Intel’s Lunar Lake (14th-gen) processors have already been spotted in GPU drivers, perhaps indicating that the chip giant is serious about advancing its CPU roadmap as swiftly as possible to counter the

clear threat from AMD

(considering its rival is already dominant on the desktop, and advancing in laptop territory too).

Videocardz

spotted that a denizen of

Reddit

(‘stblr’ – whose name we’ve seen pop up with

hardware leaks before

) posted a bunch of info dug up from GPU drivers (Windows and macOS), with the codename Lunar Lake mentioned.

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The supposed 14th-gen range will have Gen13 graphics, the same as Intel’s DG3 discrete graphics card (which is also mentioned in the leak – remember that DG1 is just out in the form of

Intel’s Iris Xe Max GPU for laptops

, and

DG2 will run with Xe high-performance gaming architecture

next year, so it’s not yet clear where DG3 will fit in). Obviously treat all this with a suitable degree of caution.

The Lunar Lake codename briefly emerged earlier in 2020 when ‘Moore’s Law is Dead’ aired some whisperings about Lunar Lake on his YouTube channel, but this is the first purportedly official (sort of) glimpse of the 14th-gen CPUs.

Lunar landing

Considering that Comet Lake is the 10th-gen, these chips are the fourth in line successors from Intel’s current line-up. Rocket Lake (still 14nm) is next to bat in early 2021, followed by Alder Lake, and then Meteor Lake (which was

recently spotted in Linux code

) – and purportedly Lunar Lake will land after that.

Alder Lake is expected to

initially emerge late in 2021

with Intel’s current plans – although we have our doubts – and this will represent the jump to 10nm desktop chips (finally).

Meteor Lake could theoretically follow late in 2022, then, and Lunar Lake – if it is indeed the successor to the former – could possibly turn up in 2023, although these timeframes could be very optimistic. Especially when you consider that the most recent 10th-gen processors ended up being delayed and releasing later in 2020 than expected. All of this is pretty much speculation and guesswork though, and as mentioned, chuck in a heap of salt.

That said, Intel will certainly want to be driving hard to catch up with AMD, given that Ryzen 5000 processors are looking seriously impressive, and launch in a few days’ time on November 5. And AMD will only build upon that momentum…

The good news for Intel is that we’ve seen suggestions that

Rocket Lake could turn out to be a big step forward

compared to Comet Lake, particularly for gamers.

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