Intel Raptor Lake could be the chip giant’s follow-up to Alder Lake processors, and has been spotted in what’s seemingly a leaked roadmap indicating that the potential 13th-gen CPUs might arrive in 2022 complete with an ace up the sleeve for gamers.
Now, start grabbing your buckets of salt for this one, which was reported by VideoCardz, because as the site notes, this is clearly an old Intel roadmap – assuming it’s genuine in the first place – as it indicates that Rocket Lake was supposed to launch in (late) 2020 (which was always a shaky seeming theory on the grapevine way back when, as you may recall).
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The roadmap has Alder Lake down as 2021, which is still the case – 12th-gen chips are rumored to perhaps debut in September, and Intel has said it’s aiming for the second half of the year – but the following generation is Raptor Lake, according to this leaked material.
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This isn’t the first mention of Raptor Lake we’ve seen, and as previously suggested in a major leak around Lunar Lake (purported 14th-gen chips), this will simply be a refresh of Alder Lake (remaining on 10nm).
The new leak indicates that Alder Lake will be honed for better performance with Raptor Lake, doubtless with IPC (instructions per clock) improvements, with another very interesting snippet of information regarding desktop Raptor Lake stating that there will be an “improved CPU cache for gaming.”
If this is correct, Intel has plans to further boost gaming performance by beefing up (or otherwise revamping) on-board cache, which should hopefully deliver some extra oomph for Raptor Lake when it comes to running the latest and greatest titles smoothly.
Lunar landing
The potential launch date of 2022 makes sense, of course, and it’s what we’ve heard before from the rumor mill. VideoCardz suggests that if Raptor Lake is 13th-gen, then Meteor Lake would be 14th-gen and Lunar Lake 15th-gen.
The latter was also the subject of recent speculation, floating the idea that Lunar Lake will be 14th-gen – maybe pitching up in 2023 – and that Meteor Lake is not going to appear on the desktop. In other words, Meteor Lake will be mobile CPUs for laptops, much like Tiger Lake is right now (running in parallel to Comet Lake).
All of this is just so much guesswork based on unproven leaks and rumors, mind you.
Another nugget worth bearing in mind with this leak is that Raptor Lake mobile chips will supposedly support LPDDR5X memory, a step forward from Alder Lake’s LPDDR5 RAM. The 13th-gen mobile chips will also apparently use ‘DLVR power delivery’, although exactly what that might be is unknown at this point.
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