Intel’s 13th-gen then 14th-gen CPUs could launch at a pace that’ll worry AMD

Intel Core i9 Processor Shown Back and Front
(Image credit: Intel)

Intel’s Raptor Lake desktop CPUs could launch in just over six months’ time, and rumor has it that these chips will provide a beefy performance boost. What’s more, next-gen Meteor Lake could arrive hot on the 13th-generation’s heels to put more pressure on AMD’s Ryzen processors.

Moore’s Law is Dead (MLID) has a new video out on YouTube which, among other topics, addresses Raptor Lake and its rumored launch date, as well as the kind of performance boost we can expect from the next-gen CPUs.

The leaker believes we’ll witness the arrival of Raptor Lake processors late in Q3 2022, which presumably means September. Interestingly, this echoes a previous leak on Twitter which also pointed to a third quarter debut for Intel’s 13th-gen chips.

Perhaps even more interesting is the revelation that MLID believes Meteor Lake will land less than a year after Raptor Lake, so that could mean August 2023 (maybe even slightly earlier).

Bear in mind that this is the prediction for Raptor Lake desktop models, with mobile CPUs debuting in laptops in the fourth quarter.

MLID claims that with Raptor Lake, we’re looking at an 8% to 15% single-thread performance uplift compared to Alder Lake, which is a laudable boost, and more optimistic sounding than Intel’s recent (much vaguer) claim of ‘up to’ a double digit boost.

In multi-threaded workloads, we can supposedly expect a bigger 30% to 40% surge in performance.

On the whole, this sounds pretty impressive for what is just a simple refresh of Alder Lake, with no big changes to the formula. We already know that Intel is planning to boost efficiency cores with the flagship Raptor Lake chip, and in fact double them up to 16, but performance cores will stick with a configuration of 8.


Analysis: AMD set to come under serious pressure?

As we’ve recently seen, the rumor mill believes that AMD has stepped up its intentions with the incoming next-gen Zen 4 launch in an effort to get these Ryzen processors out the door in Q3. As we theorized earlier this month, this could be a reaction to the news that Raptor Lake might come in Q3 (which was floated in a previous rumor), and that Team Red may be aiming to steal Intel’s thunder.

However, if it’s true that Raptor Lake is due in September, and Meteor Lake could follow in the summer of 2023 – shifting to 7nm, and providing nearly as good a boost as Raptor Lake, according to MLID, even if the 14th-gen will purportedly focus more on mobile CPUs – then AMD will seriously have its work cut out to respond to that kind of pace of development.

While Ryzen has ruled the desktop CPU roost in recent times, Alder Lake has swung some momentum back Intel’s way since it launched, and it looks like Team Blue really doesn’t want to let up the pressure.

Via VideoCardz

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).