Intel leans to more E-cores for performance boost in leaked 13th-gen CPU lineup

Our understanding of Intel’s 13th generation Core processors, codenamed “Raptor Lake,” continues to build ahead of their planned launch this fall. Motherboards for current generation Alder Lake chips were adding advance support for themand now the estimated list of desktop processors (as reported by Tom’s Hardware) suggests that Intel will rely on the small efficient cores (E-cores) of its processors for significant performance gains.

Based on Intel’s announcements, we know that Raptor Lake processors will use the same CPU and GPU architectures and Intel 7 manufacturing process as Alder Lake. Its large performance cores (P-cores) will be based on an architecture called “Raptor Cove”, however technical documents do not distinguish between themselves and Alder Lake “Golden Bay” cores. And the E cores will be based on the same Atom-derived Gracemont architecture that Alder Lake uses. Bigger cores handle the heavy lifting and deliver the best performance for games and other programs that benefit from good single-core performance, while E-cores help with lower-priority and background tasks, as well as workloads like coding and rendering video using CPU tasks that can use all the cores of your CPU at the same time. It’s hard to make an exact performance comparison, but AnandTech E-Cores Isolated Benchmarks they are believed to be as fast as a mid-range 6th gen Skylake CPU core in most cases.

Intel too confirmed that some Raptor Lake chips will include up to 24 physical cores spread across eight P-cores and 16 E-cores. Alder Lake processors have a maximum of eight E-cores, for a total of 16 physical cores.

This estimated processor list builds on that knowledge, suggesting that the top-of-the-line Raptor Lake Core i9 processors will include 16 E-cores, up from the current eight, and that all Raptor Lake Core i7s will have eight E-cores, while the Alder Lake i7s include either eight or four. Clusters of four or eight E cores will also appear for the first time across the entire Core i5 tier. The current i5-12600 (non-K), 12500 and 12400 processors have no E-cores at all, while the i5-13600 and 13500 will reportedly include eight E-cores and the i5-13400 will arrive with four . Raptor Lake single chip with no The E-cores are apparently the i3-13100, which remains a quad-core processor with all P-cores.

The “add more cores” approach is in line with Intel’s strategy to increase the performance of the 8th, 9th and 10th generation processors. All were based on some version of the company’s 2015 Skylake architecture and 14nm manufacturing process, but the company has steadily added more cores to compete AMD’s success with the Ryzen line of processors. Although Intel uses the same manufacturing process for Alder Lake and Raptor Lake, it is becoming easier to produce larger and faster chips in larger quantities as chip performance improves and the number of defects decreases.

The 13th generation chips are listed at the same TDP level as their 12th generation counterparts, although the CPU base frequency has been reduced for all chips except the i3-13100. The Turbo Boost frequency is likely to be slightly higher than the 12th generation CPUs, so Intel can still claim an increase in single-threaded performance. However, if all cores are loaded at the same time, they may not run at Alder Lake speeds and stay within Intel’s default power limits. As with Alder Lake, raising the power limits from Intel’s default values ​​should dramatically increase the performance of most of these chips by (sometimes disproportionately) higher power consumption and temperature.

AMD’s fast Zen 4 processor architecture will still use a more traditional design with varying numbers of identical “P-Cores” (AMD doesn’t call them that, but for consistency, it’s useful to think of them that way). Early and very sketchy rumors suggest that the Zen 5 may feature a hybrid design with Zen 5’s P-cores and E-cores based on a modified version of the Zen 4, but AMD hasn’t confirmed this and we’re unlikely to get any official Zen news 5 no earlier than next year.

These hybrid CPU architectures have occasionally caused problems with old or obscure software, including some old games and test taking software which for one reason or another interpret the presence of a second processor architecture as the presence of a second physical computer. But time passes, these problems are solved resolved with Windows patches and software updatesand at least some PCs will let you work around them in the short term by disabling the E-cores.