Intel launched its 10nm-class Alder Lake-S processors late last year, marking its first truly competitive lineup since AMD’s Ryzen 3000 parts landed in 2019. At CES 2022, the lower-end Alder Lake SKUs and the 45W high-performance mobile chips were announced as well. With much of the 12th Gen offerings out and about, plans for the 13th Gen Raptor Lake lineup are already underway. Raptor Lake will be an enhancement of the Alder Lake skeleton. (Tatuing.com) A refinement of the hybrid core architecture, it’ll leverage the Raptor Cove core (Raptor Cove is to Golden Cove what Willow Cove was to Sunny Cove, a soft refresh) as the performance cores.
The Gracemont efficiency cores will be retained, although the count will be doubled to 16, pushing the overall core count to 24 cores. Since the Gracemont cores lack hyperthreading, the thread count comes up to 32. Like Alder Lake, Raptor Lake will also support DDR4 as well as DDR5 memory (5,600 MT/s+) and fit into the LGA1700 socket.
According to Moore’s Law is Dead, Raptor Lake will be a direct response to AMD’s upcoming Ryzen 7000 (5nm Zen 4) offerings. As such, it’ll land sometime in the last quarter of 2022, aka, the holiday season. Raptor Lake will be followed by Meteor Lake in the mobile and Arrow Lake in the desktop segment. These will be Intel’s first modular/chiplet based designs for consumers.
