It's been a busy time for Intel leaks, and another couple have just surfaced. One is for Team Blue's incoming Lunar Lake laptop CPUs, which will be big news for battery life, and another arrived related to the rumored update for the flagship Raptor Lake Refresh (try saying that quickly).
Let's start with the world of laptops and the HXL leaker spill on X (formerly Twitter), as noted by Tom's Hardware. This shows a sample Lunar Lake processor running on Windows.
Lunar Lake A1 pic.twitter.com/xKQKJZVIOIFebruary 17, 2024
Specifically, what we see in the tweet above is a screenshot of the Task Manager with details of the Lunar Lake chip on the PC, although as always with leaks, we should be wary of the possibility that it is fake.
In any case, the leaker informs us that this is an 'A1' sample of Lunar Lake, meaning it is an early version and not representative of the final silicon we will see in 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. This is apparently a configuration of four performance cores and four efficiency cores (although these The latter do not have hyper-threading, the former normally would).
The processor also has an NPU (as with Meteor Lake) for AI acceleration, and we get a glimpse of the cache loads, where there are a bit of wrinkles as well. The L3 cache is smaller than the L2 cache, and normally it would be the other way around. We'll come back to discuss that and other spec details here in a moment.
Before that, however, the second leak is that Intel's rumored 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
That converts to just over $800 in the US, or £640, AU$1,240, but don't panic about a potential 35% price increase above the MSRP of the existing flagship. For starters, the French retailer may have used a placeholder price (most likely), and even then, this won't directly translate to prices in other regions (especially not the US).
Looking at US pricing, we can expect the 14900KS to be about 20% more expensive, if the 13900KS vs 13900K was anything to go by (and it should be). That said, Intel may add a little more premium, but not up to 35%.
Analysis: it's all a matter of time
Regarding the Lunar Lake CPU sighting, the 2.8 GHz boost speed seems very low, but we can attribute that to the chip being an early sample. As for the oddities with the cache, well, that could be a misinterpretation of the numbers by the Task Manager in Windows, which again wouldn't be surprising with early-functioning silicon. The original leaker (on Zhihu.com, a Chinese Q&A community forum) believes the stated cache levels are correct, yes, but we'd put a lot of seasoning on that.
Regarding the lack of hyper-threading, it is possible that this sample processor has the feature disabled here. Although alternatively, this could suggest that Lunar Lake will follow in the rumored footsteps of Arrow Lake, which is supposedly ditching hyper-threading. We will see.
Lunar Lake is expected to debut later this year, perhaps alongside or very close to Arrow Lake, and the silicon sample sighting suggests that rumors of a 2024 launch may be accurate. Intel has hinted that these CPUs will appear by early 2025 at the latest, and these energy-efficient, battery life-extending processors aim to revolutionize premium thin and light laptops. Lunar Lake also promises to have some interesting tricks up its sleeve.
The Core i9-14900KS listing doesn't really mean anything pricing-wise, as we discussed before, but what it does represent is an indication that this CPU is close to launch. Retailers typically only rush this way when a product launch is approaching.
We've heard several rumors about the 14900KS recently, including a photo, a leaked benchmark, and rumors that it will launch in mid-March. This latest nugget on the supercharged flagship is just a little more weight added to the likelihood that we'll see this CPU arrive next month.
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