Intel's 13th Gen 13600 and below to be based on the older Alder Lake architecture
Just days ago, I said how excited I was about the upcoming Intel Core i5 13400(opens in new tab). The addition of E cores is certainly the biggest improvement over our favorite budget CPU, the i5 12400(opens in new tab), but there’s some new information that leads me to put an asterisk next to the word excited.
According to leaked slides from Igor’s Lab(opens in new tab) (via 3Dcenter.org(opens in new tab)) the non-K i5 chips won’t be based on the Raptor Lake architecture, but instead be based on the existing 12th Gen Alder Lake with its Golden Cove P cores. This means the likes of the 13400, 13500 and 13600 will miss out on the Cypress Cove P core improvements that come with Raptor Lake, including cache size increases.
This means the i5’s will have a tougher time against AMDs upcoming Zen 4 chips(opens in new tab), particularly the Ryzen 5 7600X and possibly take a little of the shine off of what we’d otherwise expect to be excellent budget gaming CPUs.
It’s important to remember that a 13400 or 13500 would be very much like locked versions of the i5 12600K(opens in new tab). That’s already an excellent CPU, and with a 65W TDP and hopefully competitive pricing, 13th Gen i5’s can still be very competitive chips, not just for gaming, but in general use too.
It’s expected that K series i5’s will include Raptor Lake upgrades, as well as all i7 and i9 chips. The reasoning behind this assumption is the slide above that states only i5 K series processors and higher will include more L2 cache.
If locked i5’s are to be Alder Lake chips, then future i3 13300 or 13100 models are certain to be as well. That’s a discussion for the future though. They can be expected to go up against variants of AMD’s Dragon Range or Phoenix APUs.
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