Intel Raptor Lake forever alive. A new model has appeared stealthily

Although the Intel Raptor Lake family debuted at the end of 2022, the Americans decided to quietly expand it with an additional system for laptops. The Core i7-13645HX model has just appeared on the website. At first glance, it looks like any other, but the devil, as usual, is in the details. The memory controller and graphics system have been improved.

We get 14 cores (6P+8E) and 20 threads, 24 MB cache and a clock speed of up to 4.9 GHz with a TDP of 55 W. All in Intel 7 lithography (10 nm). So it looks almost identical to the long-available Core i7-13650HX. However, the new CPU supports DDR5-5600 instead of DDR5-4800, which means an increase in bandwidth from 76.8 GB/s to 89.6 GB/s.

The second significant advantage of the new model is a more powerful iGPU. Intel used UHD Graphics P730 here, a system with 32 CU. For comparison, the previously mentioned Core i7-13650HX only offers 16 CU. Of course, the performance will still not be at the level of a dedicated GeForce or Radeon, but when playing older/lighter games or video processing, the difference will be noticeable.

On the one hand, more choice is always better, on the other hand, this is a rather strange step. Not only has the Panther Lake series recently debuted on the market, but a few days ago Arrow Lake Refresh was also announced. Therefore, the Core i7-13645HX only makes sense if its price is attractive enough to allow the creation of cheap gaming laptops. However, as of now, neither Intel nor its partners have mentioned any specific machines.