To no surprise, leaked performance benchmarks on Bilibili - now removed - show improvements for the 13th Gen Raptor Lake i9-13900K over the 12th Gen Alder Lake i9-12900K.
As we are still a month away from launch, further improvements will be expected.
On a more technical level, its not just a beefed up 12900K, it has better multicore performance, double the number of efficiency cores, and better cache performance.
Just like AMD, a massive frequency clock speed improvement has been made, peaking at 5.8 GHz, however, just on cores 1+2, while 3-8 maxes out at 5.5GHz. The efficiency cores have been improved a lot, and now peaks at 4.3 GHz at all 16 cores.
Improvements are vast, 5-11% latency reduction, E cores up to 18% better performance in benchmarks, resulting in 44% increase in Cinebench performance over the 12900KF, and an average increase of 41% in mixed synthetic benchmarks such as 3D Benchmark. IPC should be up 12%.
Real gaming benchmarks were lacklustre, but around 10% better when gaming, over the 12900KF.
While Raptor Lake seems to be a vast improvement all around, if the gaming performance is only increased by 10%, there is a real risk that AMD may not have only one, but perhaps even two or more CPU's that can beat it head on, however, these benchmarks are very early, and a lot of optimisation can be done before release in a month.