Intel's next-gen 13th Gen Core 'Raptor Lake': DDR4 support, DDR5 too

Intel might have just launched its new 12th Gen Core "Alder Lake" CPUs but even in the months leading up we were enjoying leaks and rumors of the 13th Gen Core "Raptor Lake" CPUs, and today we have a new tease.

The new Intel 13th Gen Core "Raptor Lake" CPUs will arrive in 2022, and according to Tom @ Moore's Law is Dead, Raptor Lake will also support DDR5 and DDR4 memory, just like the just-launched 12th Gen Core "Alder Lake" CPUs and the new Z690 chipset.

We will see Intel launch its new 700 series chipset with the flagship Z790 chipset lighting up next-gen Raptor Lake-ready motherboards in 2022. If you've got some good DDR4 memory now and didn't want to upgrade to Alder Lake, you should be fine when Raptor Lake launches and not need to buy new DDR5 RAM.

• Read more: Intel's next-next-gen Z790 chipset with Raptor Lake CPUs in Q3 2022
• Read more: Intel's next-gen 14th Gen Core 'Meteor Lake' compute tile taped in
• Read more: Intel's 13th Gen Core CPU teased: Raptor Lake-S comes in 2022+
• Read more: Intel's next-gen LGA1700: same boring stock cooler, new hole pattern
• Read more: Intel's next-gen Alder Lake-S rumored to use LGA1700 socket

As for the new Raptor Lake CPU architecture, we shouldn't expect too much over the current big leap with Alder Lake. We will see an updated core architecture, more efficiency cores (E-cores) and what seems to be the same memory controller that Alder Lake has, but it will support higher frequency DDR5 memory.

Alder Lake supports DDR4-3200 and DDR5-4800 standards, so we should expect the new 700 series chipset to support something like DDR5-5200 by default, or higher. The new flagship Core i9-13900K processor is what we will see as the leader of the Raptor Lake pack in 2022.