The i5-13600K's P-cores are designed for high-performance single-threaded workloads, while the E-cores are optimized for power efficiency and multithreaded workloads. With four more E-cores than the previous generation, the i5-13600K shows significant improvement in multithreaded performance. It's evident in its faster samples per minute pace than the Core i5-12600K in Blender's Junk Shop benchmark, which is a well-known benchmarking tool for content creation.
The processor's multithreaded performance is further demonstrated in the synthetic Cinebench R23 benchmark, where the i5-13600K is 37% faster than the i5-12600K. But the most surprising result is that the i5-13600K is only 12% slower than the Intel Core i9-12900K, which has a much higher price point and more cores.