Intel’s 13th Gen mobile processors are mostly a refresh of the preceding 12th Gen offerings. Mostly. The Raptor Lake-HX lineup, featuring the BGA implementation of the desktop parts, brings the full feature set of the next-gen stack to (rich) mobile users. We recently got our hands on the Razer Blade 16, which packs the Core i9-13950HX and NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 4090 mobility dGPU. Here are the first set of CPU tests from this $3,299 monster:
Comparing the Razer Blade 16 powered by the Core i9-13950HX against contemporary flagships, we get the following chart:
The Raptor Lake-HX part destroys everything in its path. Courtesy of the 24 cores (8P + 16E) and 32 threads running at a peak (single-core) boost clock of 5.5GHz, we have a chip that’s twice as fast as the AMD Ryzen 9 6900HX, Team Red’s fastest mobile CPU on the market. We’re looking at a 30-40% performance uplift in the multi-core segment compared to Intel’s own precious-gen Alder Lake-HX offerings.
We included the Cinebench R23 scores of the next-gen AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS based on the Zen 4 architecture (Via: HXL), which hardly affected the results. The Core i9-13950HX is 66% faster than its Dragon Range rival in the multi-threaded benchmark. Remember that the 7840HS is an octa-core part with a TDP of 35W while the 13950HX is a 24-core part with a TDP of 55W+, so it’s not a legit comparison.
Moving to the single-core benchmarks, you can see that not much has changed gen-over-gen on Intel’s side. This is understandable, as the Raptor Cove core is technically a faster Golden Cove with more L2 cache. Compared to the AMD offerings, however, there’s a wide gulf. The Core i9-13950HX is roughly 30% faster than the Ryzen 9 6900HX in the single-threaded Cinebench R23 benchmark.
Cinebench R20 further widens the gap between the next-gen Raptor Lake-HX and its competitors. The Core i9-13950HX is an incredible 2.34x faster than the AMD Ryzen 9 6900HX in the multi-threaded benchmark. Compared to its predecessor, the Core i9-12900HX, we’re looking at a generational gain of close to 30%.
As before, the single-core performance is a much closer affair. The i9-13950HX is about 10% faster than the 12900HX in the 1T Cinebench R20 benchmark while beating the Ryzen 9 6900HX by a lofty 38%, albeit in a larger power envelope. We’ll soon post further benchmarks of the Core i9-13950HX and the GeForce RTX 4090!