Oh, sorry, I was busy admiring these gorgeous die shots of the Intel Core i9 13900K

Infrared close up of Raptor Lake chip.
(Image credit: Fritzchens Fritz)

Frtizchens Fritz is at it again. The close-up chip photographer has just released infrared images of Intel's Core i9 13900K CPU, and these die shots give us a rather intimate look at Intel's flagship CPU. 

Fritz shared a couple of his shots on Twitter, but you can find the rest on his Flickr account. That's best to appreciate them at the highest possible quality since our gallery viewer won't do them justice. 

The CPU photographed in this series is the Raptor Lake B0 die measuring 252mm2. His gallery looks at Raptor Cove cores, Gracemont clusters, and the accompanying L2 and L3 caches in a view you don't see too often in great detail. 

Fritz even breaks down the sizes of the tiny cores below:

  • P-Core with 2MB L2$ - 8,080mm²
  • P-Core w/o the new L2$ - 7,429mm²
  • P-Core with L3$ - 10,068mm²
  • E-Core w/o L2$ - 1,588mm²
  • E-Core with L2$ - 2,570mm²

The powerful Raptor Lake CPU launched last week, and its gaming performance did not disappoint despite being a bit of a power-hungry chip. Our review of the chip called it the "most impressive CPU money can buy right now."

More recently, Fritz took some remarkable die shots of the PlayStation 5's SoCs to highlight the difference between the console and desktop CPU. And if you go back in his collection of chip pics, you'll find plenty of other gorgeous ones to gawk at, some going way back to the early days of gaming processors.

Intel is planning on recently releasing a version of the Core i9 that will 6GHz "out of the box" early next year, which Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger calls a "huge milestone for client computing." Until then, we can just sit and stare at this 5.8GHz beast.

Jorge Jimenez
Hardware writer, Human Pop-Tart

Jorge is a hardware writer from the enchanted lands of New Jersey. When he's not filling the office with the smell of Pop-Tarts, he's reviewing all sorts of gaming hardware, from laptops with the latest mobile GPUs to gaming chairs with built-in back massagers. He's been covering games and tech for over ten years and has written for Dualshockers, WCCFtech, Tom's Guide, and a bunch of other places on the world wide web. 

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