Intel leaks suggest innovative battery-boosting laptop chips and new 14th-gen flagship CPU are on track
It’s been a busy time with Intel leaks, and a few more have just surfaced. One is for Team Blue’s upcoming Lunar Lake laptop CPUs, which will be great news for battery life, and the other has arrived regarding the rumored refresh for the flagship Raptor Lake Refresh (try to catch that soon say).
Let’s start with the notebook world and the spill from leaker HXL on X (formerly Twitter), as pointed out by Tom’s hardware. This shows a sample Lunar Lake processor running in Windows.
Moon Lake A1https://t.co/REwqArpOUo pic.twitter.com/xKQKJZVIOIFebruary 17, 2024
Specifically, in the tweet above we see a screenshot of Task Manager showing details of the Lunar Lake chip in the PC – although, as always with leaks, we should beware the possibility that it is fake.
Regardless, the leak tells us that this is an ‘A1’ copy of Lunar Lake, meaning it’s an early version, and not representative of the eventual silicon we’ll see from these laptop chips.
It shows us a CPU with eight cores (and eight threads, so no hyperthreading) running at a boost speed of 2.8 GHz. Apparently this is a configuration of four performance cores and four efficiency cores (although the latter don’t have hyperthreading anyway, while the former normally would).
The processor also has an NPU (like Meteor Lake) for AI acceleration, and we get a glimpse of the cache gear, which is also a bit of a wrinkle. The L3 cache is smaller than the L2 cache, and normally this would be the other way around. We’ll be back to discuss that, and the other spec details here, in a moment.
But before that, the second leak is that Intel’s Core i9-14900KS, the special edition of the current Raptor Lake Refresh flagship, the 14900K, has been spotted at a French online retailer (via VideoCardz).
Another leaker on
That works out to just over $800 in the US – or £640, AU$1,240 – but don’t panic about a possible 35% price increase over the existing flagship’s MSRP. For starters, the French retailer may have used a temporary price (more than likely), and even then it won’t translate directly to prices in other regions (especially the US).
Looking at US prices, we can expect the 14900KS to be about 20% more expensive, if the 13900KS versus 13900K is anything to go by (and it should be). That said, Intel can add a little more premium, but not to the tune of 35%.
Analysis: It’s all about the timing
As for Lunar Lake’s CPU observation, the 2.8GHz boost speed seems very low, but we can attribute that to the chip being an early one. As for the quirks with the cache, that could be a misinterpretation of the amounts by the Task Manager in Windows – which again wouldn’t be surprising with early working silicon. The original leaker (on Zhihu.com, a Chinese Q&A community forum) believes the stated cache levels are correct, mind you, but that would add a whole lot of seasoning to us.
As for the lack of hyper-threading, it is possible that this feature is disabled here on this example processor. Although this could also indicate that Lunar Lake will follow in the rumored footsteps of Arrow Lake, which is supposedly doing away with hyper-threading. We will see.
Lunar Lake is expected to debut later this year, perhaps alongside Arrow Lake, or very close to the latter – and the sighting of sample silicon suggests that rumors of a 2024 launch may be looming. Intel has hinted that these CPUs will hit the market by early 2025 at the latest, with these energy-efficient processors with longer battery life set to revolutionize premium thin and light laptops. Lunar Lake also promises to have some interesting tricks up its sleeve.
The mention of the Core i9-14900KS doesn’t really mean anything price-wise, as we’ve discussed before, but what it does represent is an indication that this CPU is close to launch. Typically, retailers only jump into action in this way when a product’s release is approaching.
We’ve heard several rumors about the 14900KS recently, including a photo, a benchmark spill, and word from the grapevine that it will launch in mid-March. This latest nugget on the supercharged flagship weighs just a little more on the likelihood that we’ll see this CPU arrive next month.