With the 13th Gen Core “Raptor Lake” series, Intel increased the CPU core-counts, but using more E-cores only. The P-core counts remain the same generationally, although the P-cores themselves received a performance uplift (to a smaller extent, so did the E-cores). The top Core i9-13900K has 8 P-cores and 16 E-cores (8P+16E), while the Core i5-13600K has a 6P+8E configuration. The new Core i7-13700K in this review attempts to strike a middle-ground, with an 8P+8E configuration which resembles that of the previous-gen flagship i9-12900K. This is not to say that Intel is repeating what it did with the Core i9-9900K and Core i7-10700K (which were functionally the same chip). The i7-13700K is physically different from the i9-12900K.

Each of the eight P-cores on the i7-13700K is a new-gen “Raptor Cove” core, featuring larger 2 MB dedicated L2 caches (compared to 1.25 MB on the “Golden Cove” P-cores); while each of the two “Gracemont” E-core clusters gets 4 MB of L2 cache shared among the four E-cores in the cluster (an increase from 2 MB per cluster on “Alder Lake”). Both the P-cores and E-cores receive updates to the L2 cache hardware-prefetchers; the 30 MB of L3 cache that’s shared among the eight P-cores and two E-core clusters now gets new inclusive/non-inclusive cache partitioning mode; and overall, the i7-13700K comes with higher clock-speeds than the i9-12900K. The P-cores are clocked at 3.40 GHz, with 5.40 GHz boost frequency; while the E-cores run at 2.50 GHz, with 4.20 GHz boost—both of which are higher than the clocks on the i9-12900K.

The “Raptor Lake” microarchitecture, as we mentioned, is the swansong of monolithic silicon client processors for Intel. Future generations will implement the IDM 2.0 product design, and will be multi-chip modules with chiplets built across various foundry nodes. The “Raptor Lake” silicon is fabricated on the same Intel 7 (10 nm Enhanced SuperFin) foundry node as the previous-gen “Alder Lake,” although Intel claims to have squeezed out a handful of improvements, such as better electron channel mobility, which can let both the P-cores and E-cores gain increases in clock speeds by as much as 600 MHz over the previous-generation, and minimally higher power. The transistor-density is unchanged, since it’s the same the node. The “Raptor Lake” die measures 23.8 mm x 11.8 mm (257 mm² die-area).

The Core i7-13700K processor package looks like the 12th Gen processor package, as it shares the same LGA1700 socket. It’s backwards-compatible with 600-series chipset motherboards with a BIOS update.