Stopp me if I’m repeating myself…
Intel’s new Raptor Lake CPUs have a power guzzling problem
THIS SHOULDN’T COME as much of a surprise. Raptor Lake is, after all, a tweaked version of the Alder Lake just with more cores and higher clocks. And Alder Lake was already seriously pushing the wattage.
Intel can say all it wants about the 3rd-gen SuperFin process tech used to manufacture Raptor Lake, now branded as Intel 7. But the reality is that it’s still a 10nm process in a world where the likes of TSMC have just started producing 3nm chips for commercial applications. Of course, process nodes aren’t directly comparable between competing fabs. So, Intel’s 10nm is actually a bit more dense than TSMC’s 7nm technology. But however you slice it, Intel is miles behind.
Our benchmark results put Raptor Lake’s CPU package power at around 250W in the case of the Core i9-13900K. But that’s actually a best-case scenario. If you look at total platform power and use even more demanding software, it’s possible to push the overall draw up to nearly 500W, at which point the delta to AMD’s Ryzen 9 7950X is getting on for 150W.
Now, it’s debatable how important power draw is on the desktop. An extra, say, 50W in any direction surely doesn’t make much odds. But at some point, it becomes an issue and at least with high-end Raptor Lake models, we’re surely approaching realworld problem territory. As I’ve mentioned in a previous issue, the recommended limit for a standard wall socket in the US is 1,440W. But anything over 1,000W is a bit worrisome, depending on the quality of your wiring and how many devices you have contending on a given loop.
In that context, just imagine adding Nvidia’s new RTX 4090 GPU, which has been tested sucking up over 500W all on its
own. If you ask me, this is all getting a bit silly. Quite literally, the power consumption of CPUs and GPUs can’t keep going up like this. It just isn’t sustainable in terms of plain old wall socket power, let alone any broader questions of sustainability.