Intel 13th Gen ‘Raptor Lake’ CPUs Provide Massive Cache Improvements Over Last Gen
Chips and Cheese has posted an article covering the cache improvements we’ll see in Intel’s upcoming 13th Gen processors, codenamed ‘Raptor Lake‘, in comparison to the 12th Gen ‘Alder Lake‘ SKUs.
A Slight Cache Overview
Intel’s Raptor Lake features double the E-core count as compared to Alder Lake. The Golden Cove P-cores, on Alder Lake feature 1.25MB of L2 cache each whereas Raptor Lake bumps this up to 2MB per each core.
This proves to be a massive (60%) improvement from generation to generation. The main breakthrough comes as Chips and Cheese, after a lot of research, concluded that the L2 cache latencies have increased with the newer generations.
Raptor Lake’s Cache Improvement
The bottleneck that arose between the performance and efficient cores is being put to a halt with Intel’s Raptor Lake. OneRaichu over at Twitter suggests that Raptor Lake is not just a refresh of Alder Lake due to the changes in the cache structure which drastically improve the latencies.
This is why I just say the RPL is just not only a refresh.
you can see the ringbus structure has some changes and it makes the boundary of the P and E core is almost disappeared.
I guess the network topology of ringbus is different. pic.twitter.com/6pZSLe6JFx— Raichu (@OneRaichu) August 23, 2022
A Complete Re-Design
The report reads that Skylake featured 256KB of L2 Cache (4-way) having a latency of 12 cycles. This was increased to 13 cycles for the Sunny Cove architecture. Willow Cove has an increased 1280KB 20-Way cache with a latency of 14 cycles. Raptor Lake being a massive architectural leap, boosts this number to 2048KB. The latency is expected to increase at 16 cycles.
This puts to show that team blue has cleared a major inevitable hurdle. This new design will allow for more efficient power consumption while providing faster cache speeds.
Expectations
The 13th Gen CPUs from Intel are expected to be announced in the last week of September. Chipzilla targets the innovation event for announcing its new and latest innovations and technology. Raptor Lake’s release is en route without any delays (so far). We can expect these CPUs by around October.
