Intel debuts next-generation desktop CPUs

After weeks of teasers and leaks, Intel is finally making its 13th Gen processors official today. Intel’s 13th Gen desktop CPUs will start arriving on October 20th, led by the flagship Core i9-13900K priced at $589. That’s the same price as Intel’s previous 12900K flagship, despite Intel’s warning of price increases. Intel’s 13th Gen announcement comes just as AMD launches its new Ryzen 7000 processors today in a battle for desktop dominance.

Report informs, citing The Verge, that Intel’s Core i9-13900K will ship with 24 cores, 32 threads, and clock speeds of up to 5.8GHz. Built on Intel’s 7 process and its x86 performance hybrid architecture, 13th Gen processors include Performance cores (P-cores) and Efficient cores (E-cores) that split workloads intelligently using Intel’s Thread Director, an embedded microcontroller inside the CPU that monitors threads and ensures they’re running on the correct cores.

Intel used this same architecture for its 12th Gen chips last year, and it’s a similar approach to what Apple has been doing with its Arm-based silicon. Instead of cramming new chips full of power-hungry cores, this P-core / E-core split should be more efficient. Having said that, these 13th Gen chips now consume more power in max turbo than their Alder Lake predecessors.

Intel’s 13th Gen of processors will include 22 in total, led by today’s Core “K” processors for the very high end of consumer PCs. Intel is promising up to 15 percent better single-thread performance on its Core i9-13900K and up to 41 percent better multithreaded performance.

All new items will go on sale on October 20 and will cost $589, $564, $409, $384, $329 and $294, respectively.