Intel 13th Gen Raptor Lake Box Leaks And There’s A Small Wafer Inside
That image comes courtesy of HXL (@9550pro on Twitter), who says that they acquired it from a private WeChat. The box appears to be significantly smaller than current packaging, and the plastic faux wafer inside is now silver-colored rather than gold. It also stands up straight instead of being tilted the way it was in the 12th-gen boxes.
It's possible (or even likely) that Intel management decided the extra pizzazz wasn't worth the trouble. Not many people buy their CPUs off a literal shelf anymore; most DIY purchases are made via online shops based on the specifications and capabilities of the CPU, which is to say that the packaging isn't likely to catch anyone's eye and prompt an impulse buy.
This cute faux gold wafer contains the 12th-gen CPU inside.
Despite being an admitted "stopgap" due to the delay of Meteor Lake, Raptor Lake still appears to be a significant step up over Alder Lake. Most CPUs across the range are getting an additional four-to-eight E-cores, and the L2 cache on both the E-core clusters and the P-cores has been bumped up significantly. Raptor Lake is also expected to clock much higher than Alder Lake, with Intel already having promised a model that does 6 GHz out of the box.
Intel is expected to debut its next-generation CPUs at its Innovation event on the 27th (along with, hopefully, its high-end Arc Alchemist GPUs.) That's notably the very same day that AMD's already-announced Ryzen 7000 processors become available. Rumors are that Intel's new CPUs will become available next month, so stay tuned for the battle of the century—or at least, of 2023.
