Intel is cooking up a new budget Raptor Lake chip with eight P-Cores, according to regular and often-reliable tech leaker Jaykihn on X, with a plan to replace the Core i5-14600K. The latter remains a popular CPU, offering 14 cores for a reasonable price, while also supporting both DDR5 and DDR4 memory. However, it only has six P-Cores, and these are the ones most important for gaming.
If this Core i5-14600K replacement leak is true, Jaykihn says it will have eight P-Cores and eight E-Cores, referring to it as the “8/8” chip in the rumoured upcoming Raptor Lake Refresh (RL-R) lineup in response to a question about it on X. Basically, it’s a Core i5-14600K with eight P-Cores instead of six, and the same number of E-Cores, which should make for a CPU that’s ideal for both gaming and multi-threaded workloads. If it lands at the same ~$249 price as the 14600K at the moment, then it could end up being a popular upgrade.
It looks as though Intel has learned that packing its CPUs with loads of little, power-efficient cores isn’t always the best strategy. It might be great for multi-threading performance, and putting big numbers in marketing material, but gamers would often be better off with more P-Cores, with little need for loads of E-Cores.
That’s a problem with the current Raptor Lake lineup, where you have to pay $100 more than the 14600K for the 20-core 14700K to get eight P-Cores. Meanwhile, AMD’s Ryzen 7 8-core CPUs competing might ostensibly have fewer cores, but they’re all full-fat ones, meaning they’re better set up for gaming.
Crucially, this new 16-core chip should support both DDR5 and DDR4 RAM, so you’ll be able to use it with either memory standard. That’s a big deal in these times when DDR5 prices are putting this memory increasingly out of reach, meaning you can use your old DDR4 RAM if you have some. Jaykihn has also suggested that new DDR4 Intel motherboards are likely to accompany the release of Intel’s Raptor Lake Refresh lineup.
All of this is very much in the unofficial leaks and rumour file at the moment, so take it with a pinch of salt, but this would be a shrewd move from Intel in current market conditions. If you bought a Core i5-12400F with DDR4 RAM five years ago, for example, you should be able to drop one of these new 16-core chips into the same motherboard with a BIOS update, and carry on using your memory.
In the meantime, check out our guide to buying the best DDR4 CPU if you’re looking to upgrade your setup – the 14600K is still a decent chip, as is the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, which AMD recently rereleased.
