Intel Raptor Lake flagship benchmark leak shows a seriously fast CPU

Intel’s next-gen flagship CPU has been spotted in a leaked benchmark, with the Raptor Lake chip showing a good turn of speed.

The Core i9-13900K has turned up in PassMark, as Tum_Apisak brought to our attention on Twitter (courtesy of VideoCardz), with the processor being ranked on four sample runs.

The 13900K scored 4,833 (averaged) in single-thread performance, which is around 15% faster than its predecessor (and almost 10% quicker than the special edition 12900KS). A pretty impressive performance that gets it top spot in the PassMark rankings here.

For multi-threaded the 13900K hit 54,433 points which is 31% faster than the 12900K, and indeed almost 20% quicker than the Ryzen 9 5950X in PassMark’s CPU Mark. Again, that’s a good early showing, and has certainly spiked some expectations around what the Raptor Lake flagship might deliver – though we should always be very cautious around leaked benchmarks.

Analysis: Promising stuff – and a sign that Raptor Lake is coming soon?

Obviously, this is just one benchmark suite – and four sample runs as noted – so there’s very much a limit to what we might infer here. PassMark isn’t the benchmark we’re most excited to see in leaks either, but nonetheless, it represents a piece of the puzzle regarding the overall performance of the 13900K. But it’s just that – one piece, and not a central element of the jigsaw either, many would argue.

At the same time, there’s no denying that the kind of uplift demonstrated here is eye-opening. Sadly, what we don’t have yet is any next-gen Ryzen 7000 processors showing up on PassMark, which would obviously make for the most illuminating comparison. And that’s a little strange, as AMD’s Zen 4 chips are out imminently – on September 27, in fact – and Raptor Lake silicon isn’t even revealed yet. (That reveal is thought to be happening on the same day as Ryzen 7000 goes on sale, which appears to be some tricksy maneuvering by AMD in terms of removing wind from Intel’s sails).

Raptor Lake chips won’t go on sale until next month – seemingly mid-October, or thereabouts – but maybe these benchmarks turning up now is a glimmer of hope that they might debut sooner in October rather than later. We shall see, but at least it points to Intel’s 13th-gen CPUs not being delayed from their rumored launch schedule, anyway.

We already know the 13900K can boost to 5.8GHz (albeit briefly) at stock, and a future chip – the 13900KS presumably, which again is likely to turn up as a special, higher-binned edition of the flagship – is set to boost to 6GHz, Intel recently let us know. And again, that’s at stock performance, as in default, right out of the box.

Raptor Lake is certainly shaping up impressively, then, but so is AMD’s Zen 4, with the next-gen flagship Ryzen 7950X already breaking world records in some benchmarks where the top performers used the likes of liquid nitrogen – and yet the 7950X ran with standard you-can-do-this-at-home cooling.