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, the 13th generation Raptor Lake chips from Intel are now here.
Announced a while back, these new chips are now in hands of those that seek optimum performance. And soon enough, will find their ways 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, these is the codename for the 13th generation Core architecture from Intel.
They follow the 12th generation Alder Lake, which had the distinction to be the first hybrid architecture from the company. This idea, basically, is to combine large and small cores to together for use in different tasks as needed, just like things are 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 future for the company as far as processors are concerned.
And as for what this 13th generation lineup brings, well the mantra here for Intel 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 going up against the Zen 4 based Ryzen 7000 processors from AMD, which themselves 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.
