Intel has decided to discontinue its entire 13th Gen Raptor Lake lineup of overclockable "K-series" CPU SKUs. According to an official product change notice, the company will stop accepting orders for chips like the Core i9-13900KS, Core i9-13900K, Core i9-13900KF, Core i7-13700K, Core i7-13700KF, Core i5-13600K, and Core i5-13600KF after May 24th, 2024. Final shipments to vendors are targeted for June 28th. After those dates, availability of the unlocked Raptor Lake processors will rapidly diminish as the remaining inventory gets sold off, possibly at inflated prices due to shortages. This discontinuation comes just over a year after Raptor Lake's launch in late 2022, which delivered additional performance improvements over the previous Alder Lake generation.

Raptor Lake brought higher clocks, more cache, additional efficiency cores, and enough muscle to compete with AMD's Ryzen 7000 CPUs in many workloads. Interestingly, Intel has not yet discontinued Alder Lake, suggesting those 12th-generation chips may still be available for some time. While the death of the overclockable Raptor Lake K-series CPUs is unfortunate for enthusiasts, there is an upside—it paves the way for Intel's current generation Raptor Lake refresh, 14th generation Core processors, to clear inventory before the next-generation processors arrive. The 15th generation "Arrow Lake" Core Ultra 2 series of processors could be teased at the upcoming Computex event in June.

EK, the leading computer cooling solutions provider, is happy to announce that the latest generation of its TEC solutions - the EK-Quantum Delta² TEC - a CPU water block for extreme cooling made in collaboration with Intel, is now unlocked for the 14th generation of Intel Core desktop CPUs. EK is thankful to Intel for collaborating to bring this extreme cooling technology to the market.

EK is now taking over and continuing support for the 14th generation with the EK Delta² TEC Integrated Intel Cryo Cooling Technology software.

Intel's next-generation designs are nearing launch, and we are already getting information about the upcoming generations. Today, we have the information that Intel's Arrow Lake-S desktop/client implementations of the Arrow Lake family will feature as much as 3 MB of level two (L2) cache for each performance core. Currently, Intel's latest 13th-generation Raptor Lake and 14th-generation Raptor Lake Refresh feature 2 MB of L2 cache per performance core. However, the 15th generation Arrow Lake, scheduled for launch in 2024, will bump that up by 50% and reach 3 MB. Given that P-cores are getting a boost in capacity, we expect E-cores to do so as well, but at a smaller size.

Arrow Lake will utilize Lion Cove P-core microarchitecture, while the E-core design will be based on Skymont. Intel plans to use a 20A node for this CPU, and more details will be presented next year.

Intel's upcoming Meteor Lake processor family is supposedly looking good with the new performance/efficiency targets. According to the @OneRaichu Twitter account, we have a potential performance estimate for the upcoming SKUs. As the latest information notes, Intel's 14th-generation Meteor Lake will feature around a 50% increase in efficiency compared to the 13th-generation Raptor Lake designs. This means that the processor can use half the power at the same performance target at Raptor Lake, increasing efficiency. Of course, the design also offers some performance improvements besides efficiency that are significant and are yet to be shown. The new Redwood Cove P-cores will be combined with the new Crestmont E-cores for maximum performance inside U/P/H configurations with 15-45 Watt power envelopes.

For integrated graphics, the source notes that Meteor Lake offers twice the performance of iGPU found on Raptor Lake designs. Supposedly, Meteor Lake will feature 128 EUs running 2.0+GHz compared to 96 EUs found inside Raptor Lake. The iGPU architecture will switch from Intel Iris to Xe-LPG 'Xe-MTL' family on the 14th gen models, confirming a giant leap in performance that iGPU is supposed to experience. Using the tile-based design, Intel combines the Intel 4 process for the CPU tile and the TSMC 5 nm process for the GPU tile. Intel handles final packaging for additional tuning, and you can see the separation below.

Intel's upcoming 13th generation of Core processors, codenamed "Raptor Lake," is supposed to arrive in the coming days. Apparently, one user pre-ordered the CPU and got it delivered to their home. Pictured below is the box of Intel Core i9-13900KF CPU. This SKU comes without integrated graphics and boasts eight P-cores with 16 E-cores on board. This is supposed to boost performance, along with the higher frequencies Raptor Lake is advertised to bring. The user even showed screenshots of proof that the software recognizes this upcoming model, so the information seems legit. In the screenshots below, we see that the P-cores of this SKU is reaching 5.5 GHz clock speeds. We are yet to see how much this silicon is capable of; however, the frequency alone looks promising.

When designing integrated circuits, engineers aim to produce an efficient design that is easier to manufacture. If they manage to keep the circuit size down, the economics of manufacturing that circuit is also going down. NVIDIA has posted on its technical blog a technique where the company uses an artificial intelligence model called PrefixRL. Using deep reinforcement learning, NVIDIA uses the PrefixRL model to outperform traditional EDA (Electronics Design Automation) tools from major vendors such as Cadence, Synopsys, or Siemens/Mentor. EDA vendors usually implement their in-house AI solution to silicon placement and routing (PnR); however, NVIDIA's PrefixRL solution seems to be doing wonders in the company's workflow.

Creating a deep reinforcement learning model that aims to keep the latency the same as the EDA PnR attempt while achieving a smaller die area is the goal of PrefixRL. According to the technical blog, the latest Hopper H100 GPU architecture uses 13,000 instances of arithmetic circuits that the PrefixRL AI model designed. NVIDIA produced a model that outputs a 25% smaller circuit than comparable EDA output. This is all while achieving similar or better latency. Below, you can compare a 64-bit adder design made by PrefixRL and the same design made by an industry-leading EDA tool.

Intel is preparing to launch its next-generation desktop platform codenamed Rocket Lake-S. According to the presentation held by Intel today in Shenzen, China, we have official information regarding some of the platform features that Raptor Lake is bringing. Starting with memory support, Raptor Lake is still carrying the transitional DDR4 and DDR5 support, as the full swing towards DDR5 is still in progress. Unlike the previous generation Alder Lake, which brought DDR5-4800 support, Raptor Lake's integrated memory controller can drive DDR5 modules with a 5600 MT/s configuration. As DDR4 support remains, it is limited to 3200 MT/s speed.

Interesting information from the leaked slide points out that support for CPU-attached NVMe storage remains PCIe Gen4. While AMD will provide an AM5 socket with CPU-attached NMVe storage on PCIe Gen5 protocol, Intel is taking a step back and holding on to Gen4. The CPU is outputting 16 PCIe Gen5 lanes on its own. Motherboard vendors for the upcoming 700-series boards for Raptor Lake can still provide a PCIe Gen5 NVMe slot; however, it will have to subtract eight Gen5 lanes from the PCI Express Graphics (PEG) slot and route them to NVMe storage. As our testing shows, this will affect GPU's performance by a few percent. AMD's upcoming AM5 platform has no such issues, as the CPU provides both the PEG and CPU-attached NVMe storage with sufficient PCIe Gen5 bandwidth.

Hot Chips 34, the upcoming semiconductor conference from Sunday, August 21 to Tuesday, August 23, 2022, will feature many significant contributions from folks like Intel, AMD, Tesla, and NVIDIA. Today, thanks to Intel's registration at the event, we discovered that the company would present its work on Meteor Lake and Arrow Lake processors with the novel Foveros 3D packaging. The all-virtual presentation from Intel will include talks about Ponte Vecchio GPU and its architecture, system, and software; Meteorlake and Arrowlake 3D Client Architecture Platform with Foveros; and some Xeon D and FPGA presentations. You can see the official website here for a complete list of upcoming talks.

As a little reminder, Meteor Lake is supposed to arrive next year, replacing the upcoming Raptor Lake design, and it has already ahs been pictured, which you can see below. The presentation will be recorded and all content posted on Hot Chips's website for non-attendees to catch up on.

Eurocom is launching the 15.6" Raptor X15 Mobile Supercomputer class laptop powered by the socket LGA1700 Intel 12th generation desktop processors. Supercharged by the latest generation H670 Intel chipset, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Ti graphics, up to 24 TB of storage and 64 GB of DDR4-3200 memory, the Raptor X15 delivers an impressive level of performance in a fully upgradeable Mobile Supercomputer. The EUROCOM Raptor X15 supports the Intel Socket LGA1700 and Intel H670 Chipset, enabling the fastest DDR4 memory and PCIe 4.0 for NVMe and graphics.

Mark BialicThe EUROCOM Raptor X15 combines Intel 12th generation socket desktop processors, up to 12900K, with NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Ti 8 GB DDR6 graphics in a small 15.6" laptop form factor that weighs just 2.6 kg yet it holds 24 TB of storage with three physical drives is a remarkable feat that our customers are crazy about. The EUROCOM Raptor X15 truly is King of the Hill in terms of user customization, user upgradeability, performance and mobility!

CPU-Z is one of the most widespread tools for profiling and monitoring, gathering information from the system, and presenting it in a user-readable UI. Today, the application has reached another milestone with the release of the CPU-Z 2.01 version, which brings support for additional upcoming processors from AMD and Intel. One of the software highlights is the inclusion of AMD's forthcoming processor designs, codenamed Rembrandt and Raphael. These processors are what AMD is bringing to the market now and in the near future, meaning that the software ecosystem has to prepare. Additionally, CPU-Z has been updated with preliminary support for Intel's upcoming 13th Generation Raptor Lake processors, alongside Intel ARC 3/5/7 DG2 designs. CPU-Z developers also improved validation process for high-frequency overclocking submissions of over 6 GHz. The full changelog is listed below.

Download CPU-Z 2.01 here.

When Intel announced the company's first hybrid design, codenamed Alder Lake, we expected to see more of such design philosophies in future products. During Intel's 2022 investor meeting day, the company provided insights into future developments, and a successor to Alder Lake is no different. Codenamed "Raptor Lake," it features a novel Raptor Cove P-core design that is supposed to bring significant IPC uplift from the previous generation of processors. Using Intel 7 processor node, Raptor Lake brings a similar ecosystem of features to Alder Lake, however, with improved performance across the board.

Perhaps one of the most exciting things to note about Raptor Lake is the advancement in core count, specifically the increase in E-cores. Instead of eight P-cores and eight E-cores like Alder Lake, the Raptor Lake design will retain eight P-cores and double the E-core count to 16. It was a weird decision on Intel's end; however, it surely isn't anything terrible. The total number of cores now jumps to 24, and the total number of threads reaches 32. Additionally, Raptor Lake will bring some additional overclocking improvement features and retain socket compatibility with Alder Lake motherboards. That means that, at worst, you would need to perform a BIOS update to get your previous system ready for new hardware. We assume that Intel has been working with software vendors and its engineering team to optimize core utilization for this next-generation processor, even though they have more E-cores present. Below, we can see Intel's demonstration of Raptor Lake running Blender and Adobe Premiere and the CPU core utilization.

Razer announced their intro into the monitor market with the Raptor. The Raptor is a 27" diagonal monitor sporting an IPS panel with a 2560 x 1440 resolution. That many pixels tick along at a rate of 144 Hz and 1 ms response time - which is made fluid and jitter-free with recourse to AMD's FreeSync. Additionally, the panel sports the lowest available HDR certification in the form of HDR 400, with brightness levels of 420 nits.

Razer is quoting a 95% coverage of the DCI-P3 color gamut on the "edge-to-edge" monitor. The Raptor also features support for Razer's Chroma and a RGB LED on the base of the aluminium stand, which incorporates a built-in CNC cable management solution running through the back. The Razer Raptor can now be pre-purchased for $699.

Razer a dominant player in the PC peripherals market is looking to make their mark when it comes to monitors with their all-new Razer Raptor gaming monitor. Its a 27-inch display featuring an IPS panel with a resolution of 2560x1440. It comes with support for FreeSync and has a refresh rate of 144 Hz. Response times are listed as 7 ms typical and 4 ms with Overdrive. The contrast ratio is 1000:1 and the screen has a max brightness of 420 nits. It also offers 95% of the P3-D65 color gamut, and yes it has support for HDR. Connectivity consists of 1x HDMI 2.0, 1x DisplayPort 1.4, 1x USB Type-C with power delivery and 2x USB 3.0.

The design features a wide stand that offers excellent stability while also providing channels for cable routing giving the system a clean and unique appearance especially with those bright green cables. As expected of Razer the Raptor monitor also supports Chrome-powered lights in the base which will sync with the rest of Razer's Chrome gear including, mice, keyboards and even laptops and speakers. In regards to availability, no date has been set just yet; however, Razer said it would be made available later this year with an MSRP of $699.99.

Corsair, a worldwide leader in high-perform- ance PC gaming hardware and PC components, today unveiled the Raptor K40 RGB LED backlit gaming keyboard and Raptor M45 optical gaming mouse. The Raptor K40 keyboard brings the extreme lighting customization of 16.8 million colors priced for a wider range of gamers. The Raptor M45, a precision enhanced successor of the award-winning Raptor M40, features a new 5000 DPI sensor, the highest resolution optical technology available. The new products are on display at Corsair's press suite at the Venetian at CES 2014 in Las Vegas from January 7-10.

Jason Christian, product manager for PC gaming at Corsair, said, "The keyboard and mouse can make the difference between winning and losing a game. That's why Corsair's Raptor series of gaming products are designed from the ground up to deliver pure performance with no unnecessary frills. Every feature, component, and material is carefully selected and engineered to provide a best-in- class gaming experience."

Corsair, a worldwide designer of high-performance PC gaming hardware, today announced the addition of four gaming keyboards and two gaming mice to the company's Vengeance and Raptor Gaming lines.

Vengeance K70 Gaming Keyboards - Now with Cherry MX Brown or Cherry MX Blue Key Switches. In March, Corsair released the Vengeance K70 fully mechanical gaming keyboard with Cherry MX Red key switches designed for gamers who prefer a hair trigger key response. To meet the demand of users who prefer a different key feel, Corsair has expanded the K70 line to include two new versions equipped with Cherry MX Blue and Cherry MX Brown key switches. Both switch types require slightly more finger pressure to trigger and provide a more distinct tactile feel, with the Cherry MX Brown switches providing a less audible click.
Both of the new Vengeance K70 keyboards versions are housed in a rugged, brushed, gun-metal anodized aluminum chassis and have individually programmable blue backlighting for each key. Like all Vengeance K70 keyboards, the new models feature dedicated media keys as well as a 100% anti-ghosted matrix, full key rollover and a 1000Hz reporting rate for fast, accurate input for gaming.

Corsair today announced that professional eSports champions Team SoloMid have selected Corsair's Vengeance gaming keyboards, mice, and mouse mats as their gear of choice for League of Legends competition. The team will also exclusively use Corsair PC cases, power supplies, and cooling products in their training center PCs.

Team SoloMid is one of the top-ranked teams in League of Legends, the world's most played video game with over 12 million active players per day. Team SoloMid captain Andy 'Reginald' Dinh said, "We train constantly and leave our PCs running and ready to go, so stability and speed are really important to us. We've been using Corsair hardware in our Origin gaming PCs since last season and performance has been absolutely flawless." The experience led to a partnership with Corsair and an endorsement of Corsair's cases, power supplies, and cooling products.

NVIDIA has been awarded a contract worth up to $20 million from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to research embedded processor technologies that could lead to dramatic improvements in the ability of autonomous vehicles to collect and process data from on-board sensors.

DARPA is the U.S. Defense Department's research and development arm. The five-year contract, awarded under DARPA's Power Efficiency Revolution For Embedded Computing Technologies (PERFECT) program, will fund research for processors that are 75-times more energy efficient than current embedded solutions. The goal is to enable surveillance and computer vision systems in ground and airborne vehicles to collect and analyze vastly more data than can be processed today in real time.

Corsair, a worldwide designer and supplier of high-performance components to the PC gaming hardware market, today announced the acquisition of certain assets of Raptor Gaming, a maker of high-performance PC gaming peripherals headquartered in Heinsberg, Germany. Established in 2004, Raptor Gaming has a strong retail presence in Germany, the largest market for video gaming in Europe, with products widely available in major chains including Media Markt, Saturn, Real, Kaufland, and Conrad.

As part of this transaction, Corsair receives Raptor Gaming's full product portfolio of keyboards, mice, headsets, and accessories, which will form a new series of gaming products alongside Corsair's existing award-winning line of Vengeance PC gaming products. Raptor Gaming executives CEO Dirk Schunk and COO Heinz-Dieter Ludwig will remain engaged with Corsair to facilitate a smooth transition.

Century Japan released a new drive dock (model: CMRK-S4) for PCs with vacant 5.25-inch drive bays, which provides four 2.5-inch SATA hot-swap drive bays, supporting drives as thick as 12.5 mm (such as WD VelociRaptor without its heatsink, or Seagate Cheetah. The four bays have lockable caddies. Since this is a passive dock, the SATA connections are relayed to the back. The four bays are cooled by a 40 mm exhaust fan on the back. The fan spins at speeds of around 4,000 RPM, with noise output around 25 dBA. Measuring 145.7 x 149.3 x 41.6 mm (WxDxH), the dock weighs 500 g, owing to its mostly metallic built. Slated for early August, it is expected to be priced at 3,980 JPY (US $50).

Axigon, a Palit subsidiary for the Chinese market, launched a new factory-overclocked GeForce GTX 670 graphics card model, the GTX 670 Raptor Edition. Its design involves a reuse of the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 reference design board, which supports higher out of the box clock speeds thanks to its stronger cooler and VRM. The card even comes with clock speeds that match those of the GTX 680 (1006/1058/6008 MHz), which leaves only its CUDA core count of 1344 as a difference from the GTX 680. Selling now, the Axigon GeForce GTX 670 Raptor Edition is priced at 2,999 RMB (US $473), in China.

German peripheral maker Raptor Gaming Technology has this week announced its latest creation, a flagship gaming mouse called the 'M4' which features an ergonomic, right-handed design, an adjustable weight system, and a 6000 dpi laser sensor (users can adjust the resolution from 400 dpi to 6000 dpi, depending on their needs).

Raptor's new gaming mouse also has a Soft-Touch surface, six buttons, on-board memory to storing game profiles, a 2.5 meter cable, a gold-plated USB connector (500/1000 Hz polling rates are supported), and comes bundled with a wrist rest, the Raptor Mousebag XL, a weight bag with 16 weights (each weight is about 2 grams), and two sets of mouse sliders. This whole package is set to become available very soon (should be a matter of days) and will cost 79.90 Euro.

German gaming peripherals manufacturer and gamer community Raptor Gaming unveiled its new P9 professional-grade, extra-wide mouse pad. With an area of 390 x 290 mm and an irregular shape, the P9 is 3 mm thick, and uses a fine textured-surface with silver-metallic plastic coating, for control-intensive mouse movements. The bottom side is coated with natural rubber to add grip to the surface below. Slated for shipping in July, the Raptor Gaming P9 is priced at €29.90.

Raptor Gaming rolled out the successor to its LH1 value gaming headset, the LH2. Apart from the base model, the company also rolled out a "Ladies Edition" that comes in soft pink and white. The headsets feature noise-cancellation for the microphones, and have volume controls on the cable. The ear cups can be folded, to help packing. The two headsets will be released to market by the end of June, priced at 29.90 EUR.

WD announced today that it is now shipping WD VelociRaptor 450 GB and 600 GB hard drives, the next generation of its 10,000 RPM SATA family of hard drives. The new WD VelociRaptor hard drive is designed for blade servers, high-performance PCs, Mac computers, professional workstations, as well as 1U and 2U rack servers that require a balance of high performance and capacity. As the only 10,000 RPM SATA hard drive on the market today, and a favorite amongst enthusiast and enterprise groups, the WD VelociRaptor hard drive now comes packed with twice the capacity and up to 15% performance increase over the previous generation.

The most popular hard drive for high-performance enthusiasts who demand the ultimate SATA drive, the WD VelociRaptor hard drive is built with enterprise-class mechanics that provide 24x7 durability under high-performance demands and packs up to 600 GB of capacity into a 2.5-inch enterprise form factor. The WD VelociRaptor drive is also available in the IcePack enclosure, a 3.5-inch mounting frame with a built-in heat sink - a factory customization that fits the drive into a standard 3.5-inch system bay and keeps this powerful drive extra cool when installed in a high-performance desktop chassis and 3.5-inch HDD form factor enterprise chassis.

First surfaced earlier this year, Western Digital (WD) is just about ready with its newest line of VelociRaptor high-performance hard drives. The second generation of VelociRaptor will take a shot at much expensive solid state drives on two fronts: transfer speeds and access times, at highly competitive price-per-gigabyte. With transfer speeds, the new VelociRaptor drives offer sustained read speeds of 145 MB/s, while having access times of 3 ms, as close as it gets to flash storage. These are conventional (Winchester) hard drives with spindle-speeds of 10,000 rpm, double the areal density as its previous generation and having an onboard cache of 32 MB, with the standard SATA 6 Gb/s interface.

The actual drives come in thick 2.5" form-factor, with a 3.5" bay mounting frame that also serves as a heatsink since it has aluminum ridges. The drives have a noise-output of up to 37 dBA. WD rates its MTBF at 1.4 million hours, and backs it with a five-year company warranty. The drives come in capacities of 150 GB, 300 GB, 450 GB, and 600 GB with prices expected to be highly competitive with SSDs in terms of price-per-gigabyte, given its performance level.