Intel Bartlett Lake-S Gaming CPU May Pack Even More Performance Cores

Bartlett Lake is a real, confirmed CPU family for Intel's LGA 1700 platform. The company confirmed its existence back at CES 2025. However, it's designed by the company's NEX group and aimed at edge compute and networking use, not high-end gaming. That may change according to the latest leaks and rumors, though, which suggest we could see a chip with twelve Raptor Cove P-cores, that ends up being the end of the road for the LGA 1700 platform.

To back up for a second, at CES Intel announced the Core 200 family of processors for edge computing. These parts are for LGA 1700, and primarily consist (so far) of reheated Raptor Lake silicon with more conservative power limits versus the enthusiast DIY segment parts. "Bartlett Lake" supposedly describes this entire series of processors, but those aren't the only chips covered by that name.


The most interesting processor purportedly packaged as part of the Bartlett Lake family is one that comes with twelve Raptor Cove P-cores and zero Gracemont E-cores; a fully homogenous processor like the good ol' days—or like one of AMD's desktop Ryzen chips. Many enthusiasts have been salivating at the thought of such a chip, which would be free from the ring bus performance hit Alder Lake suffered, and also from the "Vmin Shift Instability Issue" that affected Raptor Lake and its Refresh.

However, even if such a chip existed, it would likely be limited to B2B sales and obscrue edge systems—or so we thought. Toppc, an overclocker affiliated with MSI who is definitely in a position to have insider knowledge, pointed to a recent relatively innocuous AIDA64 update with an interesting statement.


Toppc's remarks basically amount to "hey, AIDA64, what are you doing?" and then saying "those who knows, know" before remarking that sticking to NDAs is of critical importance. But why would Toppc, an enthusiast and overclocker, be excited about Bartlett Lake-S unless Intel were launching mainstream desktop CPUs based on the design?

We also have to consider whether enthusiasts should even be excited about such a part. After all, as we've discussed before, it's not likely to hit the same clock rates as the fastest Raptor Lake parts (which exceeded 6 GHz out of the box.) It's also not necessarily going to be a multi-core screamer, as the core count is much lower than extant high-end chips.

Indeed, we've run the numbers and figured out that it will probably scratch at the heels of the Core i9-13900K in multi-core speed—or less, if it comes with a more conservative power target than the 253W PL2 enjoyed by the older chip.


Still, it could be a compelling upgrade for those on lower-tier chips, or folks rocking an Alder Lake CPU who could benefit from the move to the slightly newer core architecture and its larger caches, which help for gaming performance. It also almost assuredly avoids the "Vmin Shift Instability Issue," which makes it even more compelling as an upgrade.

There's no real question that Bartlett Lake-S exists, and there's no real doubt that the 12C/24T model is coming. The only real question is whether Intel is actually considering putting these chips on store shelves. We'll likely know within the next few months as more leaks trickle out.

_{Thanks to Videocardz for pointing out this story.}