We've been waiting for this announcement: the Intel Core i9 13900KS will be available today, January 12, for $699. This processor has been teased and talked about many times over the past few months, but the world's first 6GHz desktop processor with stock speed actually goes on sale today.

Yes, it is not often these days that an officially announced chip is released on the same day. This high-performance processor wants to be the be-all and end-all of gaming performance and can achieve a maximum turbo clock of 6GHz right out of the box. Earlier this week, Intel showed off the chip in action, giving us a glimpse of the CPU running at up to 6 GHz (opens in new tab). Admittedly, this high clock speed cannot be sustained for long, but this is common for any CPU today.

A 6 GHz processor is absolutely amazing. But even Intel must know how niche this kind of chip is: the Core i9 13900K runs up to 5.8 GHz, and even that processor is almost overkill for all but the most intensive professional production workloads. (We know the answer: because big numbers are fun.)

Binned chips that hit these kinds of turbo speeds have gradually become less and less attractive over the last few years; the so-called golden chips we found a decade ago, running gigahertz faster than their mediocre brethren, have long since disappeared. At least without liquid nitrogen, we can now extract a few hundred megahertz from a nearly perfect die; the Core i9 13900K is up to 9 GHz (open in new tab), but that's way out of the realm of the everyday user.

Both Intel and AMD are pushing the limits of their new chips from the start. The silicon lottery is not as exciting for hobbyist overclockers because the rare "golden samples" are sold as more premium products, like this Core i9 13900KS. The silicon lottery is therefore not as exciting for the hobbyist overclocker, as it is for the more premium products like the Core i9 13900KS. The store stated on the day it closed that "overclocking headroom is dwindling."

Process node development has also slowed in the last few years, and increasing clock speeds is all about getting more clocks out of existing nodes, which is what Intel has been doing for the last few generations.

These things make it difficult to recommend a chip like the Intel Core i9 13900KS. As I said, a 6 GHz CPU right out of the box is a really nice milestone, but none of the gamers will benefit from that slight speedup in cores. For the avid overclocker, it could be the case that this is a somewhat "cheap" binned chip, but even then, they will pay more for the glory of "having it" than anything else.

Nevertheless, Intel is hopeful that the Core i9 13900KS can stave off a challenge from AMD's new and improved 3D V-cache Ryzen 7000 series processors. from the rough performance figures presented by AMD, it seems likely that AMD will have the edge seems to be the case, but the graphs presented so far are not very specific. [We thought AMD's 3D V-Cache release date (open in new tab) was set for February 14, but that date turned out to be wrong; AMD has not provided an alternative date for when the next-generation gaming processor will be announced, but it will probably be during the first It will probably be during the first quarter. At least I hope so.