Another piece of the jigsaw pointing to an October launch for Intel Raptor Lake Refresh processors has seemingly fallen into place. Earlier today, ITHome reported that a Chinese PC brand has indicated that it is launching a new gaming desktop featuring "a new generation of Intel Core processors and RTX 40 series graphics cards." The brand, Machenike, apparently boasted that its upcoming PC powerhouses will officially launch in October.
Machenike is currently appearing at the Bilibili World 2023 exhibition in Shanghai, China as can be seen from its social media posts. Many in the west won't be familiar with this brand, but it offers a wide gamut of PC gaming gear including desktops, laptops, mini PCs, as well as peripherals like monitors, keyboards etc.
For now, take the news with a pinch of salt.
Previous leaks and spills also point to the Raptor Lake Refresh being only about dozen weeks away. As is historically the case, we expect to see the desktop 'K' processors establish the new line with consumers who are prepared to pay for the best Intel has to offer. It is very likely that the first chips available will be dubbed the Intel Core i5-14600K, Core i7-14700K, and Core i9-14900K (plus KF processors too).
We have some performance expectations for Raptor Lake Refresh, but what we have seen isn't so inspiring. The refresh doesn't impress in some leaked benchmarks. Perhaps down to a number of factors in testing pre-release silicon?
The tale of the next gen Intel Core processors has been uncharacteristically muddy this year. Initially Intel was expected to push out Meteor Lake as the 14th Gen Core processors on both desktops and laptops, but for reasons we can only speculate about seems to have split the launch line-up, and tweaked its established branding. That means desktop users will see Raptor Lake Refresh instead, with laptop users getting Meteor Lake later in the year. Mobile PC users get a bunch of interesting new technologies first. Desktop users, meanwhile, stick with socket LGA 1700, and have to wait for next year and Arrow Lake to benefit from similar new advanced packaging, processes and architectures.
As well as featuring the next generation Core processors from Intel, the source reports that the upcoming Machenike desktop PCs will be the first to come with PCIe Gen5 SSDs as standard. This makes sense, as PCIe Gen5 SSDs have at last started to move to general availability. This wasn't the case when the original Raptor Lake pre-built systems were launched.
