Gigabyte Seemingly Confirms Intel's 14th Gen CPUs Will Be Raptor Lake Refresh

If Gigabyte’s verbiage is legit, we are definitely looking at a Raptor Lake refresh of some kind featuring re-branded and/or enhanced Raptor Lake chips that will slot into current LGA 1700 socket motherboards. Current rumors estimate that Meteor Lake will use a brand-new socket known as LGA 1851, automatically removing compatibility of Meteor Lake CPUs from current generation LGA 1700 motherboards. What’s interesting about this, is that Meteor Lake is rumored to be launching later this year, meaning any new Raptor Lake chips coming out soon will also co-exist with Intel Meteor Lake products coming in just a few months' time.
Obviously, this would be a bit bizarre since Intel would effectively have two “current” motherboard platforms operating in the same price bracket. However, rumors aren’t always accurate, and Intel is obviously competent enough not to build two different product stacks that will compete with each other in the same market. What we are probably looking at with Raptor Lake refresh is either one of the following scenarios. One is that Meteor Lake won’t be released to the desktop market anytime soon, giving way to a Raptor Lake refresh with higher clock speeds and/or better power efficiency. Or second, Intel will in fact allow Meteor Lake and Raptor Lake refresh to co-exist together, however, both architectures will be targeted at different price points in the desktop market.

The latter wouldn’t be that surprising to see; Intel has done this before where it will use previous-generation hardware to fill out the entry-level stack of future-generation products. Ironically, Intel is doing this quietly right now with its 13th Gen Raptor Lake product. Most of the high-end and mid-range product stack is based on Intel’s enhanced Raptor Lake architecture, while the bottom stack is filled out with re-branded Alder Lake chips (albeit with higher clock speeds or other tweaks).

Sadly, we don’t know any potential specifications of these supposed Raptor Lake refreshed CPUs, but we know a lot about Meteor Lake so be sure to check out our previous coverage here. Meteor Lake represents one of the biggest jumps in architectural design for Intel, featuring a new EUV process node and an entirely new design philosophy surrounding “tiles” — a new terminology Intel is using to build out a single chip with multiple dies.