Cope and seethe boys, cope and seethe.
MSI has accidentally confirmed Intel’s upcoming 14th generation Core processors as being a refresh of their current 13th gen Raptor Lake processors during an unlisted video on YouTube that quickly made the rounds, the video has since gone private.
In a product training video showcasing MSI’s latest Intel 700 motherboard series and upcoming PC cases, the main focus is on the improvements made to these motherboards. However, there is a brief slide that provides an overview of Intel’s next-generation Core series.
According to the slides, Intel’s 14th Gen Core series will not feature any increases in overall core count with only one of the upcoming K-series CPUs undergoing a specification change from 13th to 14th gen.
Specifically the upcoming Core i7-14700K, which has an altercation of its hybrid Performance and Efficient core allotment, while the i7-13700K comes equipped with the maximum of 8 performance cores but only comes equipped with 8 additional Cinebench accelerators (efficient cores), the upcoming i7-14700K will have the same count of 8 performance cores but will see an uplift to its E-Core portion with 12, which according to MSI will uplift its multithreading performance by roughly 17%.
There are no config changes for the 14600K or the 14900K.
While single core performance between Intel’s 13th and 14th generation Core processors has once again gone stagnant, after surviving half a decade of Skylake Intel has once again hit the breaks with actual yearly incremental uplifts in performance yet again, with Raptor Lake’s refresh essentially serving as a stopgap to aid its woeful power consumption and efficiency as the refresh will likely come with a 200-300MHz boost which according to MSI equates to roughly 3% additional performance.
Which means that Intel intend on playing second fiddle to AMD’s Ryzen 7000 series processors of which their X3D counterparts are absolutely dominating the field in terms of overall gaming prowess for at least a full year with the upcoming refresh offering very little incentive for users to even swap out their 12th generation Core processors even.
Intel recycling its wares on a slightly more mature, a more refined 10nm processing node wouldn’t be a bad thing so long as they were actually upfront about their current situation and sought to compete against AMD’s Zen 4 components not in terms of an outright performance metric but a price war.
If Intel had the fucking balls they would easily capture the lower end market segments by pricing down their CPUs and more specifically, giving the i5-14600K either two more additional performance cores, for a total of 8, or increasing its allotment of E-Cores to 12, matching the upcoming i7-14700K and increasing its MT performance drastically.
But obviously we cannot have that because then people might actually consider buying it because the benefit of Intel’s big.Little approach is the decrease in total amount of physical performance cores so it would not make sense from a marketing / financial perspective to give what would essentially be the “full chip” on a sub $300 Core i5 counterpart.
Pity, Intel fans can at least look forward to the company looking to once again shovel out its upcoming i9-14900K for around $600.
Though if you do happen to own a 13th generation Core processor there is a near trick you can do to potentially upgrade your CPU without actually having to purchase a brand new one, simply reboot your system, load into the BIOS, increase your core frequency by 200MHz, press F10 to save and exit the BIOS and voila, you’ve just got a free 14th generation upgrade. You’re welcome.
