Rumor: Intel will 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 is expected to announce the processors at the end of September at its Innovation event that will take place on September 27 and 28.

Enthusiastic Citizen, 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 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 integrated GPUs but are otherwise identical. Non-overclockable processors and lower-ranked H770 and B760 chipsets should be announced at CES in January 2023, with a release later that month. Intel used a similar release strategy with Alder Lake.

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

Raptor Lake also gets DDR4 and DDR5 support, just like Alder Lake. In addition, official DDR5 support would be moved from DDR5-4800 to DDR5-5600, claims Enthusiastic Citizen. 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, Raptor Lake follows Alder Lake just under a year. Intel also announced those chips at its Innovation event last year and released them in early November. This year, AMD is also coming 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.