Intel unveiled its 13th Gen Core desktop processor family, formerly codenamed Raptor Lake, with its new processor the Intel Core i9 13900K. It’s the fastest desktop processor ever built, said Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger.
He made the announcement at the Intel Innovate event in San Jose, California. The new desktop CPUs will start shipping on October 20, with the Core i9 13900K coming in at $589. It comes just as Advanced Micro Devices launched Ryzen 7000 processors today.
The Intel Core i9-13900K will have 24 cores, 32 threads, and clock speeds of up to 5.8GHz. It is built on the Intel 7 process, a sign that Intel of course still believes in Moore’s Law. Last week, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said that Moore’s Law was dead. Gelsinger said Moore’s Law is alive and well, and that the company is investing billions of dollars to deliver multiple generations of chip processes in the future.
Intel has a hybrid architecture with a mix of power-efficient cores and performance cores. There are 22 different models of chips, with 15% better single-thread performance and 41% better multithreaded performance.
Intel is also now shipping Intel Arc A770 graphics chip for gamers. It starts shipping on October 12 and is priced at a low $329. Compare that to Nvidia’s high end graphics processing unit, announced last week, at $1,600. Intel is shipping GPUs for both the datacenter and gamers. Gelsinger noted that gaming GPUs have been creeping up in price, reaching an average of $418 now. Intel said the GPU has 65% better peak performance versus the competition in ray tracing.
In a tech demo, Gelsinger also showed off a working silicon photonics tech demo, using a combination of silicon chips and optical tech for super-fast connectivity. Gelsinger also gave a lifetime achievement award, dubbed the Intel Innovation Award, to Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux.