We’ve been getting a lot of Intel leaks lately, suggesting team blue is getting ready to make some major moves. Rumors have been flying around about its planned refresh of the Raptor Lake CPU range, and the latest we’re privy to is the suggestion that the product launches associated with this refresh, including that of the Intel Core i7 14700K, could be arriving in October 2023.
Hardware leaker Enthusiastic Citizen, shared some information to Bilibi that claims the “K series will be in 2023 WW42,” by which they mean the week beginning October 17, and “non-K will be in 2024 WW1,” i.e., the first week in January. They speculate that the rumored CPU configuration of eight performance and 12 efficiency cores refers to the Intel Core i7 14700K, corroborating last week’s speculation that Intel Core i7 14700K specs leak could blow AMD’s high end CPUs away.
Enthusiastic Citizen also alleges that, “There is a high probability that [Zen 5] this year is fake news.” Zen 5 is a codename for AMD’s next gen CPU microarchitecture, and has been confirmed by its inclusion in various team red roadmaps. It’s expected to be included in Ryzen 8000 processors, bringing a big performance uplift to AMD’s flagship desktop CPU range. If this leak is correct, Zen 5 is still some way away.
Although we’re still a good few months away from the Raptor Lake refresh, if these leaks are correct, we can’t wait to get our hands on these new processors to see how they fare in our guide to the best gaming CPU. Of course, as with any leaks, this info could be completely wrong, so make sure you wait for the official word from Intel before you get too excited.