Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by jeffbee 1259 days ago
The "K" in 13900K stands for "draws as much current as physically possible." The ones without the K are a little more mainstream, and were just recently released.
1 comments

They were released, but they weren't publicized, nor were they seeded to reviewers. In other words, unlike the non-X Zen 4's, the non-K Intel Raptor Lakes likely perform a lot worse than the Intel K's.
I'm not sure that's really going to be the case. E.g. the 13900 a score in CineBench R23 Multi close to the best AMD CPU in this article, just a few % off the 13900K.
In highly multithreaded workloads the 13900 probably does fine (24 cores are 24 cores). It's the lightly threaded and gaming workloads where it's expected to suffer the most. Especially since the L2 cache is also cut on some of the non-K parts, which might be a first. The 13600 drops from 20mb on the k to 11.5mb on the non-K, that's a big drop.
It's the heavily threaded workloads that will suffer the most. In a single threaded workload that single core can get as much power as it wants in both K and non-K. In a multi-threaded workload the cores are power limited, and K has a lot more power than non-K so the effect of power throttling is felt more on non-K.
Heavily threaded will suffer the most between the K & non-K, but not necessarily enough to drop below the "only" 16-core competition which was the comparison point here, not the K version. Especially since it's primarily the 8 P-cores that are really going to be impacted in such a scenario.

Hence why I specified "lightly threaded" not "single threaded" workloads. There's a whole huge market of workloads that sit at around 4-8 threads. They're called "video games" and it's what Intel has been bragging about being the best at for a while. The new crop of non-K's look prime to suffer the most in this workload relative to AMD's non-X competition.

On the contrary, the other article at the top of Anandtech right now shows that the K-series CPUs don't benefit from higher power levels in games. As far as games are concerned they might as well be 95W CPUs.