What has long been suspected could now become reality: According to several media reports, Intel is working on a new edition of the “Raptor Lake” CPU architecture. This was first released as the 13th core generation for PCs and notebooks at the end of 2022. The memory controller of the design supposedly called “Raptor Lake Next” will also support DDR4 memory in early 2027, as it did back then.
Read more after the ad
Tom’s Hardware claims to have found out this at the Taiwanese tech trade fair Computex this week. Two mainboard manufacturers surveyed there did not want to confirm this. However, they stated that they wanted to increase the production of DDR4 motherboards for both AMD’s AM4 socket and Intel’s Socket 1700. DDR4 is significantly less affected by the ongoing memory crisis than DDR5. For the latter, prices have roughly quadrupled in less than a year, and DDR4 has “only” become around twice as expensive as it was in mid-2025. AMD also announced the return of the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, which is particularly popular with gamers, at Computex.
Rebranding als Core Ultra 200
This should be available at the end of June 2026, and Intel will still have a more or less new DDR4 processor available: it shouldn’t be until the end of January 2027. Videocardz reports this independently of Tom’s Hardware. According to their report, Raptor Lake Next will receive the model names of the current Core Ultra 200 series. Today’s 14th generation Core-i CPUs (Raptor Lake Refresh) will be offered in parallel. This means that there is once again a technically largely identical processor architecture with two different brand names.
According to Videocardz, at least one desktop CPU with 16 cores (8P + 8E cores) is planned, which will be specified with a 125 watt TDP. There will also be several more processors with fewer cores and probably a cheaper price. Nothing is yet known about a possible successor to the previous Raptor Lake top models such as the infamous 14900K with 8P + 16E cores. It’s quite possible that Intel won’t build one so as not to create even more competition within the Core Ultra 200 and Core i 14000 series.
Probably only for desktop PCs
Intel’s alleged plans for Raptor Lake Next probably have little to do with Nova Lake. The next, truly new architecture for desktop PCs is currently being developed under this code name. It is also not expected to appear until 2027 and will probably contain up to 52 cores and, like AMD’s X3D CPUs, a particularly large last-level cache. The current reports also do not mention notebook CPUs with Raptor Lake Next. Intel recently launched Panther Lake, also known as Core Ultra 300, for mobile computers.
Read more after the ad
Read also
(NO)
