Intel’s new 14th Gen CPUs arrive on October 17th with up to 6GHz out of the box

theverge.com:

By Tom Warren, a senior editor covering Microsoft, PC gaming, console, and tech. He founded WinRumors, a site dedicated to Microsoft news, before joining The Verge in 2012.

Intel is launching its 14th Gen desktop processors this week, promising boost frequencies of 6GHz out of the box for its flagship Core i9-14900K. Known as Raptor Lake Refresh, Intel is maintaining pricing for its 14th Gen Core i9, i7, and i5 processors this year, sticking to the same retail pricing as the 13th Gen when these new chips launch on October 17th.

The 6GHz boost on the new Core i9-14900K makes it the “fastest desktop processor at volume,” according to Intel, referring to its special-edition 13900KS that first broke the 6GHz barrier at stock speeds last year but didn’t ship at volume. The more interesting 14th Gen processor in this refresh could be the Core i7-14700K, though, thanks to a significant bump to its efficiency cores.

This year, Intel is increasing the core count on its Core i7 processor, moving from eight efficiency and eight performance cores to 12 efficiency and eight performance cores. That’s 20 cores in total for the Core i7-14700K, close to the 24 found on the Core i9-14900K. The base clocks on the P-core are 3.4GHz and 2.5GHz on the E-core for the 14700K, the same that we saw on last year’s 13700K. These added efficiency cores should help with creator tasks and even gaming performance for titles that take advantage of multithreading.

Intel has some favorable benchmarks against AMD’s Ryzen 9 7950X and even its own previous Core i7 chips for creator tasks, but we’ll have to wait and see how this new Core i7-14700K compares to AMD’s impressive 7800X3D chip for gaming benchmarks.

Over on the flagship side, Intel’s Core