It seems like it was just yesterday that Intel announced its 12th Generation Alder Lake processors, which top our list of best CPUs. However, according to Coelacanth-dream, the chipmaker is already preparing its Bootlog for Raptor Lake, the successor to Alder Lake.
The specifications from the Bootlog align with an earlier leaked 13th Generation Raptor Lake sample, which we presumed to be the Core i9-13900K. Intel's Bootlog specified 24 cores and 32 threads. The configuration should have eight Performance (P) cores and 16 Efficiency (E) cores, packing double the E-cores compared to the Core i9-12900K. The Core i9-13900K was an engineering sample, so the clock speeds didn't impress. It was reportedly running at 1.8 GHz.
The other piece of juicy information relates to the instruction set. Although Alder Lake doesn't officially support AVX-512 instructions, motherboard vendors had left a backdoor to enable AVX-512 on the hybrid chips. Intel eventually rolled out a new microcode to manufacturers to altogether disable AVX-512. Since Raptor Lake is utilizing the same recipe as Alder Lake, it doesn't come as a surprise that it wouldn't support AVX-512. The code from the Bootlog shows Raptor Lake without support for AVX-512. The processor is an early engineering sample, so Intel could potentially change its stance further down the road, but we wouldn't hold our hopes up at any event.
At CES 2022, Gregory Bryant, Intel's executive vice president and general manager of the Client Computing Group, confirmed that Raptor Lake was on track. Although the new hybrid processors aren't quite there yet, they can boot into Windows, which would explain why we see Raptor Lake in Intel's Bootlog.
Intel wasn't specific on when Raptor Lake will make its way to the retail market. Bryant had only mentioned a 2022 launch. AMD's Ryzen 7000 (Raphael) Zen 4 processors will land in the second half of 2022, so Raptor Lake will likely come out around that time frame.
