We’ve barely come to terms with the technological leap of the 12th-generation Intel CPUs with their hybrid architecture and the 13th-generation chips from are already poking their head out, ready for a Q2 2022 launch.

Early engineering samples of a 14-core Raptor-lake chip is showing better performance in benchmarks than the superlative 12900HK.

Are the Benchmarks Real?

Tom’s Hardware reports the source of the leak as a UserBenchmark result spotted by a Twitter user. Since this is just an engineering sample, there’s no final product name, but we do know the core count and the benchmark results. These specs put it very much up against the 12900HK, so even if it’s not officially the chip that will replace that tier in the product stack, it is a useful comparison.

We do think the benchmarks are real, but of course they care not representative of any sort of final performance. However, given the numbers, that’s actually a good sign since we expect them to get better, not worse, once these CPUs are finally out.

This Is a Mobile Chip

Although there’s no name of a specific chip model, the information that’s available here show that this is a mobile chip. That does muddy the waters when it comes to benchmarks, because we don’t know whether this sample is running under laptop thermal and powe constraints, it does show the potential of the chip.

It’s also worth noting that the UserBenchmark software reports the chip being throttled to 87% of it’s max load. In other words, these results may be conservative or that’s an indication of thermal and power constraint in the test bench.

How Big Is the Difference?

The 13th-gen CPUs should be faster than their 12th-gen predecessors, but as we’ve see in the past those difference can be small. In some cases we’d get a small performance bump, but also better power efficiency, for example.

In the multi-threaded test, the non-name Raptor Lake chip scored 2052 against the the i9 12900HK’s 1884. A moderate improvement, but a clear one. Of course, this is a single sample of the new chip versus the averaged results of all 12900HK CPUs submitted to the database, so it’s hard to say if this is a typical difference.

It’s going to be some time until Raptor Lake chips appear in real-world laptops, but at this very early stage it’s good to see that Intel has at least a clear (if not dramatic) improvement in performance within the laptop power envelope.