As far as rumors go, today’s source is pretty unexpected. ASRock penned a post on its Weibo (Chinese social media website) profile, where it seems to have spilled the beans on Intel’s rumored Raptor Lake refresh. This includes rough performance estimates and a release date window. Assuming this is all true, will these processors become some of the best CPUs?
ASRock wrote an article (first spotted by ITHome) where it talks about the next-gen Intel CPUs. While it seems to be referring to rumors in the post, ASRock confirms the suggestions that the Raptor Lake refresh will provide a single-core performance uplift of around 4% to 8%, followed by a multi-core boost ranging from 8% to 15%. It’s hard to expect a lot more out of an updated lineup of chips as opposed to a brand-new generation, but these figures might make it difficult for it to sell in any great numbers.
There’s another juicy bit of information — ASRock teases that the processors will feature native support for the DDR5-6400 JEDEC memory standard. That’s a pretty big upgrade, considering that the current Raptor Lake chips max out at DDR5-5600.
ASRock itself is getting ready to support Intel’s new CPUs. The blog post states that its motherboards will receive a badge to indicate that they’re ready for the next generation. Both 600- and 700-series boards are expected to support Intel’s Raptor Lake refresh, and new versions of BIOS are expected to appear when it’s time.
It’s not just the performance ASRock seems to have leaked, but also the approximate release date. Although past rumors sometimes reported that the CPUs weren’t coming until 2024, it seems that we might see them as soon as this October.
PC hardware leaks come from various sources, often including Twitter and YouTube. However, it’s rare that a manufacturer of some of the top motherboards for both Intel and AMD (as well as other components, like graphics cards) would release any information ahead of time. Despite the legitimate source, it’s important to take this information for what it is — a bunch of rumors. We will likely learn more during Intel’s Innovation event this September, so it won’t be long before today’s leak is either confirmed or debunked.
