Intel Raptor Lake Launch and Availability Dates Revealed

A post on Chinese forum Bilibili has revealed more exact details with regards to when Intel’s Raptor Lake series of processors will launch and if nothing changes between now and then, the K and KF SKU’s should be announced as previously thought, at the Intel Innovation ’22 event that kicks off on the 27th of September. Retail availability, alongside Z790 motherboards should be about a month later, starting the week of the 17th of October. We’ve confirmed these dates with our own sources, but as always with early information, these things can change.

The rest of the Raptor Lake family of CPUs, as well as the H770 and B760 chipsets are expected to launch at CES 2023 in January and the poster on Bilibili claims that retail sales should be sometime in the second half of January. We’ve not been able to confirm the latter information here. As per older rumours, Intel is expected to change the PCIe lane allocation for the Z790 chipset compared to Z690 and based on the information posted, Z790 will have 20 PCIe 4.0 and eight PCIe 3.0 lanes, vs. 12 PCIe 4.0 and 16 PCIe 3.0 for the Z690 chipset. Raptor Lake is also said to get native support for faster DDR5 5600 memory, rather than just 4800 MHz DDR5 for Alder Lake. There are apparently no changes to the CPU PCIe lanes and DDR4 support is still here, but once again, no changes have been made to the DDR4 memory controller.