Intel Raptor Lake-S “Desktop” & Raptor Lake-HX “Laptop” Refresh CPUs To Retain 14th Gen “Core i” Branding

Intel will be using the same "Core i" branding for its 14th Gen Raptor Lake-S Refresh Desktop & Raptor Lake-HX Refresh Enthusiast laptop CPUs.

Intel detailed its new "Core" branding which marks a major shift in 15 years. The company revealed that the new branding will be applicable to chips starting with the Meteor Lake lineup but the latest details reveal that the company will still retain the older "Core i" branding on two major families for 2023.

According to Golden Pig Upgrade, we get a better understanding of what the lineup will be looking like. For this year, Intel is planning at least four product families for its client platform. Meteor Lake is the main laptop family while Raptor Lake-S Refresh is the main desktop family. But in addition to both of these, there are also the Raptor Lake-HX Refresh for enthusiast laptops and Raptor Lake-U Refresh for mainstream laptops. So here's what Intel is doing:

Intel has kind of made its new "Core" branding already a bit confusing by going the AMD route and adding different families under the same generation of CPUs. The only distinction between the 1st Gen Meteor Lake and Raptor Lake H/U series will be the "Ultra" and "Non-Ultra" notifiers. The Intel Meteor Lake U/H series will fall under the "Core Ultra" branding in the Core 5 Ultra, Core 7 Ultra & Core 9 Ultra series while the Raptor Lake U/H series will fall under the "Core" branding in Core 3, Core 5, and Core 7 series.

For the 14th Gen series that utilizes the older naming scheme, Intel will have its current naming scheme intact. The two families to utilize the naming scheme will be the Raptor Lake-S Refresh "Desktop" and Raptor Lake-HX "Refresh" Laptop" lineups. Both families aim for the mainstream and high-end segment with Raptor Lake-HX refresh specifically being an enthusiast laptop segment & utilizes the same die SKUs as the desktop family.

It will definitely be a bit weird to have Raptor Lake part of both the older 14th Gen "Core i" and the new 1st Gen "Core" branding. Hopefully, Intel will have a more clear way of ending this confusion at launch because right now, the older naming scheme looks and sounds much better.

But it is also understandable why Intel and AMD are approaching these new branding and naming choices and that has to do with multiple generations of CPUs launching at the same time with entirely different CPU architectures and product positioning. It will also be interesting what the desktop and high-end HX series get called under the new naming scheme because the "Ultra" segment has already been taken up by the mainstream parts.

News Sources: Videocardz, Harukaze5719