Intel revealed its 13th generation desktop processors a little over a year ago, under the codename Raptor Lake, and the company has been working on updates to stay competitive with the latest offerings from Apple and AMD. We're still waiting on the more advanced Meteor Lake chips, which Intel said are coming in December, but in the meantime, Intel has revealed a series of updated Raptor Lake processors: the 14th gen Intel Core lineup.

Intel has officially unveiled its first 14th gen Intel Core desktop processors, also known as "Raptor Lake-S Refresh." These are not fully revamped chips with a completely new architecture, and they use the same Intel 7 Process technology as the 13th gen, but the company is still promising significant performance improvements. There are six CPUs in total: two Intel Core i5, two Intel Core i7, and two Intel Core i9. Intel said earlier this year that it will drop the "i" from its processor names, but that will start with Meteor Lake chips, not these processors.

First up is the Intel Core i5-14600KF and Core i5-14600K, which both have 6 performance cores, 8 efficiency cores, 20 threads, and a maximum turbo clock of 5.3 GHz on the performance cores. The Intel Core i7-14700KF and i7-14700K both bump that up to 8 performance cores, 12 efficiency cores, 32 threads, and a slightly higher turbo clock of 5.6 GHz. Finally, the Intel Core i9-14900KF and Core i9-14900K have 8 performance cores, 16 efficiency cores, 32 threads, and a turbo clock of 5.6 GHz. Intel says the Core i9 chips can hit a boost frequency of 6 GHz with the right cooling.

The only difference between the K and KF processors is that the K chips have integrated graphics (Intel UHD Graphics 770, to be exact), while the KF chips have no integrated graphics. The KF chips are slightly cheaper and intended for use in gaming PCs that have discrete graphics anyway.

Every processor Intel announced today supports overclocking, 20 PCIe lanes, DDR5 5600 or DDR4 3200 memory, Wi-Fi 6 and 6E, 40Gbps Thunderbolt 4, Bluetooth 5.3, and up to 192GB of RAM. They're also staying at roughly the same power usage as last year's first Raptor Lake chips. All of them start at 125W, with the Core i5 chips jumping to 181W at max load, and the Core i5 and i7 maxing out at 253W.

Intel is promising up to 18% better multi-threaded performance, and the company using the bold claim of the "world's fastest desktop processor" for the Core i9-14900K running at 6GHz. We'll have to wait and see how performance holds up when the CPUs are independently tested. There's also a new Intel Extreme Tuning Utility that supposedly uses an AI model to recommend overclocking settings — it's 2023, so of course AI needs to be mentioned somewhere.

Pricing will start at $294 for the Intel Core i5-13600KF, and maxing out at $589 for the Core i9-14900K.

Source: Intel