At least one of Intel’s upcoming 13th Gen CPUs will be able to run stock at 6GHz, Tom’s hardware reports. The detail was: shared in a slide on stage at Intel’s Technology Tour 2022, which also says it can hit 8GHz when overclocked. Other promised improvements for this new generation, called Raptor Lake, include a 15 percent improvement in single-threaded performance and a 41 percent improvement in multi-threaded performance.
Intel’s 6GHz claim is a shot across the board at competitor AMD, which recently said its upcoming flagship 16-core Ryzen 9 7950X will be able to ramp up to 5.7GHz. While raw clock speeds aren’t everything when it comes to performance, breaking the 6GHz barrier would be a major marketing gain for Intel, which has struggled with a resurgent AMD in the CPU market in recent years.
Raptor Lake’s CPU lineup has yet to be officially announced, so it’s unclear which or how many of the generation’s processors can hit these kinds of clock speeds. Given that Intel’s 12900KS has been ramped up to 5.5GHz (up 300MHz from the maximum 5.2GHz speed on the regular i9-12900K), Intel’s 6GHz CPU may be a KS version of the upcoming 13900K chip. Official pricing and release date information has not yet been made public, but Intel will reveal more details on its San Jose, California Innovation Event on September 27. In what probably isn’t a coincidence, that’s also the same day AMD releases its Ryzen 7000 processors.