Intel’s messy roadmap

Three lakes, two sockets, and lots of confusion

INTEL’S RECENT great burst of development has seen some remarkable technical developments and some big promises for the future. From being behind the curve for process nodes, Intel is back at the front of the pack. Only a couple of years ago, Intel was selling 14nm chips but now we’re rapidly approaching using angstroms as a metric, even if it’s not exactly comparing apples with apples. However, recent hiccups have slowed Intel’s ambitious plans.

The most obvious sign is the Raptor Lake refresh—a stop-gap measure to buy time for the mainstream desktop market, as Meteor Lake struggles. These are marketed as 14th-generation, but Intel isn’t fooling anyone, they are tweaked 13th-generation chips, technically the same, bar the DDR4 support. The first three due to appear are the Core i9-14900K, Core i7-14700K, and Core i5-14600K. We’re close enough to the launch in October for details, and early benchmarks to appear. The i9-14900K is 200MHz faster than the 13900K, reaching 6GHz. The KS version reportedly manages to reach a heady 6.2GHz, which no doubt will be the focus for many of the first round of tests. Who doesn’t love the top chip? This will have to brave AMD’s V-Cache Ryzens to declare gaming supremacy. The Core i7-14700K gets more of an improvement with an extra four efficiency core bringing the count to 8P+12E, as well as a 200MHz bump in the boost clock. The Core i5-14600K gets the 200MHz bump in boost clock, but no extra cores.

Before Intel slipped in this refresh, Meteor Lake was set to replace Raptor Lake in pretty much all market segments. However, Intel scaled back expectations and targeted the mobile market instead. The pressures of the new design and process node just couldn’t deliver the core count and clock speeds required. Enter our stopgap refresh, which leaves Intel using two generations, two architectures, and two sockets simultaneously. Now an image has emerged of a desktop Meteor Lake, which is also the first we’ve seen of an LGA 1851 socket chip. It’s not clear if this is an aberration, a sample of what could have been, or if we’re going to see some desktop versions after all (don’t hold your breath!).