Enlarge / An overview of the improvements coming to Intel’s 13th-gen desktop chips. (credit: Intel)
If there’s one thing Intel has gotten good at in the last few years, it’s refining a CPU architecture. Between 2015 and 2020, manufacturing troubles pushed Intel to release not one, not two, but five processor generations based on iterations of the sixth-gen Skylake core, while still managing to increase clock speeds and core counts enough to stay competitive through most of that timespan.
It’s an approach Intel is returning to for its 13th-generation Core CPUs, the first of which are being officially announced today. Codenamed Raptor Lake, Intel says it has made some improvements to the CPU architecture and the Intel 7 manufacturing process, but the strategy for improving their performance is both time-tested and easy to understand: add more cores, and make them run at higher clock speeds.
Intel is announcing three new CPUs today, each with and without integrated graphics (per usual, the models with no GPUs have an “F” at the end): the Core i9-13900K, Core i7-13700K, and Core i5-13600K will launch on October 20 alongside new Z790 chipsets and motherboards. They will also work in all current-generation 600-series motherboards as long as your motherboard maker has provided a BIOS update, and will continue to support both DDR4 and DDR5 memory.