It’s been a busy time for Intel leaks, and a handful more have recently emerged. One is for Team Blue’s upcoming Lunar Lake laptop CPUs, which are expected to improve battery life, and another is for the rumored Raptor Lake Refresh flagship (say that quickly).
Let’s start with the notebook world and the spillage caused by leaker HXL on X (previously Twitter), as reported by Tom’s Hardware. This image depicts a Lunar Lake sample CPU running on Windows.
Specifically, what we see in the above tweet is a screenshot of Task Manager with information about the Lunar Lake chip in the PC – albeit, as with any leaks, we must be wary of the chance that it is a fake.
At any rate, the leaker claims that this is a ‘A1’ Lunar Lake sample, implying that it is an early version and not typical of the final silicon found in these laptop processors.
It depicts a CPU with eight cores (and eight threads, indicating no hyper-threading) operating at 2.8GHz. This appears to be a setup of four performance cores and four efficiency cores (albeit the latter do not support hyper-threading, while the former generally does).
The processor also contains an NPU (like with Meteor Lake) for AI acceleration, and we get a look at the cache loadouts, which have a bit of a wrinkle. The L3 cache is smaller than the L2 cache, which would ordinarily be the opposite case. We’ll return in a moment to address that and the other specifications.
However, the second piece of information is that Intel’s speculated Core i9-14900KS, a special edition of the current Raptor Lake Refresh flagship, the 14900K, has been sighted at a French online retailer.
Another X leaker, @momomo_us, highlighted the listing for the flagship model, which will run at 6.2GHz, with the CPU priced at €750 (including sales tax).
That equates to just over $800 in the United States – or ₹66958.59, AU$1,240 – but don’t be alarmed by a projected 35% price increase above the MSRP of the current flagship. For starters, the French store may have utilized a placeholder price (most likely), and even so, this will not translate straight to prices in other locations (particularly the United States).
If we look at US pricing, the 14900KS should be roughly 20% more expensive than the 13900KS. However, Intel may charge a somewhat higher premium – but not by 35%.
Analysis: It’s all about time
Regarding the Lunar Lake CPU sighting, the 2.8GHz boost speed appears to be low, but this might be attributed to the chip being an early prototype. The peculiarities with the cache could be due to a misunderstanding of the amounts by Task Manager in Windows, which is not uncommon given the early working hardware. The original leaker (on Zhihu.com, a Chinese Q&A community forum) feels the reported cache levels are correct, but we would add a lot of seasoning to that.
Regarding the lack of hyper-threading, it is possible that the feature was disabled on this sample processor. Alternatively, this could indicate that Lunar Lake will follow in the rumored footsteps of Arrow Lake, which is allegedly falling hyper-threading. We shall see.
Regarding the Lunar Lake CPU sighting, the 2.8GHz boost speed appears to be low, but this might be attributed to the chip being an early prototype. The peculiarities with the cache could be due to a misunderstanding of the amounts by Task Manager in Windows, which is not uncommon given the early working hardware. The original leaker (on Zhihu.com, a Chinese Q&A community forum) feels the reported cache levels are correct, but we would add a lot of seasoning to that.
Regarding the lack of hyper-threading, it is possible that the feature was disabled on this sample processor. Alternatively, this could indicate that Lunar Lake will follow in the rumored footsteps of Arrow Lake, which is allegedly falling
We’ve lately heard various speculations about the 14900KS, including a photo, a leaked benchmark, and reports that it will be available in the middle of March. This additional information on the supercharged flagship adds to the possibility that we will see this CPU next month.
