A limitation to only Chinese users that we can not explain.
During the fall of 2022, Intel has perfectly followed its schedule by marketing its 13th generation of processors, the famous Raptor Lake. A punctuality that has not always been in order at the American who - between 2017 and 2020 - has even experienced numerous problems on the evolution of its engraving process and, in doing so, countless delays in the delivery of different generations of CPUs. So technical worries seem to be a thing of the past for Intel, which would rather be firing on all cylinders at the moment. While the Core 13000K was launched at the end of last year and the "non-K" versions followed last month, Intel is even taking the liberty of interjecting references.
Remember, at the beginning of 2022, Intel announced the release of the Core i5-12490F, an Alder Lake processor that came between the more classic Core i5-12400 and Core-i5-12500. The move had surprised many observers when Intel had decided to distribute this processor only in China. Well, the American company is doing it again today. Indeed, only a few days after the emergence of a rumor surrounding the release of a Core i5-13490F, we learn not only that this processor is a reality, but also that it is accompanied by a Core i7-13790F and, above all, that both chips are in turn reserved for the Chinese market only.
In either case, the main change seems to come from the Level 3 (L3) cache on board the processors. Thus, the Core i5-13490F takes the same number of cores as the 13400 (6 powerful cores and 4 efficient cores), but it increases the L3 cache from 20 to 24 MB for frequencies that increase from 200 MHz to 4.8 GHz, at the level of the 13500. For the Core i7-13790F, we see a similar transformation. The number of cores is the same as on the 13700 (8 powerful and 8 efficient), but the L3 cache increases from 30 to 33 MB. On the other hand, the operating frequency drops by 100 MHz (5.1 GHz), getting closer to that of the 13600.
Because of their packaging in an all-black box, these two processors are nicknamed "Black Series" and are already on sale in China. The Core i5-13490F is priced at around $186, a little less than the 13400F ($196). The Core i7-13790F is also already on sale, but it doesn't seem to benefit from a single unit launch: it is reserved for packages that bring together processor and motherboard, making its estimation more delicate.
