Raptor Redux Delivers Little To Desktop

Code-named Raptor Lake Refresh, Intel’s 14th-generation Core processors add little to the 13th-generation Raptor Lake. We expect them to mainly target desktop PCs while Meteor Lake addresses mobile-PC designs.

Joseph Byrne

Owing to superstition, elevators in some buildings skip the 13th floor. Passengers exiting at floor 14, therefore, are actually on floor 13. Intel is engaged in similar numerological nonsense. Customers of the Intel Core 14th-Generation processors will find their new chip to be physically the same as the 13th-generation design.

The Intel Core 14000K products target content creators and gamers, who also may make videos of their online adventures. The new desktop-PC processors make superficial changes to their Core 13000K predecessors and nudge higher the top speed of what was already the fastest x86 processor. The flagship 14900K is the first PC processor to achieve a maximum boost speed of 6.0 GHz.

Nvidia designed the processor mainly for the latter configuration, which accelerates the performance of AI models that exceed the GPU’s 96 GB of High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) but fit into the processor’s 512 GB of DRAM. In this case, Grace feeds data to the GPU through a high-bandwidth chip-to-chip interface, avoiding the delay of loading it through slower board-to-board links.

Code-named Raptor Lake Refresh, the 14000K comes to market under similar circumstances as the original Raptor Lake, which was a stopgap employed when Meteor Lake fell behind schedule. A year later, Meteor still isn’t available even as Intel continues to promise that it will deliver five process nodes in four years. The only major product to employ Intel 4 technology, Meteor now targets only lower-power designs, forcing Intel to refresh Raptor Lake to update other PC-processor tiers.