Hear them roar! A new breed of CPUs is upon us. Planned as a stopgap solution between Alder Lake and the upcoming Meteor Lake line of chips, Intel’s 13th-generation Raptor Lake chips are now here.
Announced a while back, these new chips are now in the hands of those who seek optimum performance. Soon enough, they will find their way into a whole range of new Windows 11 hardware from the usual suspects.
Including, hopefully, Microsoft for its Surface line.
Intel first announced them back this September at their special event, confirming availability a month later for the first batch of processors that includes SKUs from the Core i9, Core i7, and Core i5 series. A little while later we can expect the Core i3 lineup to be released.
Though that budget series is not really the true Raptor Lake in form and finesse.
In case you are not familiar with Raptor Lake, this is the codename for the 13th generation Core architecture from Intel.
They follow the 12th generation Alder Lake, which was the company’s first hybrid architecture. This idea, basically, is to combine large and small cores for use in different tasks as needed, just like in the mobile space.
The chip giant calls them P-cores and E-cores, short for Performance cores and Efficiency cores.
Windows 11 itself is optimized for this new architecture, which clearly is the company’s future as far as processors are concerned.
And as for what this 13th-generation lineup brings, well, Intel’s mantra seems to be that more is better. It has packed in more cores in these new CPUs than their predecessors, which help them handily deliver class-leading performance in a range of tasks, gaming, productivity, and multimedia.
These chips are now competing with AMD’s Zen 4-based Ryzen 7000 processors, which are the new kid on the block.
Initial impressions have the Intel chips defeating their competition without pulling a sweat, and that much is given considering the architectural and hardware improvements that Intel has packed into these new processors.
Intel launched these 7nm chips on October 20, with mobile versions expected before 2022 is out.
