Given they’re over two and half years outdated and plagued with reliability considerations, you is likely to be stunned to be taught that Intel’s Raptor Lake CPUs are selling like high-temperature baked comestibles. That is in line with Intel itself in its newest earnings name for traders.
Raptor Lake refers to Intel’s thirteenth and 14th Gen CPUs for cellular and desktop. Michelle Johnston Holdhaus, CEO of Intel Merchandise, defined that value is the driving issue behind the ongoing success of those chips, which first went on sale in October 2022, a relative age in the past by the requirements of laptop chips.
“We’re not pushing the outdated elements primarily based on margins. What we’re actually seeing is a lot higher demand from our clients for N minus one and N minus two [referring to the two previous generations of CPUs before Intel’s current Arrow Lake, meteor Lake and Lunar Lake processor families] merchandise, in order that they will proceed to ship system worth factors that buyers are actually demanding. As we have all talked about, the macroeconomic considerations and tariffs have all people type of hedging their bets in what they should have from a list perspective. And Raptor Lake is an incredible half,” Holdhaus says.
She additionally emphasised that Intel’s newer Meteor Lake and Lunar Lake CPUs, “include a a lot larger value construction.” Whereas Holdhaus did not say so particularly, calling out Meteor Lake and Lunar Lake, which are each completely provided in cellular format, however not mentioning Arrow Lake, which is obtainable as each a desktop and a laptop computer CPU, means that it is Raptor Lake chips for laptops which were selling surprisingly well, late into the era’s life cycle.
That stated, it is price remembering that Raptor Lake’s lengthy gross sales tail is not totally novel. When a brand new era of CPU is launched, it would not instantly exchange its predecessor in its entirety.
At anybody time, Intel can be manufacturing a number of generations of chips in parallel. As a brand new era arrives, it would step by step ramp up in quantity, whereas numbers produced of its predecessors could also be maintained for a time earlier than ultimately tailing off.
That is very true if the newest era is primarily based on a brand new silicon node, which itself must be ramped up earlier than enough volumes could be produced to totally exchange older generations of chips.
To place this all into context, Intel is the truth is still producing CPUs from the even older Alder Lake era, which went on sale in November 2021. Intel stopped taking orders for Alder Lake CPUs in January, however stated manufacturing would proceed till 23 January 2026. So, you would possibly count on Intel to maintain making Raptor Lake CPUs till early 2027.
Of late, that ramp-and-replace cadence has turn into extra advanced because of Intel transferring a few of its manufacturing to the Taiwanese chip foundry TSMC. Raptor Lake is constructed on Intel’s inner Intel 7 node and constructed from a single chip or silicon die.
Meteor Lake, Lunar Lake, and Arrow Lake, against this, are all chiplet designs manufactured from a number of dies, or tiles in Intel parlance. Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake logic chiplets are made totally by TSMC, whereas Meteor Lake CPUs are largely made by TSMC, however with the Intel 4 course of used for the die containing CPU cores.
Definitely, should you browse the web sites of many large laptops manufacturers, you may still discover loads of laptops with Intel H sequence Raptor Lake CPUs, similar to the Core i7-13620H. It tends to be mainstream merchandise provided at cheaper price factors which use the older chips, simply as Intel implies.
Laptops with larger worth tags that supply both excessive efficiency or ultra-slim type components are extra seemingly to make use of the newest chips, which ship both extra grunt or higher effectivity.
Likewise, if we are certainly speaking about laptops completely, then the well-documented points suffered predominantly by desktop members of the Raptor Lake era are by definition much less related.
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