Intel's upcoming Raptor Lake CPUs could use 25% less power and become more efficient thanks to D-LVR

Intel's brand-new Alder Lake CPUs like the Intel Core i7-12700K (from US$459 on Amazon) are barely on the market, and we already witness the emergence of new rumors and speculations regarding Intel's next processor generation known under the codename "Raptor Lake", which could be released in 2022. According to a report by Tom's Hardware, Raptor Lake could see the introduction of a new type of voltage regulation and therefore offer significant improvements in terms of energy efficiency.

Intel's patented technology is called "digital linear voltage regulator", or D-LVR in short. This component is intended to notably reduce the power consumption of Raptor Lake CPUs. Simply said, Intel adds another voltage clamp in addition to the regular voltage regulator. According to Intel's example, this clamp is active when a CPU requires a current of less than 40A, which should be the case in most mobile use cases. This consequently reduces the power drawn by the CPU. The exact technical details of this D-LVR implementation are laid out in Intel's according patent publiation.

Intel expects that this approach reduces the power consumption of Raptor Lake CPUs by 20 to 25%, which would also result in better performance which could see improvements of around 7%. In the end, Intel appears to be focused on finally catching up to AMD's Ryzen Zen 3 processors, which are currently superior in terms of energy efficiency. Mobile Raptor Lake chipsets will also introduce support for LPDDR5X RAM.