Intel's 13th Gen Core "Raptor Lake" is shaping up to be another leadership desktop processor lineup, with an engineering sample clocking significant increases in gaming minimum framerates over the preceding 12th Gen Core i9-12900K "Alder Lake." Extreme Player, a tech-blogger on Chinese video streaming site Bilibili, posted a comprehensive gaming performance review of an i9-13900K engineering sample covering eight games across three resolutions, comparing it with a retail i9-12900KF. The games include CS:GO, Final Fantasy IX: Endwalker, PUBG, Forza Horizon 5, Far Cry 6, Red Dead Redemption 2, Horizon Zero Dawn, and the synthetic benchmark 3DMark. Both processors were tested with a GeForce RTX 3090 Ti graphics card, 32 GB of DDR5-6400 memory, and a 1.5 kW power supply.

The i9-13900K ES is shown posting performance leads ranging wildly between 1% to 2% in the graphics tests of 3DMark, but an incredible 36% to 38% gain in the CPU-intensive tests of the suite. This is explained not just by increased per-core performance of both the P-cores and E-cores, but also the addition of 8 more E-cores. Although the same "Gracemont" E-cores are used in "Raptor Lake," the L2 cache size per E-core cluster has been doubled in size. Horizon Zero Dawn sees -0.7% to 10.98% increase in frame rates. There are some anomalous 70% frame-rate increases in RDR2, discounting which, we still see a 2-9% increase. FC6 posts modest 2.4% increases. Forza Horizon 5, PUBG, Monster Hunter Rise, and FF IX, each report significant increases in minimum framerates, well above 20%.

MSI announced BIOS support and updates on our motherboards for the upcoming series of next-gen Intel CPUs. As a world-leading motherboard brand, MSI is the commitment to keep updating and improving to deliver the best optimizing performance for gamers. BIOS updates are always great news and improvements for users. With MSI M-Flash or Flash BIOS button, allows users to update the BIOS with ease. MSI 600-Series motherboards will receive support for the next generation of Intel's Processors. BIOS updates will be available on its respective motherboard support pages, which can be accessed via the MSI Support website.

In what could be evidence of Intel pulling off a major generational IPC increase, Chinese PC enthusiast Extreme Player, with access to a Core i9-13900K engineering sample (ES), tested the chip on a handful synthetic tests, with the processor yielding significant performance gains over its predecessor, the i9-12900K. The most striking performance number has to be the CPU-Z Bench single-core test, which shows an impressive 9.41 percent increase over that of the i9-12900K.

The i9-13900K packs "Raptor Cove" performance cores, which Intel claims come with a generational IPC increase over the "Golden Cove" P-cores. The 9.4% performance increase could be a result of not just increased IPC, but also higher clock speeds (set at 5.50 GHz, the assumed maximum boost frequency of the retail processor). The multi-threaded CPU-Z Bench sees an incredible 46.34% performance increase. This stems from not just increased performance on the eight P-cores, but also the doubling in E-cores from 8 to 16. The E-core clusters also see a doubling in L2 cache sizes. The story repeats with Cinebench R23, with an incredible 13.53% single-thread performance increase, and a 40.25% multi-threaded performance increase.

Intel is readying its next-generation NUC Extreme desktop, codenamed "Raptor Canyon," based on the company's 13th Gen Core "Raptor Lake" processors. Leaked roadmap slides point to the "Raptor Canyon" kit being significantly larger than its predecessor, "Dragon Canyon," with a volume of 13.9 liters, as opposed to 8 liters. This could indicate that "Raptor Canyon" is being designed as a workstation or performance gaming machine, and could pack the company's in-house Arc "Alchemist" discrete GPUs going all the way up to the A770. The company is also developing professional variants of Arc with certifications of content creator software, so the possibility of pro-vis GPUs is also there. At 13.9 L volume, "Raptor Canyon" could be as big as some Micro-ATX cube cases.

The slide mentions that "Raptor Canyon" will come with "next-gen" (read: 13th Gen Core "Raptor Lake") processors across all brand extensions, including Core i9, and also pack overclocking capabilities, as they feature "K" SKUs. The NUC will feature a PCI-Express 5.0 x16 slot. Launching alongside "Raptor Canyon" is the "Shrike Bay" Compute Element. For the past several generations of NUC Extreme, Intel has been adopting a variation of the ISA Backplane for PCIe, where the processor, chipset, and memory sit on an add-on card (now referred to as the "Compute Element." The "Shrike Bay" Compute Elements will come with a variety of 13th Gen Core processor options. Intel plans a Q4-2022 launch for "Raptor Canyon" and "Shrike Bay."

New week, new leak, as an engineer sample of Intel's upcoming Raptor Lake based Core i9-13900K has appeared in the infamous Geekbench database. It seems to be one of the ES samples that has been making the rounds over the past few weeks, but this is the first time we get an indication of what the performance might be like. There are no real surprises in terms of the specifications, we're looking at a base clock of 3 GHz, with a boost clock of 5.5 GHz, which has already been reported for these chips. The 24-core, 32-thread CPU was paired with 32 GB of 6400 MHz DDR5 memory and an ASUS ROG Maximus Z690 Extreme motherboard. Unfortunately the test results are reported as invalid, due to "an issue with the timers" on the system.

That said, we can still compare the results with a similar system using a Core i9-12900K on an ASUS ROG Strix Z690-F Gaming board, that's also paired up with 32 GB of 6400 MHz DDR5 memory. The older Alder Lake system is actually somewhat faster in the single core tests where it scores 2,142 points versus 2133 points for the Raptor Lake based system, despite having a maximum frequency of 5.1 GHz. The Raptor Lake system is faster in the multi-core test at 23,701 vs. 21312 points. However, it's no point doing any kind of analysis here, as the Raptor Lake results are all over the place, with it beating the Alder Lake CPU by a significant amount in some tests and losing against it in others, where it shouldn't be falling behind, simply based on the higher clock speed and additional power efficient cores. At least this shows that Raptor Lake is running largely as intended on current 600-series motherboards, so for those considering upgrading to the 13th gen of Intel CPUs, there shouldn't be any big hurdles to overcome.

At the end of last month, ASRock revealed its UEFI/BIOS updates for its 600-series motherboards for the next generation of CPUs from Intel and now ASUS has announced that it will offer updates for its Z690 motherboards. We're not sure why ASUS has limited itself to only Z690, but we'd expect updates for all of its 600-series chipset motherboards to arrive in due time. ASUS has been just as short on details as ASRock, although in the case of ASUS, all the Z690 boards will start on the same UEFI version—160x—when it comes to Raptor Lake support.

ASUS will offer updates for its ROG, ROG Strix, ProArt, Prime and TUF Gaming boards at this first stage. ASUS recommends using the BIOS Flashback functionality on the motherboards, or its EZ Flash 3 program in Windows. To get the latest UEFI update for your motherboard, you need to head over to ASUS' support site and download it manually according to the press release.

Intel's next-generation Core "Meteor Lake" processors will debut the new Xe-LPG graphics architecture for its iGPU. A successor to the Xe-LP architecture powering iGPUs since 11th Gen Core "Tiger Lake," the Xe-LPG graphics architecture is tailored for small-scale GPU designs such as iGPUs. It sheds much of the bulk that the Xe-HPG has, which is optimized for discrete GPU designs. A leaked block diagram of "Meteor Lake" describes Xe-LPG as featuring a new "extended gaming mode," new Adaptix power sharing, which is probably a power-management optimization that prioritizes power share to the iGPU; and even more media encode acceleration capabilities.

The Core "Meteor Lake" compute tile will also feature the latest Gaussian Network Accelerator, GNA 3.5, which speeds up AI deep-learning neural net building and training. The chip features a purpose-build VPU (visual processing unit), similar to the ones in mobile SoCs, which improves the device's ability to recognize faces, or even augmented-reality applications. Lastly, with "Meteor Lake," Intel is debuting the new "Crestmont" E-core clusters that introduce an IPC improvement over the "Gracemont" E-cores powering "Alder Lake" and "Raptor Lake."

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.

ASRock has released UEFI/BIOS updates for at least 47 of its 600-series chipset based motherboards, which will add support for the next generation of CPUs from Intel. The new CPUs are of course Intel's 13th gen Core CPU's, codenamed Raptor Lake, even though ASRock doesn't specifically mention this anywhere in the text on its portal site. We're expecting to see similar announcements from the other motherboard makers in due time. ASRock doesn't go into any kind of details as to which CPUs are supported and the company doesn't appear to have updated its CPU support lists yet, which is a shame, but not entirely unexpected, since the Raptor Lake CPUs aren't expected to launch until later this year.

However, ASRock has implemented what the company calls Auto Driver Installer or ADI in this UEFI/BIOS update for the boards and this is likely to be an unpopular addition, as it means drivers will be automatically be downloaded and installed if the system is connected to the internet. Presumably there will be an option to disable this feature, but it appears to be enabled by default, which has proven to be an unpopular option when other companies have done it. Admittedly it could be a handy feature during a new build or OS reinstall, but it's also a potential attack vector for malware.

Intel is set to launch its 13th generation Raptor Lake processor lineup for desktop users sometime in September or October. However, the market is already supplied with early-stage engineering samples of Raptor Lake-S SKUs used for testing and software optimization. Today, we have the first listing of the upcoming flagship Intel Core i9-13900K processor with eight P-cores and 16 E-Cores on the CPU. The anonymous seller claims that the CPU is working with ASUS Z690 ROG Apex motherboards, boots up, and can be overclocked, which means that this is one of the newer engineering sample revisions. The sample was listed for 2850 Chinese Yuan, translating to about 426 USD. This price should be close to the final MSRP, and the CPU is already sold.

What is interesting is the appearance of this CPU on the black market way ahead of the launch. We can expect to see more details emerge as we get closer to the launch time later this year.

Just hours ago a CPU-Z screenshot of an Intel Raptor Lake ES CPU appeared and the same CPU now appears to have been put through a full battery of benchmark tests, courtesy of Expreview. This upcoming 13th gen Core CPU from Intel is limited to a maximum clock speed of 3.8 GHz and as such, was tested against a Core i9-12900K that was clocked at the same speed, for a fair comparison. Both CPUs were used with an unknown Z690 motherboard, 32 GB of DDR5 5200 MHz memory with unknown timings and a GeForce RTX 3090 Founders Edition graphics card. According to Expreview, the 13th gen CPU is on average around 20 percent faster than the 12th gen CPU, although the extra eight E-Cores might have something to do with that in certain benchmarks.

In Sisoft Sandra 2021 the ES sample is as much as 51.5 percent faster in the double precision floating point test, which is the extreme outlier, but it's ahead by around 15-25 percent in most of the other tests. In several other tests, it's ahead by anything from as little as less than three percent to as much as 25 percent, with more multithreaded types of benchmarks seeing the largest gains, as expected. However, in some of the single threaded tests, Alder Lake is edging out Raptor Lake by 10 percent or more, for example in Pov-Ray and Cinebench. Most of the game tests favour Intel's 12th gen over the 13th gen ES sample, although it's possible that the limited clock speeds are holding back the Raptor Lake CPU. The two are either neck in neck or Alder Lake being ahead with anything from a couple of percent to almost nine percent. Keep in mind that it's still early days and everything from UEFI support to drivers will be improved before Raptor Lake launches later this year. There's also the limited clock speed which is likely to play a significant role in the final performance as well, but this does at least provide a first taste of what's to come. Head over to Expreview for their full set of benchmarks.

An engineering sample of a 13th Intel Core "Raptor Lake" Core i9 processor hit the web, courtesy of wxnod on Twitter, which confirms its 8P+16E core-configuration in a CPU-Z screenshot. Based on the same LGA1700 package as "Alder Lake," and backwards compatible with Intel 600-series chipset motherboards, besides new 700-series ones, "Raptor Lake" combines eight "Raptor Cove" performance cores (P-cores), with sixteen "Gracemont" efficiency cores (E-cores).

"Raptor Cove" features a generational IPC increase over the "Golden Cove" P-cores powering "Alder Lake," while the "Gracemont" E-cores, although identical to those on "Alder Lake," are expected to benefit from the doubling in L2 cache per cluster, from 2 MB to 4 MB. The ISA as detected by CPU-Z appears to be identical to that of "Alder Lake." The processor is a monolithic silicon chip built on the Intel 7 (10 nm Enhanced SuperFin) silicon fabrication process.

Although Intel's 13th generation of Core CPUs—codenamed Raptor Lake—aren't expected to launch until sometime in September or October this year, details of some of ASRock's motherboards for the new CPUs have leaked. ASRock is preparing to launch at least nine Z790 and three H770 motherboards, of which at least four will have support for DDR4 memory, according to VideoCardz. The list is missing a flagship Aqua model, but contains Taichi, Pro RS, Phantom Gaming Lightning and Riptide models, as well as a Steel Legend H770 boards and a couple of -C models, which are likely budget boards, despite being based on the Z790 chipset.

There will be a microATX Phantom Gaming Lighting board with DDR4 and a Phantom Gaming Riptide model with DDR5 support. So far no other features have been reported and from our understanding, the Z790 won't differ hugely from the Z690 chipset. The extra PCIe lanes from the 13th gen Core CPUs are expected to support PCIe 5.0 this time around, which will allow for faster NVMe based M.2 drives to be used. Intel is not planning on integrating Thunderbolt 4 support in these CPUs based on available information.

Intel is preparing to launch its 13th generation of desktop processors codenamed Raptor Lake. Succeeding Alder Lake, the 13th gen design will implement up to eight P-cores with 16 E-cores manufactured on Intel's improved 7+ technology node. Today, we got a performance preview from SiSoftware that has collected SiSoftware Sandra database scores of Intel Core i9-13900 Raptor Lake-S processor. They present an overview of a few benchmarks. Firstly, the SoC features 36 MB of unified L3 cache versus 30 MB in Alder Lake. With DDR5 memory running up to 5600 MT/s and PCIe 5.0, the SoC features the latest IO and memory standards. The big P-cores now lack AVX-512 and feature 2 MB of L2 cache per core. We see 4 MB of L2 cache for a cluster of small E-cores. An exciting addition to E-cores is the AVX/AVX2 support, which is a first for Atom cores.

Regarding testing, the author has collected a few tests that seemed appropriate to compare to the equivalent Alder Lake model. Starting with ALU/FPU tests that benchmark basic arithmetic tasks, Raptor Lake delivered 33% to 50% improvement over Alder Lake. The Raptor Lake design achieved this with 3.7 GHz P-Core and 2.76 GHz E-Core frequency. In vectorized and SIMD tests, the 13th gen design showed only 5% to 8% improvement over the previous generation. For more benchmarks and accurate results, we have to wait for TechPowerUp's test, which will be coming on the release day.

Intel's next-generation desktop processor socket will be the LGA1851. Leaked documents point to the next-generation socket being of identical dimensions to the current LGA1700, despite the higher pin-count, which could indicate cooler compatibility between the two sockets, much in the same way as the LGA1200 retained cooler-compatibility with prior Intel sockets tracing all the way back to the LGA1156. The current LGA1700 will service only two generations of Intel Core, the 12th Generation "Alder Lake," and the next-gen "Raptor Lake" due for later this year. "Raptor Lake" will be Intel's last desktop processor built on a monolithic silicon, as the company transitions to multi-chip modules.

Intel Socket LGA1851 will debut with the 14th Gen Core "Meteor Lake" processors due for late-2023 or 2024; and will hold out until the 15th Gen "Arrow Lake." Since "Meteor Lake" is a 3D-stacked MCM with a base tile stacked below logic tiles; the company is making adjustments to the IHS thickness to end up with an identical package thickness to the LGA1700, which would be key to cooler-compatibility, besides the socket's physical dimensions. Intel probably added pin-count to the LGA1851 by eating into the "courtyard" (the central gap in the land-grid), because the company states that the pin-pitch hasn't changed from LGA1700.

DDR5 memory pricing has been declining faster than expected, with average pricing for modules based on the latest standard dropping by as much as 20% in a month's time. As reported by ComputerBase, pricing for 1 GB of DDR5 has fallen from around €15 by the end of 2021 down to around €5/GB at time of writing. At current pricing, an entry-level, 32 GB DDR5 kit DDR5-4800 memory (JEDEC standard) has fallen from a high of €430 down to a much more palatable €154.

The price decline comes as good news for anyone aiming to upgrade their PC in wake of AMD's Socket AM5 launch for its Zen 4 architecture, which the company has already confirmed will only support the latest RAM standard. AMD itself must be riding the sea of relief, as high DDR5 pricing could significantly shape the company's next-gen platform's value compared to arch-rival Intel, which already offers DDR4 and DDR5 support with its Alder Lake chips. Expectations place the same memory support for the next-gen Raptor Lake platform. Prices for DDR4 memory seem to have hit a bottom, however, as pricing hasn't significantly moved in around six months. Like with all new technologies, expect the price difference to eventually change in favor of DDR5 memory, as manufacturers adjust their outputs towards adoption.

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.

Back in January, we heard the first reports of Intel significantly increasing the on-die cache sizes on its 13th Gen Core "Raptor Lake-S" desktop processor, with the sum total of L2 and L3 caches on the silicon being 68 MB. A CPU-Z screenshot from the same source as the January story, confirmed the cache sizes. The "Raptor Lake-S" die in its full configuration features eight "Raptor Cove" performance cores (P-cores), and sixteen "Gracemont" efficiency cores (E-cores), making it a 24-core/32-thread chip.

Each "Raptor Cove" P-core features 2 MB of dedicated L2 cache even in its client variant, as previously reported, which is an increase from the 1.25 MB L2 cache of the "Golden Cove" P-cores on "Alder Lake-S." The sixteen "Gracemont" E-cores are spread across four E-core clusters, just like the eight E-cores of "Alder Lake-S" are spread across two such clusters. The four cores in each cluster share an L2 cache. Intel has doubled the size of this L2 cache from 2 MB on "Alder Lake" chips, up to 4 MB. The shared L3 cache on the silicon has increased in size to 36 MB. Eight P-cores with 2 MB each, and four E-core clusters with 4 MB, each, total 32 MB of L2 cache. Add this to 36 MB of L3 cache, and you get 68 MB of L2+L3 cache. Intel is expected to debut "Raptor Lake" in the second half of 2022 alongside the 700-series chipset, and backwards compatibility with 600-series chipset. It could go down as Intel's last client processor built on a monolithic silicon.

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.

Although Intel's upcoming 13th generation of desktop CPUs that goes under the code name of Raptor Lake, are expected to retain support for DDR4 memory, it has come to our attention that Intel will make a big push towards DDR5 when the platform launches later this year. Intel is apparently already asking motherboard makers to avoid using DDR4 in combination with the upcoming 700-series chipsets and the only reason for this would be to speed up the transition to DDR5. According to various leaks and rumors we should expect to see support for DDR5 at 5600 MHz for Raptor Lake, which is at least a step in the right direction.

What this doesn't mean, is that Intel has removed support for DDR4 in the CPUs, as it's still very much present and is expected to work fine in 600-series chipset motherboards. As such, there shouldn't be any issues upgrading to a new CPU, at least not after a quick UEFI update. From our understanding, it's partially related to the fact that DDR4 and DDR5 motherboards have quite different UEFI code when it comes to the memory support and in turn it means that the board makers are going to end up spending a lot more time getting their boards working, as is already the case with the 600-series chipsets. We can sort of understand Intel's sentiment here, but we're also expecting to see some motherboards based on the 700-series chipsets with DDR4 support, least not from the likes of ASRock that has always liked to create non-conforming motherboards. However, this also looks like it's the end for DDR4 support from Intel, which wasn't entirely unexpected.

Intel is designing a "Halo" SKU of a future generation of mobile processors with a goal to match Apple's in-house silicon of the time. Slated for tape-out some time in 2023, with mass-production expected in 2024, the 15th Generation Core "Arrow Lake-P Halo" processor is being designed specifically to compete with Apple's "premium 14-inch laptop" (presumably the MacBook Pro) that the company could have around 2024, based on an in-house Apple silicon. This is to essentially tell its notebook partners that they will have an SoC capable of making their devices in the class truly competitive. Apple relies on a highly scaled out Arm-based SoC based on in-house IP blocks, with a software that's closely optimized for it. Intel's effort appears to chase down its performance and efficiency.

The Core "Arrow Lake" microarchitecture succeeds the 14th Gen "Meteor Lake." It is a multi-chip module (MCM) of three distinct dies built on different fabrication nodes, in line with the company's IDM 2.0 strategy. These nodes are Intel 4 (comparable to TSMC N7 or N6), Intel 20A (comparable to TSMC N5), and an "external" 3 nm-class node that's just the TSMC N3. The compute tile, or the die which houses the CPU cores, combines a hybrid CPU setup of 6 P-cores, and 8 E-cores. The performance cores are likely successors of the "Redwood Cove" P-cores powering the "Meteor Lake" compute tiles. Intel appears to be using one kind of E-cores across two generations (eg: Gracemont across Alder Lake and Raptor Lake). If this is any indication, Arrow Lake could continue to use "Crestmont" E-cores. Things get interesting with the Graphics tile.

Intel is allegedly advancing the launch of its 13th Gen Core "Raptor Lake-S" desktop processors to some time in Q3-2022, according to a report by Moore's Law is Dead. It was earlier believed to be a Q4 launch, much like "Alder Lake" was, in 2021. The report predicts the debut of "Raptor Lake" in the desktop segment in Q3-2022 (between July and September), with certain mobile SKUs expected toward the end of the year, in Q4. The Core "Raptor Lake-S" processor is built in the existing Socket LGA1700 package, and is being designed for compatibility with existing Intel 600-series chipset motherboards with a firmware update.

The "Raptor Lake-S" silicon is built on the existing Intel 7 (10 nm Enhanced SuperFin) node, and physically features eight "Raptor Cove" P-cores, along with sixteen "Gracemont" E-cores that are spread across four clusters. The chip has additional cache memory, too. Moore's Law is Dead predicts that the "Raptor Cove" P-core could introduce an IPC uplift in the region of 8 to 15 percent over the "Golden Cove" core, while the chip's overall multi-threaded performance could be anywhere between 30 to 40 percent over "Alder Lake-S," on account of not just increased IPC of the P-cores, but also eight additional E-cores.

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.

Intel's Alder Lake CPUs started the wave of hybrid designs spanning the consumer sector with high-performance P-cores and high-efficiency E-cores combined to make a mixed design work. And it seems like the replacement for it is already in progress, as the next-generation Intel "Raptor Lake" processors are continuing enablement in the Linux kernel. This next-generation Raptor Lake design will arrive towards the end of this year, and the software ecosystem is already preparing for its arrival. According to the report from Phoronix, audio support for Intel Raptor Lake processors has been added to the Linux kernel 5.18.

As the report points out, the enablement work is no different since days of Skylake, where adding new IDs to the driver gets the job done. However, what is interesting is that Raptor Lake is slowly getting the entire software ecosystem support functional. This shows with Linux kernel 5.17, where Raptor Lake-S Gen 12-based graphics card received initial software support. As the software matures, full support for Raptor Lake will come, especially as we enter the later months of 2022, when the next generation is supposed to arrive.

Intel's 600-series motherboards have barely made it into retail and we're now looking at a list of upcoming 700-series motherboards from Biostar that has leaked courtesy of the Eurasian Economic Commission via @harukaze5719 in Twitter. The list of boards suggests that Biostar will only be using the Z790 and B760 chipsets, although it's unclear at this point if there will be an H770 and a H710 chipset, as Intel has skipped those SKUs in the past for second generation CPUs using the same socket.

The boards in question are the Z790 Valkyrie, Z790GTA- SILVER, B760GTQ, B760M-SILVER, B760GTN, B760T-SILVER, B760MX5-E PRO, B760MX-PRO, B760MX-C, B760MX-E, B760MH. We'd hazard a guess that the Z790 Valkyrie will replace the Z690 Valkyrie, but the models with silver in the model name are currently missing from Biostar's 600-series lineup, but there are some 500-series silver models. In addition to the Z790 SKUs, there are also some B660 boards with a BTC suffix that Biostar hasn't announced yet and these would appear to be boards designed for mining, as this is the naming Biostar has used in the past for such boards. Intel's 700-series chipset and Raptor Lake CPUs are expected to launch later this year.