13th Gen CPUs and motherboards creep ever closer.
It seems like we’re still digesting the release of 12th Gen CPUs, motherboards and DDR5 memory and yet here we are talking about 13th Gen Raptor Lake and 700 series chipsets! There’s always something new coming for PC enthusiasts.
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700 series motherboards are in development, and they could be further along than expected. Biostar has already submitted the names of its next generation motherboards to the Eurasion Economic Commission. The EEC manages technical regulation matters and these listings are an important step towards being approved for sale in the member countries.
The list includes many Z790 and B760 boards. Other than the names of the boards, there's nothing else we can infer from the listing, other than to say that perhaps 13th Gen and 700 series chipset motherboards are a little closer to release than we thought.
Raptor Lake and 700 series motherboards aren't expected to deliver dramatic feature upgrades. Perhaps the main thing to look forward to is PCIe 5.0 M.2 support. Though there aren't any PCIe 5.0 drives on sale now, when they do come, owners of 600 series chipset motherboards will either have to run them in PCIe 4.0 mode or use an add-in card in a PCIe 5.0 expansion slot.
Performance upgrades aren't expected to be dramtic either. In addition to the likelihood of an increase in cache sizes and E core count, there’s the possibility they will retain DDR4 memory support. They’ll likely use an optimized Intel 7 (10nm SuperFin) process which would deliver either increased core clocks or improved energy efficiency. We know Intel’s manufacturing is performing very well, as evidenced by the release of the Core i9 12900KS CPU which can hit 5.5 GHz.
13th Gen CPUs and accompanying motherboards are expected to be released later this year. They’ll go head to head with AMD’s Zen 4 CPUs which are also scheduled for release around the same time.
