Intel Raptor Lake Benchmark Shows it Dominating AMD’s Ryzen 9 5950X

After the success of Intel’s “comeback architecture” named Alder Lake, we’re all curious to see what kind of gains it has in store for its successor, Raptor Lake. While Raptor Lake and Alder Lake are both built on the Intel 7 process, Intel has further refined it. The company is also rumored to be doubling the number of E-cores (efficiency cores) in its flagship CPU.

If these rumors are accurate, the Core i9-13900K will feature eight hyper-threaded performance cores, and 16 efficiency cores, for a total of 24 cores and 32 threads. Apparently this is a solid combination, as a new Geekbench score has appeared from the Core i9-13900K. It shows the CPU is a beast, at least in multi-threaded workloads.

The Geekbench score was discovered by Benchleaks on Twitter. It shows an Intel Core i9-13900K running on an Asus ROG Maximus Z690 Extreme motherboard. Since it’s not a final production CPU, its clock speeds are likely to differ from the final product. Despite that, it was still able to hit an average of 5.45GHz on a single core. What’s notable is it achieved a maximum single-core clock speed of 5.7GHz, which is impressive. That’s a 200Mhz gain over the binned Alder Lake Core i9012900KS flagship. This also aligns with previous rumors that Intel was hoping to at least hit 5.8GHz for Raptor Lake. The results show its base clock was 3GHz. This engineering sample was able to achieve a single-core score of 2,133 and 23,701 for multi-core.

As Benchleaks notes, compared to AMD’s Ryzen 7 5800X the single-core number is 23 percent faster and the multi-core number is 120 percent higher. Of course, that particular AMD CPU is just an eight-core, 16 thread CPU. When compared to the 16 core, 32 thread Ryzen 9 5950X it also comes out on top. AMD’s flagship CPU can notch a multi-threaded score of 16,508 according to Wccftech. That gives Intel’s CPU a 35 percent advantage over Zen 3’s chiplet design. For single-core, the Raptor Lake CPU is also 24 percent faster than the 5950X.

Compared to Alder Lake, we see some interesting differences as well. The Core i9-12900K can hit 1,987 in single-core tests. Raptor Lake’s 2,133 is just seven percent faster. Assuming there’s not a huge IPC uplift, this gain would come down to higher clock speeds. On the multi-core front, Alder Lake hits 17,272 while Raptor Lake is at 23,701. That’s a 31 percent difference, which is quite a boost from those eight efficiency cores.

Of course, Raptor Lake won’t be doing battle with Zen 3, as it’ll be going head-to-head with Zen 4. Both platforms are due to launch later this year and should arrive in a similar timeframe. However, given the gains we see over Zen 3 gives us an idea of what kind of targets AMD will need to hit. AMD has stated its goal is to see a 35 percent performance improvement for Zen 4. It’s also pushing for more than 25 percent gains in performance-per-watt. Finally, it anticipates more than a 15 percent single-thread uplift. Those numbers would put its 16 core, 32 thread CPU close to the numbers for Raptor Lake.

As always, there’s a rub. The results page for the Raptor Lake system says the score is invalid due to a timing error. We’re not sure what could have caused it to throw this flag. This seems to be an issue where the timers used by Geekbench to measure performance run slower or faster than the system clock. Therefore, we have to once again be somewhat cautious about trusting these results. Despite this fact, it’s still tantalizing to see what Raptor Lake may offer. After years of incremental gains from generation-to-generation, Intel might finally have shaken its curse and significantly improved its architecture. We’ll find out soon enough as more benchmarks will assuredly be revealed.

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