Rumor: Intel to release Raptor Lake processors and Z790 chipset on October 17

Intel may release its first Raptor Lake processors in mid-October. This is reported by leaker Enthusiastic Citizen. Intel was due to announce the processors at the end of September, at its Innovation event, which will take place on September 27 and 28.

Enthusiastic Citizen, who is more likely to share early information about hardware, writes on Chinese social medium Bilibili that Intel will release its Raptor Lake processors on October 17. It would then be about overclockable K processors, in combination with a new Z790 chipset for motherboards. Intel would initially come with an Intel Core i9-13900K, Core i7-13700K and Core i5-13600K. The company would simultaneously introduce KF variants of these three models, which do not have an integrated GPU but are otherwise identical. At CES in January 2023, non-overclockable processors and lower-ranking H770 and B760 chipsets should be announced, with a release later that month. Intel followed a similar release strategy with Alder Lake.

According to the leaker, Intel will not come with an H710 chipset this time. Instead, the H610 chipset will continue to be used in this generation. The leaker also says that 600 series motherboards will receive support for the new Raptor Lake chips. That was already known; Raptor Lake keeps socket LGA-1700 and many motherboards have already received bios updates that add support for Raptor Lake.

Raptor Lake will also receive DDR4 and DDR5 support, as will Alder Lake. In addition, the official DDR5 support would be moved from DDR5-4800 to DDR5-5600, Enthusiastic Citizen claims. The Z790 chipset would get twenty PCIe 4.0 lanes and eight PCIe 3.0 lanes. The current Z690 chipset has twelve PCIe 4.0 lanes and sixteen PCIe 3.0 lanes. The number of lanes on the processors remains the same, with sixteen PCIe 5.0 lanes for graphics cards and four PCIe 4.0 lanes for storage.

If these release dates are correct, then Raptor Lake follows just under a year after Alder Lake. Intel also announced those chips at its Innovation event last year and released them in early November. This year AMD also comes with its Ryzen 7000 processors, which use a new AM5 platform and a Zen 4 architecture. According to rumors from VideoCardz those processors are expected a few weeks ahead of Raptor Lake.