Intel’s 14th Gen desktop CPUs are a small update even by modern standards – Ars Technica

Intel’s new desktop processor generations haven’t always brought significant generational improvements in recent years, as the company has struggled with new manufacturing technology that enables big jumps in performance and power efficiency. With each big jump — 12th-gen CPUs, codenamed Alder Lake, come to mind — you typically get several faster but less exciting iterations.

Intel is officially launching its 14th generation desktop processors today, and they belong firmly in that repetitive and unexciting group, even compared to last year’s 13th generation chips. The good news for price-conscious PC makers is that they will continue to run on all existing 600 and 700 series motherboards after the BIOS update, and Intel isn’t launching a series of new motherboards to accompany them – there aren’t many compelling reasons to upgrade from a 12th gen setup. To the 14th generation setting, but it is an option.

Even the branding Intel uses here suggests the processors are a throwback — next-gen Meteor Lake chips for laptops and all other Intel chips are losing the i3/i5/i7/i9 generation branding to “Core” and “Core Ultra.” By Intel’s own admission, the 14th-gen brand’s final gasps here are a nod to how similar it is to the 13th-gen chipsets that came before it (and, for that matter, the 12th-gen chipsets before that).

i9-14900K, i7-14700K, and i5-14600K processors

The 13th generation update, codenamed Raptor Lake, brought small but noticeable changes to the structure of Alder Lake. In higher-end chips, Intel boosted the maximum number of cores and added additional L2 and L3 cache, as well as small clock speed increases. Energy budgets overall rose slightly as well. (For some lower-end chips, especially non-overclockable chips at the i5 tier and below, Intel kept the Alder Lake architecture completely intact, adding a few electronic cores and boosting clock speeds but without actually changing the silicon.)

The 14th Gen CPUs are just Raptor Lake again – no extra cores on the backend, no additional cache, no increase in officially supported memory speeds, and no increase in virtual power requirements. Core and turbo clock speeds across the P and E cores increase by 100 or 200 MHz, but that’s about it. The integrated Intel UHD 770 GPU is also unchanged.

Intel is launching new desktop CPUs as it usually does: starting at the top. It’s launching six unlocked, overclockable processors today, three K-series CPUs with integrated GPUs and three identical KF-series CPUs without GPUs for $25 less.

Less exciting and easier to explain are the i9-14900K and i5-14600K, which are the same as the i9-13900K and i5-13600K with slight bumps in clock speed. (Intel has said that it has “optimized” its Intel 7 chip manufacturing process, but whatever improvements have been made haven’t radically changed the performance or power consumption of either chip.) The i9-14900K could reach a significant nominal target of 6.0 GHz. Out of the box with Intel’s Thermal Speed ​​Boost feature, but in the real world, this is still just a small bump.

The i7-14700K at least gives us one hardware difference to chew on: an extra set of E-cores that bumps their count from 8 to 12 (for a total of 20, counting the eight P-cores) and boosts the CPU’s L2 and L3 cache accordingly. . That’s not enough to help the i7 catch up with the i9, but it makes a continuing argument for choosing the i7 over the i9 for more affordable home workstations.

Intel’s performance numbers shy away from comparing the i9-14900K and i5-14600K with their immediate predecessors, usually opting to compare them with AMD’s flagship Ryzen 9 7950X3D processor (most of the time, Intel’s chips show the i9-14900K winning, but not always, and generally not by much). Generation-to-generation improvement is even more significant for the i7-14700K, which Intel says is between 1.14 and 1.63 times faster than the Core i7-12700K, depending on the task. The i7 has added eight additional cores over the past two years, which will benefit multi-threaded workloads.

We’ll need to wait until early next year to hear more about cheaper non-K processors, and Intel typically announces these at or around CES in January. There’s no reason to think these cheaper chips will be any more exciting than the flagships, but the additional E-core clusters for the mainstream workhorse CPUs in the Core i5 and i7 families will be welcome.

Since these K-series chips (and their non-GPU KF-series counterparts) are overclockable, it’s worth noting an additional feature Intel is adding to its XTU overclocking program. named “Artificial intelligence assistance“Because it’s 2023 and everything has a dash or two of ‘AI’ added to it,” it “uses AI models to estimate stable overclocking settings for your system.” As of this writing, Intel says it only works with the i9-14900K and KF processors. – It would be even more interesting if it worked with all CPUs currently supported by the XTU utility, starting with the 9th generation Core chips.

We’ve been testing the new chips and will publish our findings on performance and power consumption soon. But the high-level summary, right now, is that they don’t change the calculus for desktop builders much because they’re not that different from the processors Intel was selling yesterday.