Raptor Lake to Offer ‘Unlimited Power’ Mode for Those Who Don’t Care About Heat, Electric Bills

Intel’s 13th generation Raptor Lake architecture is getting closer, as recent leaks indicate. As each new leak or screenshot appears online, we discover new capabilities Intel has planned for it. The latest is an “unlimited power” feature that lets you crank things up to 11, assuming you have sufficient cooling. On the Core i9-13900K, this setting allows for extreme power consumption to the tune of about 350W.

The news comes from Raichu on Twitter via Wccftech. They are a reliable provider of CPU-related information and seem to have a retail version of Raptor Lake. That is not confirmed, though, and they partially blurred out the description. This time around, they posted screenshots and Cinebench scores for the flagship Raptor Lake CPU. The Core i9-13900K sports eight hyper-threaded performance cores and 16 efficiency cores. It’s noted the CPU offers a dual-core boost clock of 5.8GHz, which is the same as previous leaks. Its all-core boost clocks are 5.5GHz, which is a big step up from the Core i9-12900KS’s single-core boost at that speed. This will be Intel’s first 24-core, 32-thread consumer CPU. Raichu posted screenshots of the CPU running Cinebench. R23. The benchmark was run with both a “power limited” setting and an “unlimited” setting.

With the test running in “power limited” mode, it was able to draw 253W. That’s very close to what Alder Lake can do when the reins are taken off, as it has a PL1 limit of 241W. Despite that limit, Anandtech saw a Core i9-12900KS suck down 276W in peak power. With the governor removed, the Raptor Lake CPU was able to consume another 100W of power. They noted that with clocks and power unleashed, it drew between 340 and 350W of juice. Overall, it allowed for a noticeable increase in performance. Single-core performance remained largely unchanged between tests, but the multi-core score increased by 14 percent. That’s a non-trivial boost in performance at the expense of heat and power.

As Wccftech notes, in “unlimited” mode this is a 48 percent boost in performance in Cinebench multi-core compared against the 12900K. Compared with the 32-thread Ryzen 9 5950X, it’s a 67 percent increase in performance. Even the standard power setting offers a 47 percent advantage over AMD’s most powerful consumer CPU. Obviously, Raptor Lake will be competing against Zen 4, not Zen 3, but these numbers still show Intel has made some impressive gains. Still, that level of power consumption guarantees you’ll need a robust liquid-cooling apparatus to keep it within spec. Raichu doesn’t include any info on the maximum temperatures reached in the tests, unfortunately.

Overall, Raptor Lake versus Zen 4 is shaping up to be an interesting battle. AMD has already stated power limits will rise for Zen 4, but the company likely won’t go as far as Intel in this regard. AMD’s Sam Naffziger has previously stated, “Performance is king, but even if our designs are more power-efficient, that doesn’t mean you don’t push power levels up if the competition is doing the same thing. It’s just that they’ll have to push them a lot higher than we will.” AMD’s next-generation architecture is rumored to debut in August and could go on sale by Sept. 15. There is no launch date set for Raptor Lake at this time, but it’s expected by October.

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