Raptor Lake Refresh Brings A Few New Tricks

Do You Want Thunderbolt 5, Because That’s How You Get TB5

The details, or at least some of them, have been revealed about the Raptor Lake refresh and what it will bring to the desktop and laptop.   The refresh includes support for Thunderbolt 5 and a feature called Application Performance Optimization which seems to be designed to provide optimizations for certain specific games.  There are few specifications about APO available at the moment, so it is hard to guess what games might be supported.

One inclusion in the Raptor Lake refresh is an i7 with a Turbo clock of 6GHz which will be attractive for those that feel the need for extreme frequencies.  The biggest news in the announcement has been saved for last, and that is the pricing.  While Intel is charging a bit more for the refreshed chips, the increase is nowhere near as bad as expected.   For $294 you will be able to pick up a 14-core, 20-thread Core i5-1400KF, while the top of the line Core i9-14900K will cost you $589 for 24-cores, and 32-threads of performance.