Intel has a new Lake in development (a processor family name, in other words) and this new addition is Razer Lake.
VideoCardz noticed that leaker HXL posted on X to spread the word about the new codename that Intel is apparently considering for its future desktop chips.
MSDTLGA1700: ADL-S, RPL-S, RPL-S RLGA1851: ARL-S, ARL-S R(❌)LGAxxxx: NVL-S? RZL-S? 🤔 https://t.co/S4F8JCG2HrSeptember 23, 2024
Another well-known X hardware leaker, Bionic Squash, chimed in to note that Razer Lake is indeed a correct codename for the CPU family that will follow Nova Lake.
So if this is correct, we now have the Arrow Lake desktop CPUs (ARL-S, the 'S' referring to desktop) arriving imminently, and as we recently heard, HXL confirms that ARL-S R, i.e. the rumored Refresh, has been cancelled.
Arrow Lake uses a new CPU socket and we don't know what else will support it, but Nova Lake, which is due to launch in 2026, will switch to a new socket. After the desktop Nova Lake (NVL-S), according to HXL we will have Razer Lake (RZL-S) on that same socket.
Of course, this should all be taken with a grain of salt, as with all leaked rumors. Given that Nova Lake is supposedly coming in 2026, we can theorize that Razer Lake could arrive in 2027 or 2028.
Analysis: Dragging the opposition online?
This is pretty interesting when you look at it from the perspective of previous Intel CPU rumors, as what we’d heard before was that Nova Lake would be followed by Beast Lake. In fact, Nova Lake was introduced as version 1.0 of Intel’s Royal Core project (which adopted Rentable Units, giant performance cores that can be divided into units, replacing hyper-threading) and Beast Lake was supposed to be Royal Core 1.1.
With the Royal Core concept supposedly scrapped, we now seemingly have Razer Lake instead of Beast Lake. Now, Beast Lake was expected to be a generation that ushered in giant gaming CPUs, so could Razer Lake be a similar idea? Well, the name certainly has a gaming theme to it…
Seriously, we have no idea what Razer Lake might be (if anything), and no details are provided here other than the socket. The name does seem odd, though, considering this is Razer Lake and not “Razor” Lake, which, at first glance, is a rather outlandish dig at a certain gaming laptop and peripheral manufacturer (what's next? Risen Lake?).
We'd argue that Razer may be misspelled (or misheard), but a second leak clearly backs up the name being spelled that way. And we're not even close to April 1st yet. Razer Lake doesn't really make any sense to us, unless it's “raze” in the sense of completely obliterating your opponent (again, is it possible that's a reference to gaming?).
What also seems odd here is that we only have one generation of processors using the LGA 1851 socket that Arrow Lake features. Frankly, it would seem odd for Intel to have a motherboard series that only supported a single generation of Core CPUs. Are we missing something? Is Arrow Lake Refresh going to be replaced with something, rather than going straight to Nova Lake on a different socket? Or is Nova Lake going to stick with LGA 1851 somehow? (HXL certainly doesn't think so.)
This leak raises more questions than it answers, so we guess we'll have to wait and see if anyone else comes up with more information about Razer Lake (or what might happen after Arrow Lake). Are we really going straight from Arrow to Nova Lake?
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