Intel is on the cusp of launching its 13th Generation Raptor Lake CPUs. These chips are an evolution of its Alder Lake architecture, with more efficiency cores, higher clocks, and other mild upgrades—the sort of “tock” refinement of a technology we’ve seen in previous years. As the company prepares to launch, it’s begun training its sales staff with new talking points for Raptor Lake. This obviously involves a lot of Powerpoint, along with conference calls with global sales teams. The folks over at Igor’s Lab have gotten ahold of Intel’s sales deck, allowing us to see its “go to market” strategy for Raptor Lake. Overall there’s nothing too surprising here, but it does show us what Intel considers the defining features of the new platform.
The company confirms it’s launching with six CPUs: The Core i9-13900, i7-13700, and i5-13600. All six CPUs will be offered in both K and KF variants, with K being unlocked and KF being unlocked and without an integrated GPU. We also see the spec differentiation here, as only the flagship CPU has Thermal Velocity Boost at “up to” 5.8GHz. This will allow a single core to reach those clocks if there’s enough thermal and voltage headroom. Additionally, we see that only the i9 and i7 SKUs offer Turbo Boost Max 3.0. This allows two cores to boost to the specified clocks, if there’s ample power and cooling.
That feature does not appear in the Core i5 models, though they can boost to 5.1GHz for the performance cores. That’s a 200MHz boost over the Alder Lake variant. The Core i9 gets a 500MHz boost clock, uh, boost, and the Core i7 gets a 400MHz maximum clock increase. The chart below also confirms a maximum TDP of 253W for the Core i9 and i7 variants. This will be going up against AMD’s 170W Ryzen 9 7950X and 7900X CPUs, with a maximum of 230W. Intel is rumored to offer an “extreme performance” mode on some Z790 boards that will lift this restrictor, allowing for up to 350W of juice to be consumed.
