Intel has already released refresh models over the years. It now plans to do the same with its Raptor Lake microarchitecture by the third quarter of 2023, where Intel Raptor Lake Refresh SKUs would appear, according to the company’s leaked roadmap. It is unclear whether these products will continue to be branded as 13th Gen or 14th Gen, as was the case with the 9th Gen Coffee Lake refresh that replaced Coffee Lake (8th Gen).
Leaked Roadmap with Intel Raptor Lake Refresh
Despite this leak, there is still some doubt about Raptor Lake refresh, but it is very likely that they are going through a change of manufacturing node which would give Intel the ability to integrate more cores without driving up power consumption. This could upgrade Intel’s entire product line without having to develop a new microarchitecture from scratch.
Another interesting element of this leaked roadmap is that there are also products aimed at workstations with a TDP of 250W. This is the so-called Sapphire Rapids 64L, which could be a scaled-down version of the Sapphire Rapids version, perhaps with a new socket.
The “64L” part of the codename could be a reference to the number of PCIe Gen 5 lanes, which could be as many as 64 lanes, which is less than the 112 lanes available for the Sapphire Rapids version. There are also no details on whether these processors will go by the Intel Core X or Intel Xeon designation, so we’ll have to wait and see…
Does this all have anything to do with the issues we’ve been hearing about for the Intel Node 4? We will see if this refresh keeps Intel at the top of the benchmarks or if AMD can take the lead again with its future releases, especially with the 3D V-Cache models.