Intel still dominates the world of gaming CPUs, holding firm at two thirds adoption rate according to June’s Steam Hardware Survey. Looking to stay on top, the American tech company is planning to refresh its Raptor Lake lineup later this year, and a leak has revealed the anticipated performance of the Intel Core i9 14900K for the first time.
The Intel 14th gen launch is official and you can find our Intel Core i5-14600K review here.
Although Intel Core i9 14900K is the expected name for Intel’s upcoming high end CPU, it’s not set in stone right now. You might recall the news that the Intel i series is dead, say hello to Intel Ultra: Intel is planning to remove the ‘i’ from its branding going forward. Well, that’s still in the pipeline, according to leaks obtained by YouTuber Moore’s Law Is Dead, but the 14th generation of Intel processors might retain the i for the time being.
Anyway, on to the juicy part: performance. The leaks suggest it won’t be a drastic uptick in output, but sufficient to constitute a new desktop processor generation. We’re talking a 4-8% increase in single threaded performance, and 8-15% in multithreading. Supposedly, the IPC (instructions per cycle/clock) will stay the same.
Now, obviously, this info is all unconfirmed by Intel, so don’t take it as gospel just yet. If these leaks are correct, however, they signify a slightly underwhelming performance leap for gamers. Since single threaded performance is most important for gaming, you’re unlikely to see a huge difference compared to 13th gen processors. Of course, it’ll be a big lift for multi core-intensive work like video editing or rendering, so if you use your rig for stuff besides gaming, you might be onto a winner with the Intel Core i9 14900K.
The Raptor Lake refresh release date is sometime in the second half of 2023, but we don’t have a concrete date just yet. Considering the second half of 2023 is technically now – shocking, I know – we’d imagine Intel will give us more details soon. It’ll be interesting to see where the 14th gen Intel Core processors stack up against the best gaming CPU available right now.