Intel Could Extend LGA1700 Socket With Another Raptor Lake Refresh

Despite being labeled "very preliminary info" and advised not to report on it, this information is so peculiar that we had to drop a post about it. Here's the story: regular and usually reliable Intel leaker Jaykihn claims that Intel is "planning another Raptor Lake Refresh to extend LGA 1700." That's remarkable considering that the LGA 1700 socket was introduced with Alder Lake in 2021, about four and a half years ago, and has since been superseded by the LGA 1851 socket and Core Ultra 200 "Arrow Lake" series CPUs.

There are plenty of good reasons for Intel to continue supporting the LGA 1700 socket, though. LGA 1851 and its accompanying CPUs haven't been popular, even if the recently released Core Ultra 200 "Plus" models considerably shore up the series' weaknesses and offer incredible value for the money. Moreover, there are a lot of people out there with LGA 1700 systems who might like an upgrade, whether because they're still rocking an Alder Lake chip or because they have a flaky Raptor Lake chip that they've elected not to have replaced under warranty.

Indeed, the reliability issues with extant high-end Core i9 and i7 chips from the 13th- and 14th-gen families, while relatively contained and largely mitigated by Intel's series of firmware and microcode patches, have put a lot of people off the Raptor Lake family of CPUs. I personally know three separate people who elected not to upgrade their aging Alder Lake machines to Raptor Lake specifically because of those problems. The issues only really affect the top-end CPUs from each generation, but it's also true that the mitigations for the Vmin Shift Instability Issue have reduced the performance of those parts a bit, too.


Intel has already refreshed the Raptor Lake series a second time with Bartlett Lake. While the top-end CPU in that family with twelve P-cores got all the attention in the reporting on it, most of the Bartlett Lake family is actually based on the exact same CPU design as found in Raptor Lake. It's not known if there were any changes at all when bringing those chips over to the edge—besides, of course, reduced voltages and clock rates, since those parts are meant for networking and edge deployments. They're embedded CPUs, not meant for enthusiasts.

So naturally, the question arises: will Intel bring Bartlett Lake 12P to desktops? Jaykihn says no. Responding to a question from a user who asks "RPL strictly, so still no 12P BTL consumer options?" he replied "Yes. Bartlett Lake 12P is separate." The demand for this part is extreme, and it's almost absurd that, when releasing new LGA 1700 CPUs in 2027, Intel would not make the top option a Bartlett Lake-based processor with 12 P-cores. Here's our plea to Intel: release that part, even at a pretty high ASP, and enthusiasts will buy everyone you put on store shelves. We promise.

Not only will there apparently not be a 12 P-core SKU in this family, but in fact, no Core i9 SKUs at all. Given that, this seems like a product rebadge done mostly to keep OEMs who want a cheap "current-generation" option to offer for bog-standard office PCs and other such less-demanding workloads; LGA 1700 (including Raptor Lake) supports DDR4 memory, and that makes it considerably cheaper to deploy right now versus the latest generation that requires DDR5. It may even be the case that the "new" Raptor Lake Refresh le troisième aren't even offered to enthusiasts in official form. We won't know until they hit the market, which will supposedly be in early 2027.