Intel's upcoming Raptor Lake chipset specs may have been sneaked in the latest PCH update

Intel is back in business with the release of the 12th gen Alder Lake processors, at least on the desktop side, and the company is already looking forward to releasing the next gen codenamed Raptor Lake later this year. This 13th gen family was recently demoed during Intel’s Investor Meeting 2022, promising up to double digit performance boosts both in single and multi-core workloads, plus even more hybrid cores. Intel will keep socket compatibility between Alder Lake and Raptor Lake, but will also release a new 700-series chipset family along with updated motherboard designs, which may also feature some welcome upgrades according to Japanese site Uniko’s Hardware that is speculating based on Intel’s latest Platform Controller Hub revision.

The main upgrades for the upcoming 700-series chipsets appear to be focused on the PCIe 4.0 lane and USB 3.2 port counts. Based on the updated PCH lists, Uniko’s Hardware is suggesting that Intel’s B760, H770 and Z790 chipsets will benefit from an increase in PCIe 4.0 lanes at the detriment of PCIe 3.0 lanes. Since most GPUs and NVMe SSDs are now supporting PCIe 4.0, the PCIe 3.0 lane reduction should not really pose any problems. As per the PCH document, the B760 chipset would get 4 less PCIe 3.0 lanes (down from 8) and 4 more PCIe 4.0 lanes (up from 6), while the H770 model would get 8 PCIe 3.0 lanes instead of 12 and 16 PCIe 4.0 lanes instead of 12. Top-of-the-line Z790 model is supposed to get 20 PCIe 4.0 lanes up from 12, and subsequently only 8 PCIe 3.0 lanes down from 16.

When it comes to the USB 3.2 ports, only the Z790 would get a maximum of five Gen 2X2 (20 Gbps) connectors (up from 4). Also worth mentioning is that the entry-level H710 model would not see any improvements over the current H610 models. If Uniko’s hardware is right about these upgrades, it will be interesting to see if Intel would suggest any price bump, given that the current DDR5-compatible 600-series motherboards are already relatively expensive.

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