We’ve barely had time to process the major leap Intel has achieved with its hybrid architecture Alder Lake CPUs when rumors of its successor, Raptor Lake, started surfacing. While the exact details of Raptor Lake are still up in the air before its official release, the rumors and leaks seem really positive.

What We (Maybe) Know About Raptor Lake

Alder Lake CPUs use the Golden Cove microarchitecture, which is based on Intel’s 7nm process. A long-awaited break from the 10nm process and especially the 14nm process that Intel has been stuck on for so many years. Alder Lake blew us away with it’s innovation and raw performance, but it’s very much the first go at making a CPU on this new process.

So Raven Cove, which is the microarchitecture for both Raptor Lake and next year’s Emerald Rapids CPUs is a more refined version of the 7nm CPUs that are already taking the market by storm.

Intel has spoken about Raptor Lake to some extent in its investor conference, so we do know that these CPUs will have up to 24 cores total, with a mix of up to 8 performance and 16 efficiency cores. Intel’s intimating at least a 10-percent performance increase. That’s a many as 32 threads packed into the top-tier model.

The Leaked 13900K Benchmarks

There have been some leaks that are apparently indicative of Raptor Lake performance. Moore’s Law is Dead (the YouTube channel) is responsible for quite a few of these leaks, or at least for publishing them. When it comes to those promised double-digit performance increases, it might be a much as 15% for single-threaded performance and up to 40% for multi-threaded workloads.

Gamers in particular have some things to be happy about if the rumours are to be believed. That’s because Intel has apparently done serious work on the CPU cache, including making it bigger.

The big news comes from a leak that’s apparently real-world benchmark results from Ashes of the Singularity running on an i9-13900K. This is a game known for how punishing it is as a multi-threaded title and so it’s been used as a benchmark for consumer CPUs for years now.

The actual results for the 13900K are similar to the 12900K, but that has to be seen within the context of where Raptor Lake is at in its development. This is a CPU that’s still a few months from release, yet it’s keeping up with a CPU that’s benefited from driver, OS, and software updates.

While the promises of better performance may seem relatively modest in the single-core side of things, packing more cores into the package, making it all more efficient, and then giving the CPU more cache to help it breathe are all the right moves to refine what’s already a gem of a CPU into something truly impressive.