Intel Plans “Raptor Lake Refresh” Core Desktop Processors for Q3-2023, “Sapphire Rapids 64L” HEDT in Q1

Intel is planning to refresh its desktop processor product stack with new “Raptor Lake Refresh” SKUs in Q3-2023, according to a leaked roadmap. At this point it’s unclear if these are just new SKUs within the 13th Gen Core desktop product stack, or if they’ll form the 14th Gen Core family, much in the same way as “Coffee Lake Refresh” formed the 9th Gen Core, replacing the 8th Gen Core “Coffee Lake.” At this point we don’t know what constitutes “Raptor Lake Refresh,” but it provides Intel’s product managers with the opportunity to increase CPU core-counts across the product stack without needing a new silicon (the Raptor Lake silicon has 8 P-cores and 16 E-cores), slightly higher clock-speeds, and other improvements. We don’t know if this will herald a new CPU socket or platform at this point, either.

The most interesting item in this leaked roadmap slide has to be the reference to the “mainstream workstation” segment, with products in the 250 W TDP bracket. The so-called “Sapphire Rapids 64L” could be a cut-down version of the “Sapphire Rapids” enterprise processor on a new socket, backed by the Intel W790 chipset. The “64L” part of the codename could be a reference to its PCIe Gen 5 lane count of 64, which is less than the 112 available to the full “Sapphire Rapids” silicon in its W-3400 product-stack. It’s unclear if these processors feature a Core X branding like their predecessors from the “Cascade Lake-X” family, or Xeon W. Besides fewer PCIe lanes, Intel could also segment these chips with fewer DDR5 memory channels, though both the PCIe and DDR5 connectivity will be much wider than those of the “Raptor Lake-S” mainstream desktop processors.