The specifications of the next generation of processors 13th Generation Intel Core, codenamed Raptor Lake, are not unknown to us thanks to the numerous leaks that have been reaching us. Thus, we know for example that in Raptor Lake-S The number of Gracemont cores (known as efficient cores or E-Cores) will be nicely increased from 8 to 16, but now a new leaked slide gives us more information on how Intel has worked with RAM in this next generation, improving remarkably the performance of the DDR5but surprisingly still keeping the DDR4 compatibility.
Intel’s current platform, Alder Lake-Swas the first to incorporate the new generation of DDR5 RAM, but as transition generation that is, support for DDR4 RAM was maintained, although it is true that in the end the motherboard manufacturers chose to incorporate compatibility with one or the other generation of memory, but not with both at the same time. For this reason, it is particularly surprising that Raptor Lake is once again a “transition generation”, with support for DDR5 but also for DDR4. This, of course, seems like good news for those users who do not want to invest, at least not yet, in the new and faster generation of RAM.
Intel Raptor Lake improves DDR5 performance
As we’ve discussed before, this is all coming from a leaked slide, which details some specific capabilities of next-gen Raptor Lake. This slide verifies a lot of the data we already knew from previous leaks, but it also gives us some new and quite interesting information.
As we can see in the slide, the Intel Raptor Lake-S platform will have native support for DDR5 RAM at a speed of 5,600 MHz (which should substantially improve performance, especially in single-threaded operations), while maintains support for DDR4 RAM at 3,200 MHz. This means that, for the next generation, motherboard manufacturers will re-release “D4” models that support DDR4 RAM and normal models with support for the new generation, DDR5 , allowing users looking to upgrade their PC to the new Intel platform to choose whether they want to make the leap or keep their current RAM.
While it’s relatively surprising that Intel has decided to have two transition generations for RAM, it’s also not uncommon since it’s already known that Raptor Lake-S will have the same socket (LGA 1700) as the current generation, Alder Lake-S, and therefore motherboards should also support Alder Lake processors.
Few news in the Intel Core 13
Intel Raptor Lake CPUs will include 16 PCI-Express 5.0 lanes, 4 PCIe 4.0 lanes, and eight DMI 4.0 connections for input and output on the chipset. The sixteen PCIe 5.0 lanes can be divided into two, which means that we can have one PCIe 5 x8 connection for the graphics card and two PCIe 5 x4 connections for high-speed storage devices. The result is that a single Raptor Lake processor will be capable of having up to three SSDs directly attached to the CPU, offering a rate of performance never seen before.
What is still not entirely clear is why Intel has chosen to keep a dedicated PCIe 4 connection to M.2 SSDs, but it could be related to the fact that they have kept the LGA 1700 platform. that PCIe 3.0/4.0, 2.5 GbE, Wi-Fi 6E, SATA and USB 3.0 interfaces will continue to be supported on Intel 700 series chipsets as well.
We all know by now that the 12th Generation Alder Lake platform introduced many new features for the first time, such as support for DDR5 or hybrid architecture with performance cores and efficient cores, as well as the PCI-Express 5.0 interface. The Raptor Lake-S platform thus seems like a minor upgrade to this one, improving performance on RAM and bringing the total number of PCIe 4.0 lanes on the chipset to 20, but little else.
