Intel Teases 6 GHz Raptor Lake at Stock, 8 GHz Overclocking World Record

We’re here in Israel for Intel’s Technology Tour 2022, where the company is sharing new information about its latest products, much of it under embargo until a later date. However, the company did share a slide touting that Raptor Lake is capable of operating at 6GHz at stock settings and that it has set a world overclocking record at 8GHz – obviously with liquid nitrogen (here’s our deep dive on the 13th-Gen Intel processors). Intel also shared impressive performance projections for single- and multi-thread performance.

Notably, the peak of 6 GHz is 300 MHz faster than the 5.7 GHz for AMD’s Ryzen 7000 processors, but Intel hasn’t announced which product will hit that peak speed. We also aren’t sure if a 6GHz chip will arrive with the first wave of chips or be a special edition ‘KS’ model. Intel also claimed that Raptor Lake will have a 15% gain in single-threaded performance and a 41% gain in multi-threaded, as measured by SPECintrate_2017 and compared to Alder Lake, and an overall ‘40% performance scaling.’

You can see the 6GHz stock clocks and 8 GHz world record listed in the last entry in the above timeline. The Israel Development Center (IDC) has been the design engine behind a long line of Intel products spanning back to the 8088 that started it all back in 1979 (here’s a look back). That lineup spans until today, encompassing well-known names like Pentium MXX, Banias, Sandy Bridge, and many others. 

All of this culminates, at least for now, with the 13th-gen Raptor Lake processors that Intel will formally announce soon, though the company obviously has many other designs in the pipeline, like Meteor Lake, Lunar Lake, and other processors on the company’s roadmaps. 

Aside from the teaser about the 6 GHz peak operating clocks at stock and the new 8 GHz overclocking record for Raptor Lake (though we aren’t sure if it is the overall world record or merely a world record for Intel’s 10nm chips), the company hasn’t shared more details yet. Naturally, more information will follow during the NDA’d meetings held over the next several days, and we’ll share that information soon. We’re particularly interested to learn pricing and power consumption details, though we already know most of the details of the specs. You can see those in our Raptor Lake all we know.

Intel is also sharing much more information about its design and validation process, with the slide above touting that the Raptor Lake development cycle was eight months shorter due to backward compatibility with Alder Lake.  

This quick turnaround time was necessary because the Raptor Lake chips weren’t on the roadmap as little as two years ago — Intel only added the chip to its roadmap because a ‘future product’ was delayed (presumably Meteor Lake, though we haven’t confirmed).

Intel has been very forthcoming with details so far, sharing interesting details like the image above — for instance, this handwritten checklist is the first list of design goals for Alder Lake.