Intel says one of its 13th Gen CPUs will hit 6GHz out of the box

At least one of Intel’s forthcoming 13th-generation CPUs will be able to run at 6GHz at stock, Tom’s Hardware reports. The detail was shared in a slide onstage at Intel’s Technology Tour 2022, which also says it’ll be capable of hitting 8GHz when overclocked. Other improvements promised for this new generation, which is named Raptor Lake, include a 15 percent improvement in single-threaded performance, and a 41 percent improvement in multi-threaded performance.

Intel’s 6GHz claim is a shot across the bow at competitor AMD, which recently said that its upcoming flagship 16-core Ryzen 9 7950X will be capable of boosting up to 5.7GHz. Although raw clock speeds aren’t the be all and end all when it comes to performance, breaking the 6GHz barrier would be an important marketing win for Intel, which has been battling with a resurgent AMD in the CPU market in recent years.

The Raptor Lake CPU lineup is yet to be officially announced, so it’s unclear which or how many of the generation’s processors will be able to hit these kinds of clock speeds. Given Intel’s 12900KS boosted up to 5.5GHz (up 300MHz from the maximum 5.2GHz speed on the regular i9-12900K), Intel’s 6GHz CPU may well be a KS-branded version of its upcoming 13900K chip. Official pricing and release date information has not yet been made public, but Intel is set reveal more details at its Innovation event in San Jose, California on September 27th. In what is unlikely to be a coincidence, that’s also the same day AMD is releasing its Ryzen 7000 processors.