Intel’s Beast Lake monster gaming CPUs have been canceled. Could rumored Razer Lake chips fill the void?
Intel has a new Lake in the pipeline – in other words, a processor family name – and that new arrival is Razer Lake.
Video cardz noted that leaker HXL posted on X to reveal the new codename that Intel is apparently considering for its future desktop chips.
MSDTLGA1700: ADL-S, RPL-S, RPL-S RLGA1851: ARL-S, ARL-S R(❌)LGAxxxx: NVL-S? RZL-S?🤔 https://t.co/S4F8JCG2HrSeptember 23, 2024
Another known hardware leaker on X, Bionic Squashand then noted that Razer Lake is indeed a correct codename for the CPU family that comes after Nova Lake.
If this is true, then Arrow Lake desktop CPUs (ARL-S, with the ‘S’ standing for desktop) are coming soon. And as we recently heard, HXL confirmed that ARL-S R, which stands for the rumored Refresh, has been canceled.
Arrow Lake uses a new CPU socket and we don’t know what else that socket will support, but Nova Lake, coming in 2026, will move to a new socket. After Nova Lake desktop (NVL-S), we’ll get Razer Lake (RZL-S) in that same socket, according to HXL.
Take all of this with some caution, of course, as you would any rumors that percolate out of the rumor mill. With Nova Lake reportedly coming out in 2026, we could theorize that Razer Lake could come out in 2027 or 2028.
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This is quite interesting from the perspective of previous Intel CPU rumors, because what we had previously heard was that Nova Lake would be followed by Beast Lake. Nova Lake was indeed presented as version 1.0 of Intel’s Royal Core project – featuring Rentable Units (gigantic performance cores that can be split into units, replacing hyperthreading) – and Beast Lake was supposed to be Royal Core 1.1.
With the Royal Core concept reportedly scrapped, we now apparently have Razer Lake instead of Beast Lake. Beast Lake was supposed to be a generation that would usher in monster gaming CPUs, so could Razer Lake be a similar idea? Well, the name certainly has a gaming theme…
In all seriousness, we have no idea what Razer Lake might be – if anything at all – and no details are given here other than the socket. The name seems odd, considering it’s Razer Lake and not ‘Razor’ Lake, and at first glance it seems to step on the toes of a certain maker of gaming peripherals and laptops. (What’s next – Risen Lake?)
We’d say Razer was misspelled (or misheard), but a second leaker clearly confirms the name is spelled that way. And we’re not even close to April Fools’ Day yet. Razer Lake makes no sense to us, unless it’s “razing” in the sense of utterly destroying the opposition (again, possibly a gaming reference?).
What also seems odd here is that we only have one generation of processors that use the LGA 1851 socket that Arrow Lake introduces. It would be odd if Intel had a line of motherboards that were only compatible with one generation of Core CPUs, honestly – am I missing something here? Is Arrow Lake Refresh being replaced with something, rather than going straight to Nova Lake on a different socket? Or is Nova Lake somehow staying on LGA 1851? (HXL certainly doesn’t think so.)
This leak raises more questions than it answers, so we guess we’ll just have to wait and see if anyone else comes forward with more information about Razer Lake – or whatever comes after Arrow Lake. Are we really going straight from Arrow to Nova Lake?
