What's New with 14th Gen and Raptor Lake Refresh

At the heart of the 14th Gen Core processors being launched this week, is the new "Raptor Lake Refresh" monolithic processor silicon. This is physically the same silicon as the current "Raptor Lake" silicon powering the 13th Gen Core series. The new 14th Gen Core series is built on a generational increase in CPU core clock speeds for both the P-cores and E-cores, the introduction of the new Intel Application Optimization technology that we'll talk a bit more about later; and bolstering the Core i7 SKUs with four additional E-cores, to improve its multi-threaded performance against segment rivals such as the Ryzen 9 7900X3D.


As you'll see in the next page, all three SKUs receive a 100-200 MHz increase in their maximum boost frequencies. The i9-14900K/KF in particular, reintroduces the Thermal Velocity Boost feature, which rewards good CPU cooling with the highest boost frequencies of 6.00 GHz. In addition to these CPU clock speed bumps, Intel says that it has tweaked the memory controllers to support even higher DDR5 memory speeds, particularly when using 12 GB and 24 GB DIMMs. Although the company did not introduce a new chipset with these processors, nearly every motherboard vendor for the LGA1700 platform has introduced new motherboard models based on the 700-series chipset, which come with out of the box support for these processors, and a few new platform features such as Wi-Fi 7. All existing 700-series and 600-series chipset motherboards support these processors, some require UEFI firmware updates provided by motherboard vendors.


"Intel Application Optimization" or just "APO" is an extension of Intel's Dynamic Tuning Technology (DTT) that's game-specific. The feature is available on select 14th Gen Core processor models, such as the i9-14900K/KF, and provides a means for Dynamic Tuning Technology to improve workload allocation to the various hardware resources, such as the P-cores, and back them with the highest possible frequencies. Intel claims that the feature can result in frame-rate improvements that can be as high as 13% in "Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege," or even up to 16% in "Metro Exodus."

Intel application Optimization works by optimizing the machine's thread scheduling and manages application resource allocation in real-time.

APO is supported in just two games at this time. Going forward, Intel promises to test a lot of games and add APO profiles where gains can be found. We asked Intel whether profiles can be created or customized by the user, and whether Linux is supported. The answer was "not at this time" to both questions.


With the latest version of Intel Extreme Tuning Utility (XTU), Intel is introducing an exclusive feature for 14th Gen Unlocked K processors, called AI Assist. At launch, this feature is exclusive to the i9-14900K/KF, but Intel is working to extend it to other 14th Gen Core processor models. Adding support for each new processor model entails rigorous testing and validation, which is why the feature isn't globally available for all 12th-thru-14th Gen processors. AI assist is an AI-based automated performance tuning feature that uses a pre-trained AI DNN to understand your machine, and figure out the best possible settings.