Motherboards already support unreleased and unannounced 13th Gen Intel processors

Enlarge / A Core i5-12400 processor based on the Alder Lake architecture. Intel's next-gen desktop processors will be compatible with nearly all of the same motherboards as Alder Lake. Andrew Cunningham

Intel's next-generation desktop processors have yet to be released or even announced. Codenamed "Raptor Lake" and likely to be branded as 13th Gen Core chips, rumors suggest we'll see them in September or October, but Intel hasn't said anything officially yet.

However, this does not prevent motherboard manufacturers from updating their existing motherboards to support new chips. Over the past month, Asus, ASRock, MSI, and (most recently) Gigabyte have all released BIOS updates supporting next-gen processors in their current Z690, H670, B660, and H610 series motherboards or announced plans to do soon.

This does two things for PC builders. For those who have already built PCs based on 12th Gen Alder Lake processors, this means a guaranteed upgrade path to 13th Gen processors for people who want or need to run the latest and fastest chips. . More importantly, it means people can skip the new Z790 motherboards and opt for cheaper, sometimes discounted, 600-series motherboards if they want to build an entirely new system when the Raptor Lake processors come out.

Once the Raptor Lake chips are officially released, these initial BIOS updates will likely be followed by others that add more features, fix bugs, and improve performance. Asus, on the other hand, says the initial BIOS update "is for power-on use only and not suitable for performance testing".

Intel's chipsets and motherboards support two generations of processors each before being replaced, often coinciding with a physical processor socket change. But it's not always the case; budget-oriented H410 and B460 chipset-based motherboards generally could not be upgraded to work with 11th-gen desktop processors, even though the sockets were physically compatible and the higher-end H470 and Z470 chipsets could support 10th and 11th-generation chips. Motherboard manufacturers release BIOS updates for all of their 600-series boards, not just the most expensive ones, so this segmentation issue shouldn't exist this time.

Intel's Raptor Lake architecture is expected to be a relatively minor update to Alder Lake, and technical documentation suggests that the E-cores and P-cores of Raptor Lake chips use the same architecture as their Intel counterparts. Alder Lake. That doesn't mean Raptor Lake won't be faster - there are plenty of things you can do to boost a chip's speed beyond updating its architecture, including increasing the number of cores and clock speeds. Intel has used these methods to improve the performance of its Skylake architecture for years.

Intel won't be the only processor maker offering upgrades this fall, either. AMD's Ryzen 7000 series and Zen 4 architecture will be here before the end of the year, and rumors suggest that Apple also plans to launch new M2 Pro and M2 Max processors around the same time. /p>