Intel is discontinuing its boxed overclockable Core i5, i7, and i9 Raptor Lake CPUs. Every K-series chip in the lineup will be discontinued on May 24th, 2024, after which vendors will no longer be able to purchase them.
Intel's product change document states that the last product discontinuance order date and non-cancelable/non-returnable cut-off points will start on May 24th, 2024, and final shipments will end on June 28th, 2024.
We don't expect 13th Gen K-series CPU supply to evaporate instantly but expect availability to gradually dissipate, along with price increases as vendors move to sell off all remaining overclockable Raptor Lake CPU inventory. That said, most 12th-Gen Alder Lake CPUs are still priced very competitively, even to this day, so we could potentially see the same behavior with these discontinued Raptor Lake CPUs (until stock inevitably runs out).
However, one interesting tidbit we've discovered is that it appears that Intel has not discontinued its Alder Lake CPU lineup, even though it's a full generation older than Raptor Lake. If you check out Intel's Ark website, you'll find that all its Alder Lake chips are rated as "launched" rather than "discontinued." We have contacted Intel for validation and will update the article when we get a response.
Raptor Lake had a very strong launch back in 2022. Raptor Lake was an immense upgrade over Alder Lake, sporting significantly higher clock speeds, more cache, and double the number of E-cores on most models. As a result, gaming performance and multi-threaded performance were substantially better, enabling Intel to outperform AMD's Ryzen 7000 CPUs at the time.
Even to this day, Raptor Lake is still very competitive, thanks to Raptor Lake Refresh. However, Raptor Lake Refresh did almost nothing to improve performance over Raptor Lake, except for the i7 SKUs, which got four more E-cores. To make matters worse, Raptor Lake Refresh was and still is priced higher than Raptor Lake, making 13th-Gen a more cost-effective option.
It's unfortunate to see Raptor Lake's overclockable chips go. But the good news is that 14th-gen CPUs are starting to come down in price. Raptor Lake's vanilla SKUs are also still on sale and haven't been discontinued, but it's only a matter of time until that occurs. Here's the list of chips that have been sent off into the sunset:
