Intel’s 13th-gen flagship tops out at 24-cores, however, a 34-core processor has been noticed from the Raptor Lake household on an odd flip of occasions.
That might immediate you to right away speculate that Intel has some sort of monster processor hidden up its sleeve, able to spring as a shock on AMD (and the remainder of us, for that matter), however, this isn’t, the truth is, the case.
Let’s rewind to the start of the story right here, which as Tom’s Hardware explains, is about Intel’s Innovation 2022 occasion. Group Blue was displaying a bunch of wafers right here, one in every of which turned out to comprise unreleased Raptor Lake silicon, with bigger dies than desktop fashions.
Not solely did these CPUs have 34-cores as talked about, however, they have been interconnected with a mesh – once more, that’s completely different from customary Raptor Lake desktop chips – and sported eight DDR5 reminiscence controllers.
Even Intel workers have been confused as to what this wafer was, and theories have been aired as to whether this was Ice Lake silicon, not Raptor Lake, however, these staff later clarified these have been certainly 13th-gen CPUs – carrying a ‘Raptor Lake-S 34-Core’ label on the again of the die provider.
Evaluation: Superfast Sapphire Rapids silicon rebranded?
What is that this thriller CPU then? Nicely, it’s a bigger die dimension than the usual LGA 1700 socket in Z790 (Raptor Lake) and Z690 (Alder Lake) motherboards, which means it received a slot in desktop PCs.
So it appears that evidently, it is a chip destined for workstation computer systems and heavyweight utilization, which is backed up by the truth that these 34-cores are prone to be all efficiency cores (sure, all of them). Using the mesh interconnect and the truth that no clusters of effectivity cores are seen on the die closely means that that is the case, and clearly, no desktop processor could be constructed alongside these traces. As you’re seemingly conscious, Intel’s freshly revealed Raptor Lake-S desktop chips don’t have any greater than eight efficiency cores (the 13900Ok flagship groups these up with 16 extra modest effectivity cores, to make for 24-cores on the whole as we talked about on the outset).
Tom’s {Hardware} got here to the conclusion that that is seemingly a Sapphire Rapids MCC die which has been marked with Raptor Lake branding, destined for the workstation environment, and we’d need to agree that is the one clarification that is smart. If true, having 34 full-on efficiency cores is probably going to imply this CPU is a very blistering piece of silicon.
It nonetheless must be stated, although, it’s unusual that Intel would by accident show a wafer for unreleased chips on its huge occasion, however, in fact, errors and leaks do occur on a regular basis within the tech world.
As the last word, we do know that Intel has one other huge gun for Raptor Lake ready within the wings, specifically the flagship refresh that’ll seemingly be referred to as the 13900KS. Nevertheless, this CPU will preserve the identical core configuration because the 13900Ok. What it’ll do in another way is enhance to 6GHz out of the field, which is not any implied feat, and it’s prone to be Group Blue’s pre-emptive reply to AMD’s 3D V-cache Ryzen 7000 fashions.
