Intel dropped its latest CPU generation “Raptor Lake” in late October of 2022. This is the 13th generation of CPUs from intel and is said to be the generation that blows AMD away, even the newly released AMD Ryzen 7000 series CPUs. Here is our Core i9-13900K Vs Ryzen 9 7950X article.

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We got a snippet of information regarding the new Raptor Lake flagship at Intel’s latest Innovation event. Intel CEO, Pat Gelsinger, said the Raptor Lake generation will have a flagship CPU, the 13900K, that contains up to 24 Performance and Efficiency cores.

The 13900K will also play host to much more performance than the Alder Lake CPUs seeing gains of up to 15% in single-core performance, and up to 41% better multi-thread performance.

The 13900K is one of the most powerful CPUs we have ever seen here at WePC and we are seriously impressed with its “price to performance” ratio. But how will it stack up against the Ryzen 9 7950X? We answer that very important question below.

Intel Core i9-13900K Vs Ryzen 9 7950X: Specifications

When we compare any two PC components, it’s important to analyze their specifications and look at them both comparatively. This will give us a good understanding of how the two CPUs will perform in relation to each other.

I9-13900K

Intel Core i9-13900K

Cores

Threads

Base speed

P-cores 3 GHz / E-cores 2.2 GHz

Boost speed

P-cores 5.8 GHz / E-cores 4.3 GHz

Cache

36MB

TDP

125 W / 253 W boost.

How We Review

The 13900K is designed to be the best of the best, it’s Intel’s new flagship CPU for the Raptor Lake generation. Intel’s 13900K spares no expense when it comes to performance, meaning you can expect to pay a pretty penny for it.

The specifications for the i9-13900K are as follows:

Cores: P-cores 8 / E-cores 16
Threads: 32
Base clock frequency: P-cores 3 GHz / E-cores 2.2 GHz
Boost clock frequency: P-cores 5.8 GHz / E-cores 4.3 GHz
L3 cache: 36MB
Default TDP: 125 W / 253 W boost.
iGPU: Intel UHD graphics 770

Ryzen 9 7950X

AMD Ryzen 9 7950X

Cores

Threads

Base Speed

4.5GHz

Boost Speed

5.7GHz

Cache

64MB

Socket

AM5

How We Review

The Ryzen 9 7950X is the flagship Zen 4 CPU and promises to lead the charge on AMD’s domination of intel in this CPU generation. There’s massive potential for this to be the fastest gaming CPU ever made.

The Ryzen 9 7950X specifications are as follows:

Cores: 16
Threads: 32
Base clock frequency: 4.5 GHz
Boost clock frequency: 5.7 GHz
L3 cache: 64MB
TDP: 170 W / 230 W boost
iGPU: RDNA 2

Things to consider when comparing Intel and AMD CPUs.

There are a couple of things to consider when comparing Intel and AMD CPUs, as they operate a little differently. Although some of these differences do not affect user experience, we’re going to cover them anyway, because it’s fun to learn stuff, right?

Split cores

Intel adopted split-core technology with their last generation of Intel CPUs (Alder Lake). With this technology, the efficiency of the very power-hungry Intel CPUs increases, ensuring you get a better performance per Watt.

The way this work, is the cores in the 13900K are split into both performance (P-cores) and Efficiency (E-cores). There are eight performance cores and 16 efficiency cores present in the 13900K.

The performance cores are the heavy lifters, whereas the efficiency cores handle tasks with a lower power requirement. The 13900K saves energy by not spinning up the big cores to perform small tasks.

AMD CPUs, however, are different. All Zen 4 cores in the 7950X are the same, they have the same base and boost frequencies and they’re all the same physical size and architecture.

13900K vs 7950X: Specification comparison

Here we will compare the on-paper specification of each CPU and look at them comparatively. This should help us gain a better understanding of how each CPU will perform against the other.

Core and thread count

The 13900K has a higher number of cores, but the same number of threads.

Having a higher number of cores means that your CPU will be better at multitasking. A higher number of cores means a CPU will also be better at workstation or render-based tasks that require many cores to complete efficiently.

Having a higher number of threads also means your CPU is better at multitasking, although threads are slightly different from cores. Threads are the name given to secondary instructions that a CPU completes simultaneously with its primary instruction.

In essence, a multithreaded CPU is a CPU with the ability to process two instructions simultaneously per core as opposed to just one. Almost doubling the CPUs base output, but not quite. This is because threads have to share system resources with the physical CPU cores which have priority. Making threads slower as a result.

Core speed.

The 13900K just beats the 7950X with a 0.1GHz higher boost speed.

There are three types of core speed, there’s base, boost, and all-core.

Base speed is the frequency at the core runs by default and as a minimum. The CPU should always achieve this speed no matter what.

Boost speed is the frequency one or more CPU cores can achieve whilst automatically boosting vis software. This does not apply to manual overclocking.

All-core boost speed is the highest frequency all of the CPU cores can achieve simultaneously inside the maximum TDP of the CPU.

Core speed is pretty straightforward. The faster the cores boost speed, the faster that CPU core completes a cycle.

A faster core speed lends its hand to better gaming performance as the CPU can complete the instruction cycle faster every single second.

Cache

The Ryzen 9 7950X wins here with almost double the cache of the 13900K.

A CPU cache is important for storing both instructions and computations a CPU performs. The cache is like system memory but much faster. As the cache feeds the CPU directly, it needs to be very fast.

CPU Cache is a type of volatile memory that’s constructed physically close to CPU cores. This is what’s best in terms of performance as the closer it is to the component accessing its data, the quicker that data can be accessed.

Default TDP

The 13900K has a lower default TDP but has a higher boost TDP.

TDP stands for thermal design power and is the maximum amount of thermal energy the CPU can produce under standard operating conditions.

Nowadays the TDP is split into default (the max thermal energy produced at the CPUs lowest power state) and Boost TDP (the CPUs max thermal output produced at the CPUs highest, or boosted power state)

A CPU with a higher TDP indicates either a more powerful or less efficient CPU. In this day and age, CPUs tend to be very efficient, so we’re going to say it’s indicative of a powerful CPU.

The 13900K does have more cores to supply, so it makes sense that it would have a higher boost TDP.

13900K vs 7950X Performance

The 13900K is said to perform around 15% – 20% better than the 12900K. This means that the 13900K will probably perform around 10% better than the 7950X in gaming workloads, as the 7950X performed a little better than the 12900K in our testing.

That’s all well and good but without the actual numbers from the 13900K, we can’t say for sure whether the 13900K can beat the 7950X in multi-core workloads.

Where to buy Intel 13th generation CPUs

Sold on the latest Intel 13th generation CPUs? here’s where to buy the entire 13th-generation CPU lineup!

Final word

Regardless of performance, the 13900K is probably the winner here, pending results from 13900K multi-threaded benchmarks. Both CPUs are priced similarly and will most likely perform similarly in multi-core performance.

The 13900K has bested the 7950X in almost every aspect of its specifications and this is the reason we’re choosing it as our clear winner. But for how long?

AMD has always been behind in single-core performance, but we think AMD is holding off on the 3D variants of the 7000 series CPUs to blow the Intel Raptor Lake CPUs out of the water. We hope you enjoyed our Core i9-13900K Vs Ryzen 9 7950X article.