An engineering sample from Raptor Lake confirms that they will arrive with up to 24 cores and 32 threads

The Alder Lake architecture first introduced hybrid architectures on x86 CPUs, combining up to 8 high-performance cores with 8 high-efficiency cores, and its successor Raptor Lake was rumored to add another 8 more high-efficiency cores. This has just been confirmed with the appearance of an engineering sample of what is possibly the i9-13900K, which confirms that it will have 24 cores and 32 threads, that is, 8 high-performance cores plus 16 high-efficiency cores.

This occurrence was discovered by Coelacanth-Dream, who discovered the boot logs of a Raptor Lake test platform on the Intel Linux Driver Test Site. Among these logs we can find the following:

<6>[ 0.000000] DMI: Intel Corporation Raptor Lake Client Platform/RPL-S ADP-S DDR5 UDIMM CRB, BIOS RPLSFWI1.R00.2397.A01.2109300731 09/30/2021

<6>[ 0.000000] tsc: Detected 1800.000 MHz processor

<6>[ 0.000000] tsc: Detected 1804.800 MHz TSC

These first lines confirm that it is a Raptor Lake-S CPU with DDR5 memories, that is, a 13th CPU. Desktop generation. We also see that it is a very early engineering sample, as it only works at 1800MHz to ensure stability when testing. Then the following lines confirm that it will have 32 threads, matching the configuration indicated previously:

<6>[ 0.784998] x86: Booting SMP configuration:

<6>[ 0.785013] …. node #0, CPUs: #1 #2 #3 #4 #5 #6 #7 #8 #9 #10 #11 #12 #13 #14 #15 #16 #17 #18 #19 #20 #21 #22 #23 #24 #25 #26 #27 #28 #29 #30 #31

<6>[ 0.895973] smp: Brought up 1 node, 32 CPUs

<6>[ 0.895973] smpboot: Max logical packages: 1

<6>[ 0.895973] smpboot: Total of 32 processors activated (115507.20 BogoMIPS)

In this way, everything indicates that the rumors about the number of Raptor Lake cores were true. Speaking of high-performance cores + high-efficiency cores, Core i9 would have 8+16 cores, Core i7 would have 8+8 cores, Core i5 “K” would have 6+8 cores, Core i5 “No-K” they would have 6+4 cores, and Core i3s would have 4+0 cores.

Raptor Lake is expected to arrive later this year and is compatible with current LGA 1700 motherboards. Since there is still a long time to go before its launch, it will surely take several months to know the final details of this architecture, although we will keep you updated as news appears.

What do you think about how many cores Raptor Lake will have? Do you think it’s okay to add another 8 high-efficiency cores in the Core i9?