Motherboards already support unreleased, unannounced 13th generation Intel processors.

Intel’s next generation desktop processors have yet to be released or even announced. We’re rumored to see them codenamed “Raptor Lake”and likely branded 13th Gen Core sometime in September or October, but Intel hasn’t officially announced anything just yet.

However, this does not prevent motherboard manufacturers from updating their existing motherboards to support new chips. Last month, Asus, ASRock, MSI, and (most recently) Gigabyte either released BIOS updates to support next-gen processors in their current-gen Z690, H670, B660, and H610 series motherboards, or announced plans to do so soon.

This does two things for PC builders. For those who have already built PCs with 12th Gen Alder Lake processors, this means a guaranteed upgrade path to 13th Gen processors for people who want or need the latest and fastest processors. More importantly, this means people will be able to ditch brand new Z790 motherboards and opt for cheaper, sometimes on sale, 600-series motherboards if they want to build a whole new system when Raptor Lake processors arrive.

Once the Raptor Lake chips are officially released, these initial BIOS updates will likely be followed by others that add more features, fix bugs, and improve performance. Asus, for its part, says that the initial BIOS update “is for inclusion purposes only and is not suitable for performance testing.”

Intel chipsets and motherboards support two CPU generations each before being replaced, which often coincides with a physical change to the CPU socket. But it is not always the case; Motherboards based on the budget H410 and B460 chipsets generally could not be upgraded to work with 11th generation desktop processors, even though the sockets were physically compatible and the higher end H470 and Z470 chipsets could support both 10 th and 11th generation. gene chips. Motherboard manufacturers are releasing BIOS updates for all of their 600-series boards, not just the expensive ones, so this segmentation issue shouldn’t exist this time around.

The Intel Raptor Lake architecture is expected to be a relatively minor upgrade over Alder Lake, with white paper suggesting that both E-cores and P-cores in Raptor Lake chips use the same architecture as their Alder Lake counterparts. That’s not to say that Raptor Lake won’t be faster – there are many things you can do to increase the speed of a chip beyond updating its architecture, including increasing the number of cores and clock speeds, and Intel has used these techniques to improve processor performance. its Skylake architecture for many years.

Intel also won’t be the only processor maker to roll out updates this fall. The AMD Ryzen 7000 series and Zen 4 architecture will arrive before the end of the year, and Apple is also rumored to release the new M2 Pro and M2 Max processors in the same time frame.