Intel Announces 13th Gen Core CPUs, Arc Graphics A770 Release Date, and XeSS SDK

[Guest_Jim_*]

Today Intel has held its Innovation event, and as many have been looking forward to, especially after AMD's announcement of its Ryzen 7000 series CPUs, the company announced its 13^th Gen Core CPUs based on Raptor Lake. There will be some 22 processors in this family and they will work with existing motherboards with the Intel 600 series chipset and the new 700 series chipset, and like the 12^th Gen parts, support both DDR4 and DDR5 memory.

These new CPUs are being manufactured on the company's Intel 7 manufacturing process and are to offer up to 15% better single-threaded performance and up to 41% better multi-threaded performance. Not to dismiss or diminish that multi-thread performance improvement, but Intel has doubled the number of E-cores in this hybrid architecture in some cases. This includes the i9-13900K that has 8 P-cores, like its predecessor the 12900K, and 16 E-cores, double that of Intel's current flagship. Part of how its single-thread improvement has been achieved is by achieving up to a 5.8 GHz boost. Both i9 CPUs will offer Adaptive Boost Technology and Thermal Velocity Boost to get the best clocks it can, when there is the power and thermal headroom to achieve it.

A slide from Intel lists six of the new CPUs; three K and the matching three KF processors. The only differences between them are the KF version lacking the integrated GPU and this version being a little less expensive. All of these six CPUs offer 20 PCIe lanes, a 125 W base power rating, maximum memory speeds of DDR4 3200 and DDR5 5600, and a maximum memory capacity of 128 GB. The non-F versions all offer Intel UHD Graphics 770 integrated GPUs. As these are also all K parts, they are all unlocked as well.

At the top of the stack are the i9-13900K(F) CPUs that have 8 P-cores and 16 E-cores, as I mentioned above, for a total of 32 threads from these 24 cores. The base clock for the P-cores is 3.0 GHz while the boost clock is up 5.8 GHz. The E-cores have a base clock of 2.2 GHz and maximum boost of 4.3 GHz. The maximum turbo power is 253 W. For cache, the total L2 cache is 32 MB and there is 36 MB of L3. Coming to the pricing, the 13900K is at $589 while the 13900KF is at $564.

Going down a step we have the i7-13700K(F) parts, which feature 8 P-cores and 8 E-cores for a total of 24 threads. The P-cores have a base clock of 3.4 GHz and a boost of up to 5.4 GHz while the E-cores have a base of 2.5 GHz and a boost of 4.2 GHz. Like the i9, the maximum turbo power is 253 W. For cache we have 24 MB of L2 and 30 MB of L3. The pricing is $409 for the i7-13700K and $384 for the 13700KF.

Arriving at the i5 parts now, we have the i5-13600K(F) processors with 6 P-cores and 8 E-cores for a total of 20 threads. The P-cores have a base clock of 3.5 GHz while the maximum boost is 5.1 GHz and the E-cores have a base of 2.6 GHz and a boost of 3.9 GHz. The maximum turbo power usage is down compared to the i7 and i9 at only 181 W. The i5 features 20 MB of L2 cache and 24 MB of L3. The i5-13600K will be priced at $319 with the 13600KF priced at $294.

These K class CPUs along with the Z790 chipset will be available on October 20. Information on other 13^th Gen processors will be shared at a later date.

Though I did not see it shared in the Intel Newsroom, Phoronix is reporting the Arc A770 graphics card will be arriving on October 12 and priced at $329. It will feature 32 Xe cores capable of running at 2.1 GHz, which is enough to put it in the area of the RTX 3060 for performance, which is appropriate as the pricing also lines up. Like the new CPUs, it will be interesting to see how this compares to its competition based on third-party testing.

Lastly, Intel has also released the XeSS SDK. For those who may not remember, this is Xe Super Sampling and is meant to compete with NVIDIA's DLSS and AMD's FSR, though technologically it may be closer to the former. While FSR, both 1.0 and 2.0, can be run by normal shaders on most any GPU, XeSS applies a deep-learning model to enhance the upscaling, like DLSS 1, 2, and the newly announced 3. As such, optimal performance is achieved with specialized hardware on Intel GPUs, but there is also a cross-vendor version that will work with any GPU supporting SM 6.4, with acceleration for DP4a being recommended. Within the GitHub repository is a developer guide PDF that may prove interesting to read through. For the time being at least, support appears to be limited to DirectX 12.

Source: Intel (13^th Gen Announcement), Phoronix (Arc Graphics A770), and GitHub (Intel XeSS Repository)

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