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And naturally, the chip maker is leading with its best (read fastest) foot forward.
Our first experience of the 13th Gen comes in the form of the Intel Core i9-13950HX.
But here I’ve documented some of my early thoughts and they’re almost all positive.
This thing is shaping up to be a monster.
Can you say desktop replacement?
It’s an MSI Titan GT77, though not in the exact spec that will be shipping to consumers.
That one runs to a whopping 5.6GHz turbo.
The Core i9 is made up of 8 P-cores and 16 E-cores for a total of 32 threads.
Only the P-cores are hyperthreaded, and these will be the ones utilized most in foreground tasks and gaming.
Given what’s on offer here, it’s not bad.
Base CPU power is 55W, while that can rise to 157W under max turbo.
More performance, but no higher power ceiling.
Even on these limited early benchmarks, we can make some meaningful comparisons to Intel’s desktop chips.
Laptop CPUs never quite match up, but it’s still interesting to see how close they can get.
And obviously, it blows away the 12th Gen Core i9 laptop CPUs handily.
The 12th Gen Core i9 is still a great CPU even with its replacement now in the wild.
Benchmarks aren’t everything though, but the signs are extremely pleasing.
As you would expect from a CPU like this in a laptop thermal throttling is very much a thing.
It seems to take effect when the package temperature reaches 95C (203F) and holds steady there.
That’s hot, but it’s not dangerously hot.
Even so, maybe don’t benchmark it on your lap or anything.
But ultimately it isn’t exceeding the types of temperatures seen on previous generation high-end laptop CPUs.
Package TDP does seem to spike occasionally past the listed 157W maximum, albeit only briefly.
I wouldn’t expect to see it running a benchmark on all cores at 5.5GHz.
24-cores and 32 threads in a portable PC is plain nuts.
