TECH NEWS – There’s a very simple reason why people are looking for the previous generation of Raptor Lake CPUs…

Intel’s desktop CPU business isn’t doing well, considering the company just revealed that Raptor Lake has managed to generate more interest than newer CPU families. Intel has been losing ground to AMD in the processor space lately. Newer architectures like the Arrow Lake Core Ultra 200S are not only disappointing in terms of performance, but Intel is finding it difficult to maintain a CPU market against competitors like AMD. (Also, the new naming scheme is not very easy to follow…)

In a recent business report, Intel’s Product CEO Michelle Johnston Holtahus revealed that the Raptor Lake products (N-1, N-2) are getting much more attention compared to the Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake products, raising questions about the company’s approach to the market. The answer is simple: these products are less expensive…

“What we’re really seeing is a lot more demand from our customers for N-1 and N-2 products so that they can continue to deliver system price points that consumers are really demanding. As we’ve all talked about, the macroeconomic concerns and the tariffs have everyone kind of hedging their bets and what they need to have from an inventory perspective. And Raptor Lake is a great piece. Meteor Lake and Lunar Lake are also great, but they come with a much higher cost structure, not only for us, but at the system ASP price points for our OEMs as well,” Holtahus said.

Demand for current-generation Intel CPUs is so bad that consumers are now turning to a product line plagued by instability issues. We’ve written before about hbps affecting Intel’s 14th and 13th generation CPUs, causing widespread crashes and degradation – a brand new fiasco that has yet to be resolved. Demand for Raptor Lake has reached the point where Intel is now reporting a shortage of the Intel 7 nodes that these CPUs used to use.

Demand for Raptor Lake is also high because buyers are turning to CPUs post-Trump tariffs to try to grab old processors at old prices that are still absolutely adequate today. Given that the supply chain is expected to raise the price of parts soon, consumers are obviously getting ahead of the situation by buying Intel’s older processors, so there is a lot of interest in Raptor Lake in the market…

Source: WCCFTech, Cloudfront