Intel Raptor Lake 13th Gen CPU Family Slides Into View With LPDDR5X Support
A supposed CPU roadmap from Intel has leaked to the web, with references to Rocket Lake (desktop), Tiger Lake (mobile), Alder Lake (desktop and mobile), and Raptor Lake (desktop and mobile). The latter entry is the most interesting of the bunch, because it is the only codename that Intel has not officially acknowledged up to this point.
If the roadmap is real, it is clearly an older one, because it shows Rocket Lake launching in 2020. That obviously did not happen—Intel recently confirmed Rocket Lake will blast off later this month, on March 30 at precisely 6:00 am PT (9:00 am ET). There was a time, however, when Intel hoped to get Rocket Lake out the door before the end of 2020.
That's to say, it's at least possible the leaked roadmap is real. And if that is the case, what does it tell us about Raptor Lake? Let's have a look...
The leaked CPU roadmap obtained from an unspecified source by Videocardz shows Raptor Lake debuting in 2022, in mobile and desktop variants. Consistent with past rumors, it appears Raptor Lake would essentially be a refresh of Alder Lake. The roadmap indicates a hybrid CPU core makeup, just like Alder Lake, and similar in philosophy to Arm's big.LITTLE approach.
For anyone has not been following Intel's future plans, Alder Lake's hybrid architecture will pair high performance cores with power efficient cores. This paves the way for some interesting core and thread arrangements. Today's processors either have the same number of cores and threads (no Hyper Threading support), or twice as many threads as cores (Hyper Threading support).
Neither of those will necessarily be the case when Alder Lake arrives. For example, a recent benchmark leak purported to show an Alder Lake CPU with 14 cores and 20 threads. The way it arrived at that arrangement is by having 6 high performance cores supporting Hyper Threading (so 12 threads so far), and 8 smaller cores that each count as a thread (for 20 threads total).
If Raptor Lake does come immediately after Alder Lake, it will likely comprise Intel's 13th Gen Core lineup. Its timing means DDR5 memory support is a given, including on the mobile side, with the roadmap indicating LPDDR5X being added to the mix. It also mentions DLVR power delivery, whatever that ends up being.
This latest leak follows the discovery of a reference to Lunar Lake in an Intel driver for Linux. Lunar Lake will come after Meteor Lake, so it would look like this: Rocket Lake -> Alder Lake -> Raptor Lake -> Meteor Lake -> Lunar Lake. If that's how it shakes out, Lunar Lake would end up carrying Intel's 15th Gen designation instead of 14th Gen as previously reported.
