This announcement has been long overdue: the Intel Core i9 13900KS is launched Today-January 12 – for $699. The processor has been teased and talked about a lot in recent months, but the world’s first-ever 6GHz desktop processor with standard speeds actually launches today.
Yes, a chip that was formally announced and launched on the same day – you don’t see that much these days. This powerful processor hopes to be the foremost in gaming performance and is capable of a 6 GHz Max Turbo clock out of the box. Earlier this week, Intel showed off the chip in action with a glimpse of the CPU runs up to 6 GHz (opens in new tab). Admittedly, that lofty clock speed doesn’t last long, but that’s generally the case for all CPUs these days.
A 6GHz processor is absolutely amazing. But even Intel needs to know how incredibly niche these types of chips are. With the Core i9 13900K runs up to 5.8GHz, and even that processor is usually overkill for all but the most intensive professional creation workloads, I wonder why anyone would feel the need to pay an extra $100 for the 200MHz faster Core i9 13900KS. (Okay, I know the answer: big numbers are fun).
Binned chips that achieve these kinds of turbo speeds have gradually become less and less attractive over the years. The so-called gold chips you might have found a decade ago, which can spin whole gigahertz faster than their run-of-the-mill siblings, are long gone. You’re looking at a few hundred megahertz these days from an almost perfect die, at least without liquid nitrogen. You can get a lot more out of a CPU by dipping it in the stuff, the Core i9 13900K makes it up to 9GHz (opens in new tab)but we are way out of reach for your everyday user there.
Intel, AMD, they all push the boundaries of new chips from the start. The rare ‘gold monsters’ are skimmed off the top to be sold as more premium offerings, like this Core i9 13900KS, so the silicon lottery isn’t as exciting for hobbyist overclockers. It is actually for this reason that the wasted CPU storage, Silicon Lottery, closed last year. “Overclocking room has decreased,” the store said on the day of its closing.
Process node development has also slowed down over the years, meaning material gains for clock speed are a matter of getting more out of pre-existing nodes, which Intel has been doing for a few generations now.
| Header Cell – Column 0 | Core i9 13900KS | Core i9 13900K |
|---|---|---|
| Cores (P+E) / screw thread | 8+16 / 32 | 8+16 / 32 |
| L3 cache | 36MB | 36MB |
| L2 cache | 32MB | 32MB |
| P-core Turbo clock | 6GHz | 5.8GHz |
| Unlocked | Yes | Yes |
| Pictures | Intel UHD Graphics 770 | Intel UHD Graphics 770 |
| Total CPU PCIe lanes | 20 | 20 |
| Maximum memory speed | DDR5 5600, DDR4 3200 | DDR5 5600, DDR4 3200 |
| Recommended Customer Prices (RCP) | $699 | $589-$599 |
All this makes a chip like the Intel Core i9 13900KS hard to recommend. Like I said, seeing a CPU at 6 GHz out of the box is such a great milestone, but no gamer will really benefit from its slightly faster cores. For avid overclockers, you could argue that this is a somewhat ‘cheap’ throwaway chip, but even then you’re paying for the credit of saying you have one more than anything else.
Nevertheless, Intel hopes that the Core i9 13900KS will be able to stave off any challenge from AMD’s new and much improved 3D V-Cache Ryzen 7000 series processors. From the raw performance numbers given by AMD, it looks like AMD may have an edge, although there isn’t much specificity in the charts that have been offered so far.
We’ll have to wait for a chip-versus-chip showdown to get the whole picture, or so we thought AMD’s 3D V-Cache release date (opens in new tab) was set for February 14, but that date turned out to be wrong. AMD hasn’t offered a replacement date for when we can expect to see its next-gen gaming processors instead, but it will probably be sometime in the first quarter. Or at least I hope so.