Intel Core i5 13600K + Core i9 13900K "Raptor Lake" Linux Preview

Last month Intel announced 13th Gen Core "Raptor Lake" processors while today these processors officially go on sale. Today also marks the review embargo lift with Intel having provided Phoronix with the new Core i5 13600K and i9 13900K processors for Linux testing.

The Core i5 13600K processor features six P cores and 8 E cores for a combined 14 physical cores / 20 threads. The i5-13600K can boost up to 5.1GHz for its P cores, up to 3.9GHz max for its E cores, and a base frequency of 3.5GHz for its P cores and 2.6GHz on the E cores. The Core i5 13600K features a 24MB L3 cache, 20MB of L2 cache, DDR5-5600 and DDR4-3200 native memory support, and a 125 Watt base power consumption with a 181 Watt maximum turbo power. The Core i5 13600K is going on sale today starting at $319 USD.

The Core i9 13900K meanwhile is the current top-end processor in the Raptor Lake family. The Core i9 13900K features eight P cores and 16 E cores for a combined 24 cores / 32 thread design with a maximum P core frequency of up to 5.8GHz while the P-core base frequency is 3.0GHz. The i9-13900K offers a 32MB L2 cache and 36MB L3 cache. The Core i9 13900K is listed as having a 125 Watt base power consumption with a maximum turbo power consumption of 253 Watts. The Core i9 13900K is expected to retail today for around $589 USD.

All of the Raptor Lake processors support DDR4-3200 and DDR5-5600 with up to 128GB of memory. The non-KF processors continue to feature Intel UHD Graphics 770 that are of the same capabilities as the Alder Lake family. As such Intel already has good open-source Linux graphics driver support ready for Raptor Lake and their open-source engineers since turned to focusing on Meteor Lake enablement, etc.

Intel kindly provided review samples in advance of the Core i5 13600K and Core i9 13900K processors for Linux testing at Phoronix. For today is my initial Linux preview of the i5-13600K and i9-13900K while my complete benchmark results will come in the days ahead. Due to some memory issues plaguing the test bed with Raptor Lake, I unfortunately wasn't able to complete my comprehensive set of benchmarks yet in a comparable manner against the other CPUs under test. But before getting to those DDR5 woes, first some word on the Linux compatibility with Raptor Lake.

With Raptor Lake being very close to Alder Lake in supporting all of the same ISA features, no graphics changes, and drop-in compatibility with existing Alder Lake motherboards when having an updated system BIOS, to little surprise there were no Linux specific headaches encountered with the Core i5 13600K and the Core i9 13900K. All modern 2022 Linux distributions should run fine with the Intel Raptor Lake processors out-of-the-box when it comes to core CPU functionality but some exceptions on the graphics or Thunderbolt side unless running a new enough kernel for having the needed device IDs -- as outlined on the next page.