Intel’s 12th generation Alder Lake lineup has barely been on the market for a year, and already an alleged engineering sample of a high-end Core i9-13900 has made its way online. The alleged details of the CPU were first posted online via Twitter by the Chinese site Expreview.
By virtue of Intel’s naming convention, the 13900 clearly isn’t a top-tier CPU, nor has that point been confirmed by Intel directly. However, based on the article written by Expreview and the CPU-Z screenshots that they posted, this SKU seemingly ships out with a whopping 24-cores; eight of them are P-Cores while the remaining 16 cores are E-Cores, bringing the total number of threads on the CPU to 32-threads.
On another note, the non-K nature of this 13900 also explains, to a measurable degree, the CPU’s 65W TDP. That’s low for a Core i9 processor, given that the current top-tier SKU of the Alder Lake generation, the Core i9-12900KS, has a 150W TDP requirement before you can even run it. For another matter, that lowered TDP may also explain why its boost clock is lower at 3.8GHz, and not traversing within the realm of 5GHz like, again, Intel’s current 12th generation Core i9 series CPUs.
That being said, Intel did recently confirm that its 13th generation Raptor Lake CPU series will be supporting Efficient Thermal Velocity Boost and per-core or package TVB overclocking support. However, it wasn’t clear whether or not the non-K SKUs of Raptor Lake will support these features, which could serve as the reason why the alleged 13900 is being limited to just 3.8GHz.
Beyond that, we can also see that the 13900 will be based on the same Intel 7 process node, which is Intel’s own name for the 10nm die lithography that it currently employs, having first introduced it with the launch of Alder Lake.
(Source: Expreview via Videocardz)
