We evaluate Intel’s performance over the year, from Raptor Lake CPUs to the debacle of the Arc GPU launch.
How did Intel fare in 2022? In many respects, this was a bit of a rollercoaster ride of a year for Team Blue, with some highs, and some marked lows. Let’s dive straight in and take a close look at where Intel made good progress this year, and where things came off the tracks to a lesser – or greater – extent.
Early in 2022, Intel made progress in gaining desktop market share back from AMD with robust Alder Lake processor sales, and followed that up strongly later in the year with the launch of new 13th-gen CPUs.
Intel unleashed its Raptor Lake processors in October 2022, or at least the first bunch of desktop CPUs led by the flagship Core i9-13900K. And despite this being ‘just’ a refresh of Alder Lake on paper, the 13th-gen newcomers added a lot of pep into the mix over and above Intel’s 12th-gen. Raptor Lake bristled with far more efficiency cores, it ramped up cache, and performance received a good boost over Alder Lake overall.
The flagship 13900K blew us away in terms of multi-core performance in particular, and is a seriously good heavyweight chip, although it is power-hungry, and obviously not cheap. Further down the Raptor Lake range there were CPUs that also shone, though, and the Core i5-13600K turned out to be a more affordable option that offered great gaming performance at an excellent value proposition.
There’s no question that Intel won the battle of the mid-range chips here against AMD’s Ryzen 7600X, which hit shelves just before the 13600K, and while those CPUs were actually well-matched in performance terms, Team Red lost out due to the upgrade costs of moving to the new Zen 4 platform. (Namely a new motherboard – with no truly wallet-friendly options on the table still, at the time of writing – plus DDR5 RAM is compulsory, whereas cheaper DDR4 memory can still be used with Raptor Lake).
In short, Raptor Lake was a big win for Intel in 2022, to the point that AMD slashed prices of its (still very new) Zen 4 CPUs (for Black Friday in particular, but also afterwards too). As a short aside, the Core i9-13900K also stole the crown of the fastest overclock ever for a desktop CPU – an astonishing 8.8GHz. That underlined the potential this silicon holds for enthusiasts overclockers.
In 2022, Intel finally unleashed its Arc Alchemist discrete graphics cards to take on AMD and Nvidia. This was Intel’s big moment to begin establishing itself as a third player in the graphics card market, and inject some much needed competitivity, although sadly the start that Arc GPUs (for laptops and desktops) got off to could be described in two words: shaky and wobbly.
