CES 2023 | Intel announces 13th gen Raptor Lake-HX and Raptor Lake-H mobile processors with significant leads over Alder Lake, Ryzen 6900HX, and Apple M1 Max

Intel Raptor Lake-HX can scale up to an 8P+16E configuration, which will be seen in the Core i9 series including the Core i9-13980HX, Core i9-13950HX, and the Core i9-13900HX.

Alder Lake-HX topped out at a 16C/24T configuration with 8P cores and 8E cores. We asked Intel if Raptor Lake processors with 8P+8E cores could be reusing existing Alder Lake designs with Golden Cove cores. Intel did confirm that Alder Lake designs will be reused and brought up to speed with Raptor Lake specifications as needed.

We are leading with the Raptor Lake architecture on a refined Intel 7 process featuring the Raptor Cove core for higher clocks, more E-cores, larger caches and more, but we have leveraged Alder Lake die to provide an efficient and effective way to ramp the new product stack for a broad market while giving us more capacity for the leading-edge technology at the top of our stack. It is important to know that when we leverage the ADL die it has been qualified and validated so the end user is getting the exact same spec (i.e. frequency, cache) at the same processor level – regardless of which die has been used."

Intel also showed off some performance numbers comparing the Core i9-13950HX to previous generations and also the AMD Ryzen 9 6900HX and Apple M1 Max and M2 SoCs. According to Intel's numbers, the Core i9-13950HX is about 11% faster than the Core i9-12900HK in single-threaded workloads while being up to 49% faster in multi-threaded tasks.

Intel also claims a 12% increase in gaming performance with the Core i9-13950HX when compared to the Core i9-12900HX.

Intel is offering a total of nine SKUs in the Raptor Lake-HX series starting from the 6P+4E Core i5-13450HX all the way up to the Core i9-13980HX with 8P+16E cores. The company said that more than 60 designs based on Raptor Lake-HX are in the pipeline from major OEMs including Acer, MSI, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Asus, and Razer starting Q1 2023.

Intel also unveiled the Raptor Lake-H lineup catering to more mainstream performance laptops. The Raptor Lake-H series tops out at 14 cores and 20 threads in a 6P+8E configuration with boosts up to 5.4 GHz in the Core i9 series, which includes the Core i9-13900HK, Core i9-13905H, and Core i9-13900H. 

Intel also said that select Raptor Lake-H designs will ship with Intel Movidius vision processing units (VPUs) will be shipping to developers and early adopters. Movidius is a discrete AI module that offloads work from the CPU and GPU to accelerate collaboration features such as background blur, subject framing, etc. and works with Windows Studio Effects that first debuted in the Surface Pro 9.

Intel told us that all Raptor Lake-H, U and P series are based on Raptor Cove designs. That being said, Intel's own numbers show just about a a 10% uplift in office and productivity benchmarks. Interestingly, Intel didn't show off any gaming numbers compared to corresponding Alder Lake-H and Ryzen 6000H parts.

However, the company did emphasize that the integrated Xe graphics will be getting support for XeSS super sampling and Intel Arc control dashboard.

Intel said that more than 250 designs based on Intel H, U, and P series will be available in 2023. The Raptor Lake-H series is comprised of 11 SKUs starting from the 4P+4E Core i5-13420H to the Core i9-13900HK with 6P+8E cores.