Intel's 13th Generation Core 'Raptor Lake' processors due to be released later this year, but since samples of these CPUs are in the wild, it is not surprising that preliminary benchmark results of these chips get published. This time around someone with a Raptor Lake sample at hands has revealed results of the processor in UserBenchmark (via@Tum_Apisak). The CPU appears to be around 20% faster when compared to existing flagship products from AMD and Intel — the best CPUs available today.
UserBenchmark may not be exactly the best tool to test hardware performance since it is very generalized but when it comes to CPUs, it can give a clue about single-thread and multi-thread performance of microarchitectures as well as processors. Therefore, it makes sense to compare results of pre-production Raptor Lake against existing processors from AMD and Intel.
The benchmarked Intel's Raptor Lake-S 'U3E1' processor packed 24 cores and could process 32 threads simultaneously while running at a 2.4 GHz base clock and a 4.6 GHz turbo clock. This corroborates with previous leaks and benchmark results which indicate that Intel's next-generation desktop chips will integrate eight performance cores with 2-way SMT as well as 16 efficiency cores.
The system also appears to be equipped with Intel's Arc Alchemist A770 graphics card, but considering that this 'card' only has 1GB of memory and performs very poorly, we believe that the GPU was detected incorrectly.
Meanwhile, Intel's current flagship Core i9-12900K is a 16-core/24-thread chip operating at 3.2 GHz – 5 GHz, whereas AMD's Ryzen 9 5950X is a 16-core/32-thread chip working at 3.4 GHz – 4.6 GHz. Given the fact that the Raptor Lake-S sample operates at rather low clocks, it is not surprising that it loses to both rivals in workloads that use eight threads or less. Meanwhile, in server workloads that use 64 threads, it is about 20% faster than the Core i9-12900K and Ryzen 9 5950X.
It's noteworthy that Raptor Lake's 24 physical cores along with its thread dispatcher hardware looks to be more efficient than AMD's 16 high-performance Zen 3 cores with simultaneous multithreading technology (SMT) support. Of course, it remains to be seen how Raptor Lake will perform against AMD's Zen 4-based 'Raphael' offering with up to 16 cores, but for now, multi-threaded performance of Intel's next-generation CPUs looks very competitive.
