The situation isn't improving on the RAM front, especially with DDR5.
Launched in October 2022, the Raptor Lake architecture followed on the heels of Alder Lake. It was intended to build on the strengths of the latter to ensure a smooth transition to an entirely new architecture. At the time, however, Intel was facing major difficulties, and its engineers struggled immensely to validate the progress announced on paper. In fact, rather than a completely new architecture, a year after Raptor Lake, Intel finally launched Raptor Lake Refresh, its 14th-generation of processors, with very few new features to show for it. We’ll have to wait for Meteor Lake for laptops and, more importantly, Arrow Lake, to see Intel finally shift gears. DDR4 is then completely phased out in favor of DDR5 alone, and a new socket makes its debut: the LGA-1851.
Intel—like most manufacturers—had not, however, anticipated the sudden price surge for certain components driven by the staggering demand from the artificial intelligence sector. Within a few weeks, prices for DRAM and NAND chips skyrocketed, and in the DDR5 RAM module sector alone, prices rose by 200 to 300 percent. DDR4, which is slower and therefore less in demand for AI, also saw price increases, but to a much lesser extent. The inevitable happened: consumers completely abandoned the latest platforms and turned back to older architectures, still using DDR4.
First details about the Core 200 Raptor Lake Next © Jaykihn
This is undoubtedly what is driving Intel today to prepare the release of a third iteration of Raptor Lake: Raptor Lake Next. Intel hasn’t confirmed this yet, but several reliable sources are convinced of its existence—which, incidentally, would align with recent comments from Robert Hallock, general manager of Intel’s consumer CPU division: “Raptor Lake is a key part of our strategy, and I want to make that clear [ …] It remains very powerful, even in the face of several generations of competing hardware. So it’s here to stay. I want everyone to understand that Raptor Lake will continue to be widely available.”
Dubbed Core 200 Raptor Lake Next, the new architecture isn’t expected to launch immediately: there’s talk of a launch very early next year, with a full product lineup to follow. Not all details have been revealed yet, but there is talk of high-performance models with 16 or 20 cores and much more affordable models with 10 cores or even just 4 cores, consisting exclusively of high-performance cores. It’s worth noting that the release of these Core 200 Raptor Lake Next processors would also mark the return of the LGA-1700 socket, even as Intel prepares its Nova Lake lineup on the LGA-1954 socket. In between, the LGA-1851 socket used by Arrow Lake and Arrow Lake Refresh will have had the shortest lifespan.
