A new leak confirms what we already suspected — all signs point to Intel announcing its 13th generation Raptor Lake processors on September 27.
Considering that just yesterday, AMD revealed that Ryzen 7000 CPUs will become available on September 27, this spells bad news for Intel. Which giant will be able to steal the spotlight on September 27?
— Алексей (@wxnod) August 30, 2022
A Twitter leaker shared what seems to be an Intel presentation from China that reveals various important dates for the upcoming next-gen lineup. It shows that Intel plans to break the news to the public on September 27 during its Intel Innovation event. We already expected this to be the case, and now, this leak only serves to solidify that suspicion.
According to the Twitter tipster, the product embargo date has been set to September 27 at 9.20 a.m. PT. The sales embargo lifts on October 20 at 6 a.m. PT, implying that would be the date when the CPUs appear for sale — almost a month after AMD’s Zen 4 platform hits the shelves. These dates apply to the enthusiast-level Intel Raptor Lake K and KF processors as well as the high-end Z790 chipset.
Intel will reportedly start taking pre-orders for the flagship Core i9-13900K (F) on the same day as the initial announcement, but those who want a Core i7-13700K or Core i5-13600K will have to wait until October 13 to pre-order. Further dates are less specific. Between February 19 and March 18, 2023, the product information and sales embargos will lift for the commercial and entry-level consumer and workstation CPUs.
Intel Raptor Lake will maintain socket compatibility with Alder Lake motherboards. It will be based on the 10nm “Intel 7” process node and will support dual-channel DDR5-5600 RAM as well as PCIe 5.0 (up to 28 lanes). So far, a total of 14 processors seem to be in the works, including four Core i9 models, four Core i7, five Core i5, and a single Core i3. Aside from the enthusiast Z790 platform, H770 and B760 motherboards are also expected to arrive at a later date.
The new Raptor Lake lineup will include some rather impressive CPUs. The flagship Core i9-13900K arrives with 24 cores (eight performance cores and 16 efficiency cores) and 32 threads. The base clock is said to be set to 3.0GHz and it can be boosted up to 5.8GHz for a single core and 5.5GHz for all cores. Intel definitely ups the numbers in terms of cache size, bringing the total to 68MB of combined cache. The maximum power consumption is said to be 250 watts, but it can go as high as 350 watts in Extreme Performance Mode. This dwarfs the new AMD Ryzen 9 7950X with its 170-watt TDP.
Bad luck for Intel
With all that said, the fact that Intel is likely going to announce Raptor Lake on September 27 is just pure bad luck — or perhaps a good idea from AMD. It’s possible that Intel had already planned to break the news during Intel Innovation before AMD ever decided to push up the release date of Zen 4.
If Ryzen 7000 was to launch on September 15 (as per the initial rumors), AMD would hold the spotlight for those two weeks, and then Intel could attempt to reclaim it with its own products. Now, Intel’s big announcement will arrive at a time when the news cycle will be buzzing with information about the freshly-released Ryzen 7000 processors. It’s tough luck for Intel, but good news for the customers — things are about to get really exciting in the best CPU arena.
