Leaked benchmarks for Intel’s next-gen Raptor Lake Refresh CPUs look shaky – but don’t panic

Intel’s Raptor Lake Refresh desktop processors have been spotted in another leak, and this time round we have some more benchmarks to feast our eyes on.

In this case, the benchmarks are drawn from CrossMark (a suite produced by BAPCo to provide a gauge of app performance and responsiveness), and we have results of both Intel’s incoming Core i9-14900K and the Core i7-14700K.

As spotted by Tom’s Hardware, the Core i9-14900K recorded an overall score of 2,265 (add seasoning, as ever), with the Core i7-14700K hitting 1,980. Thus we can conclude the 14900K is around 14% faster than the 14700K, at least going by this one result.

The 14900K is slightly faster still in some of the tests that make up the overall benchmark – notably, it’s 20% quicker in the responsiveness test.

What this leak also shows is the purported core counts of these Raptor Lake Refresh CPUs, and it backs up what has previously been aired on the rumor mill – namely that the 14700K is going to have more cores, 20 of them. That’ll break down to 8 performance cores and 12 efficiency cores, with the latter being 4 more than the 13700K.

The 14900K will keep the same core configuration as its Raptor Lake predecessor, which occupies the number three spot in our list of the best processors (the 13700K is number one, incidentally, to give you some idea of how important these sequels are).

Unfortunately, the spec details provided by this leak don’t cover clock speeds, but Raptor Lake Refresh is only expected to juice things up to a relatively minor extent compared to Intel’s current-gen CPUs. One theory we’ve heard is that 14th-gen processors will be 200MHz faster across most of the range.

Analysis: Why we shouldn’t focus on the scores here

Why aren’t we comparing these 14th-gen processors to the results of their 13th-gen counterparts here? Well, because the latter are actually faster in the CrossMark results database.

While that might seem worrying, or indeed even ridiculous, remember that these Raptor Lake Refresh processors are still engineering samples – or that’s what we presume, anyway – and clearly not running at their full performance levels. After all, there’s no way Intel would release a new generation of silicon that is slower than the previous range of CPUs, for obvious reasons.

For the same reason, there’s no point in drawing comparisons between these leaked results and AMD Ryzen CPUs.

Don’t worry about the raw performance side of the equation here. The value of this leak is in showing that the Core i7-14700K does indeed up the efficiency core count – or at least, this is yet another indication that this is the case – and that it’s not too far off the performance of the 14900K. Actually, we would expect the gap to be a bit closer – based on current-gen Raptor Lake results in CrossMark – but there could be something else going on behind the scenes here.

As ever with spilled benchmarks, we must be careful about drawing too much in the way of conclusions.

The other interesting thing about this leak is its very existence, and the fact that we’re now seeing multiple Raptor Lake Refresh benchmarks popping up on the grapevine (there was a Cinebench leak for the 14700K last month). As the release of any hardware nears, more leaks appear, and so this is a hint that Intel’s launch date for 14th-gen CPUs is nearing. October – the rumored month for these chips to hit the shelves – looks a good bet at this point.

After all, we just heard that Intel’s Innovation event in September will see Team Blue reveal Meteor Lake processors, which are the laptop chips to run alongside Raptor Lake Refresh on the desktop – so surely the latter will get a mention, too? We shall see.