Intel's 13th-gen flagship maxes out at 24 cores, but a 34-core CPU has been seen in the Raptor Lake family in a strange turn of events.
This might immediately make you speculate that Intel has some kind of monster processor up its sleeve, ready to surprise AMD (and the rest of us, for that matter), but in fact, that's not the case.
Here we go back to the beginning of the story, which, as Tom's Hardware (opens in a new tab) explains, takes place during Intel's Innovation 2022 event. Team Blue showed off a bunch of wafers here, one of which turned out to contain unprecedented Raptor Lake silicon, with larger dies than desktop models.
These processors not only had 34 cores as mentioned, but were mesh interlocked (again, this is different from standard Raptor Lake desktop chips) and sported eight DDR5 memory controllers.
Even Intel staff were confused as to what this wafer was, and theories arose as to whether it was Ice Lake silicon, not Raptor Lake, but these staff later clarified that these were 13th generation processors, with a 'Raptor Lake' -S 34 -Core label on the back of the die holder.
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What is this mysterious CPU? Well, it's one die larger than the standard LGA 1700 socket on the Z790 (Raptor Lake) and Z690 (Alder Lake) motherboards, which means it won't fit on desktops.
So it appears to be a chip intended for heavy-duty, workstation computers, which is supported by the fact that those 34 cores are likely all (yes, all) performance cores. The use of mesh interconnect and the fact that no efficiency core clusters are seen in the die strongly suggest that this is the case and obviously no desktop processor would be built with this in mind. As you probably know, Intel's recently revealed Raptor Lake-S desktop chips have no more than 8 performance cores (the flagship 13900K combines these with a more modest 16 efficiency cores, for a total of 24 cores as we mentioned at the beginning). .
Tom's Hardware has concluded that this is likely a Raptor Lake branded Sapphire Rapids MCC die intended for the workstation field and we have to agree that this is the only explanation it has. sense. If true, having 34 full performance cores will certainly mean that this processor is a seriously impressive piece of silicon.
However, it still has to be said that it's weird that Intel would accidentally bring out a wafer of unreleased chips at its big event, but of course, bugs and leaks happen all the time in the tech world.
Finally, we know that Intel has another big weapon for Raptor Lake waiting in the wings, namely the flagship update that will likely be called 13900KS. However, this processor will keep the same basic configuration as the 13900K. What it will do differently is jump to 6GHz out of the box, which is no small feat, and is likely Team Blue's preemptive response to AMD's 3D V-cache Ryzen 7000 models.
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