While Meteor Lake shakes up things for laptops this year, Intel has three product families planned for mainstream and HEDT desktops in the form of Raptor Lake-S Refresh, Arrow Lake-S & Sapphire Rapids Xeon W Refresh.

Intel Raptor Lake-S Refresh Launches In October, Arrow Lake-S In Late 2024, Sapphire Rapids HEDT Xeon W In 1H 2024

The latest information comes from leaker, Enthusiast Citizen at Bilibili, who has information about three desktop product families launching between 2023-2024. First up is the most obvious and we are going to get the Raptor Lake-S Refresh family which will be branded under the 14th Gen "Core" family. The Intel Raptor Lake-S Refresh desktop CPUs are expected to feature faster clocks, higher power consumption, and better support for higher-frequency memory. These CPUs are expected to hit retail shelves in October this year.

To sum things up according to the rumor:

Raptor Lake-S Refresh "Unlocked" - October 2023Raptor Lake-S Refresh "Locked" - November - December 2023Arrow Lake-S - Late 2024 - Early 2025Xeon W-2500/W-3500 - Early 2024

In addition to the Intel Raptor Lake-S Refresh "K" Unlocked SKUs, the company will also introduce the Non-K parts between November and December. There are reports that Intel has added a new SKU that implements an 8 P-Core and 12 E-Core configurations but it isn't confirmed if such SKU will make its way to retail. But it will definitely be an interesting choice to upgrade the Core i7 CPU lineup to more E-Cores. All CPUs will be compatible with existing 600 and 700 series motherboards which feature the LGA 1700/1800 socket.

As for the proper desktop upgrade, that isn't expected until late 2024 or even early 2025. The Intel Arrow Lake-S CPUs will mark a major transition in terms of architecture, featuring the latest P-Core and E-Core designs. The new CPUs will be compatible with the next-gen LGA 1851 socket but will retain the 8 P-Core and 16 E-Core designs.

There are conflicting rumors with some pointing to just 6+8 Arrow Lake-S configurations while others talk about up to 40 core configurations but nothing is set in stone unless Intel reveals it themselves. They will be based on TSMC's 3nm process node but we don't know if that's for the entire chip or a specific tile since Arrow Lake CPUs utilize a multi-tiled architecture.

Lastly, we have the Intel HEDT update which will come in the form of the Xeon W-2500 and Xeon W-3500 series which replaces the existing Xeon W-2400 and Xeon W-3500 series. These Sapphire Rapids Xeon-W refresh CPUs will also be compatible with the existing W790 motherboards. Intel will be releasing an updated Emerald Rapids design for its servers but it is not known if the same design will ship with the refreshed Sapphire Rapids chips. Both 4th Gen & 5th Gen Xeon CPUs are compatible on the same platforms.

Overall, it is definitely an interesting lineup but whether it will be enough to tackle the AMD Ryzen 8000 CPUs featuring the Zen 5 and RDNA 3.5 core architectures next year remains to be seen. The company has an Innovation event planned for 19th September so we can expect more details then.

Intel Desktop CPU Core Count Progression: