Enlarge (credit: Intel)

Intel is gearing up to release the first products in its 13th-generation Core processor family, codenamed Raptor Lake. Among the topline facts that the company announced at its Intel Technology Tour is that at least one member of the Raptor Lake family will be capable of hitting 6 GHz out of the box ( via Tom's Hardware ). Core counts and architectural improvements are generally more important than clock speed when it comes to increasing a CPU's performance these days, but after many years hanging out in the 5 GHz range, it's neat to hit the next digit.

As for what this means for performance, Intel is saying that Raptor Lake will perform roughly 15 percent better in single-threaded tasks and 41 percent better in multi-threaded workloads than the current 12th-generation Alder Lake chips. Clock speed is more important for boosting single-threaded performance, while adding more cores is usually the best way to improve multi-threaded speeds.

It's not clear which of the CPUs will be capable of hitting 6 GHz or under what circumstances or for how long. An Intel SKU chart published by Igor's Lab suggests that the Core i9-13900K will top out at 5.8 GHz, though it's possible that it's capable of further boosting beyond that.

Enlarge / A Core i7-12700. A leaked list of Intel's 13th-generation Core desktop CPUs claims that most of them will be getting more E-cores than their 12th-generation counterparts. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Our understanding of Intel's 13th-generation Core CPUs, codenamed "Raptor Lake," continues to take shape ahead of their planned launch this fall. Motherboards for current-gen Alder Lake chips have been adding preliminary support for them , and now a supposed list of the desktop CPU lineup ( as reported by Tom's Hardware ) suggests that Intel will be leaning on its CPUs' small efficiency cores (E-cores) for much of their performance gains.

Based on Intel's disclosures, we know that Raptor Lake CPUs will use the same CPU and GPU architectures and Intel 7 manufacturing process as Alder Lake. Its large performance cores (P-cores) will be based on an architecture called "Raptor Cove," though technical documents don't distinguish between it and Alder Lake's "Golden Cove" cores. And the E-cores will be based on the same Atom-derived Gracemont architecture that Alder Lake uses. The big cores handle the heavy lifting and provide the best performance for games and other apps that benefit from good single-core performance, while the E-cores pitch in for lower-priority and background tasks plus workloads like CPU-based video encoding and rendering jobs that can engage all of your processor's cores at once. It's tough to make exact performance comparisons, but AnandTech's benchmarks of E-cores in isolation suggest that they are about as fast as a midrange 6th-gen Skylake CPU core most of the time.

Intel has also confirmed that some Raptor Lake chips will include up to 24 physical cores, spread out across eight P-cores and 16 E-cores. Alder Lake CPUs max out at eight E-cores, for a total of 16 physical cores.

Enlarge / A Core i5-12400 CPU based on the Alder Lake architecture. Intel's next-gen desktop CPUs will be compatible with almost all of the same motherboards as Alder Lake. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Intel's next-generation desktop CPUs haven't been released or even announced yet. Codenamed "Raptor Lake" and likely to be branded as 13th-generation Core chips, rumors suggest we'll see them sometime in September or October , but Intel hasn't officially said anything yet.

That isn't stopping motherboard makers from updating their existing motherboards to support the new chips, though. In the last month, Asus, ASRock, MSI, and (most recently) Gigabyte have all either released BIOS updates supporting the next-gen CPUs in their current-gen Z690, H670, B660, and H610-series motherboards or announced plans to do it soon.

This does two things for PC builders. For those who have already built PCs based on 12th-generation Alder Lake CPUs, it means a guaranteed upgrade path to 13th-gen CPUs for people who want or need to run the newest, fastest chips. More importantly, it means that people can skip new Z790 motherboards and opt for cheaper, sometimes clearance-priced 600-series motherboards if they want to build a brand-new system when Raptor Lake CPUs come out.