Hardware leaker @momomo_us, spotted material from Intel, provides technical details on the chips' requirements and spec. There was also some information on compatibility with Alder Lake, the 12th-gen processors that Raptor Lake will likely succeed.

This is the first time we have had solid evidence that Raptor Lake is arriving, and it will replace Alder Lake.  It will use the same platform – although since Alder Lake brings in a new design and socket requiring new motherboards, that is less surprising.

So we have Rocket Lake, which is about to debut, then have Alder Lake (10nm) coming later in 2021, bringing changes in switching up the whole design (adopting a hybrid model of big cores and small power-efficient cores).

Raptor Lake looks like a refresh of Alder Lake, honing and tweaking still on 10nm. Intel does not start to do something impressive until the 14th-gen chips, Meteor Lake will make a bigger splash as this is where Intel theoretically changes gear and hits 7nm. However, it is not going to be that impressive by the time Intel hits that target.

While Raptor Lake may 'only' turn out to be a refresh of Alder Lake, it should still bring a substantial IPC (instructions per clock) performance boost, and there are bonuses for gamers.