Intel's Raptor Lake reveal event was... interesting
While everyone had hoped the new 13th gen Intel gaming CPU's, called Raptor Lake would be a lot more powerful, most were pleasantly surprised to learn that the new line-up fully matches the new AMD Ryzen 7000 series, with the flagship, the 13900K having 8 performance or 16 performance cores. Boost clock is set at maximum 5.8 Ghz, but is anticipated to be only for the 8 performance cores that do 5.4 Ghz, as the efficiency cores are "only" set to max at 4.3 GHz. As most games do not use more than 6 or 8 cores, Intel and AMD might be extremely equal this generation, and the performance winner may be decided by who can overclock the most with standard cooling.
As expected, the power draw will be heavy at 253 watts with rumours of an actual 350 watt TDP at full load, and the 13900K will also bash your wallet at $589. The i7-13700K seems to be able to deliver a lot of gaming performance for a lot less money, while still having the same power draw, indicating a high performance potential. When reading this, most local retailers should have revealed pricing on their websites.
Only time will tell if Intel or AMD will come out on top this generation, and if Intel will launch even faster CPU's before AMD attacks with 3D cache versions of their current line-up.
The Intel Innovation was not without controversy, as many hardcore tech media accused Intel of techno-bable the first half of the show, and point out that the graphs used were misleading, both in the competing AMD setup that was used for comparison, as well as not having the main 13900K competitor, the AMD Ryzen 5800X3D shown as a solid graph, but as a small thin floating line instead.
