The current crisis has lowered the level of user consumption and slowed down the market, which together with inflation has led to changes in the plans of large companies. Among them is Intel, where in its most recent road map the Raptor Lake-S Refreshan improved version of their newer desktop processors.
Well yes, it seems that Intel has raised its foot on the accelerator and the annual launch of a new generation and, therefore, the architecture of its processors for desktop computers is going to slow down. While everything was pointing to Meteor Lake launching in 2023, the world’s largest PC processor maker has made it clear to us that the 13th generation will still be on the market next year and even receive an improved revision.
Intel will launch an improved version of its Intel Core 13
As can be seen on the roadmap and under the name of Raptor Lake-S Refresh, starting in the second half of next year we will see the launch in stores of a new version of the most advanced Intel Core that has ever appeared on the market. . Which compete head-on with AMD’s Ryzen 7000, processors that will receive their corresponding update with V-Cache memory included next year. So Intel would have decided to face its rival and not take it as something trivial.
What improvements can the “new” Raptor Lake-S have?
Well, at the moment we don’t know, what we do know is that DLVR was disabled in the first batch of current generation Intel CPUs. As we already told you a few weeks ago, this consists of a voltage regulator inside the processor that, in combination with the one included in the motherboard, translates into a more efficient voltage curve and clock speed. Which can be translated into two things: higher speed with the same consumption or less consumption with the same speed.
However, Intel can also opt for other improvements that we are not aware of, such as a different organization of P-Cores and E-Cores. We don’t expect the total thread count to increase beyond the i9’s 32 (16 for the 8 performance cores and 16 for the small ones). We also don’t see Intel launching versions with 12 and 16 large cores, which would mean a configuration of 12+6 or 16. More than anything due to the fact that not even games need such a number of cores and few use more. 8. Although having extra cores is always appreciated.
As for the added potential of a V-Cache from Intel, it’s not something we have to discount, as the company already has experiences joining multiple stacked chips together through its Foveros technology. The problem with it is that it would be a surprise, since it would be something that would have been kept for a long time. In any case, it has little chance of being fulfilled, although it is not 100% discardable either. In any case, there are a few weeks left for CES and to clear up any doubts about these Raptor Lake-S Refresh.
Intel’s return to workstations
As the latest novelty we have the appearance of the Xeon W that will use the W790 chipset and that are designed for workstations. Its architecture will be based on Sapphire Rapids with 64 execution threads and, therefore, with 32 P-Core cores. Which differentiates it from its brother for servers.
This is Intel’s first processor in years for this type of processor, which has caused AMD’s Threadripper monopoly and total stagnation in this sector of the market, which will mean increased competition in a market, that of the HEDT, which has been stagnant for years.
