According to Intel’s 2023 roadmap for the desktop processor market, the company will further develop its 13th Gen Core “Raptor Lake” desktop family with 65 W (locked) SKUs and a new flagship chip, the i9-13900KS. After that, a new lineup of processors under the “Raptor Lake Refresh” family will be released in the third quarter of 2023, but there will be no desktop “Meteor Lake” processors that year. It turns out that “Raptor Lake Refresh” is being developed to take their place (i.e., “Meteor Lake” desktop chips won’t exist). OneRaichu, a dependable source with Intel leaks, says this.

The company’s IDM 2.0 product development strategy, which divides the processor into multiple chiplets built on various foundry nodes based on design needs, and combines them onto a single package with a high-performance interconnect, is fully implemented in “Meteor Lake,” Intel’s first client processor. “Meteor Lake” only has one issue: CPU core counts. According to rumors, the maximum core count is 6P+16E (6 performance cores + 16 efficiency cores), which Intel likely believes won’t be competitive in the desktop market against AMD, which is expected to release a line of “Zen 4” X3D processors by Q3-2023 with up to 16 P-cores. However, the business will give “Meteor Lake” a significant launch across all mobile segments.

“Raptor Lake Refresh” is still a mystery, especially as to how Intel will package it—whether it sticks with the current LGA1700 package or switches to the upcoming LGA1851 container; whether it is a speed bump; and whether, like “Coffee Lake Refresh,” Intel may even boost the core counts. The “Refresh” series could see incremental core-count increases within each Core brand extension (e.g., Core i5 increasing from 6P+8E to 6P+16E); in addition to clock speed increases, assuming Intel doesn’t change the silicon from the current 8P+16E. If Intel decides to go the LGA1851 route, the corporation may alter the branding to 14th Gen Core and produce a new chipset, with the socket likely offering enhanced I/O, such as CPU-attached PCIe Gen 5 NVMe (currently Gen 4). These LGA1851 motherboards will have support for the upcoming 2024 “Arrow Lake” processors.