Summary
Though it is not set to hit the global market until early 2024, theIntel Core i3-14100has gone on sale in China a little early, according to reports on social media. This latest 14th-generation CPU fromIntelis aimed toward the budget market, with a price point starting at around $120 for a quad-core processor with low power consumption.
The news of this early release came over a month afterIntel launched the 14th-generation Raptor Lake CPU lineup. The new Raptor Lake CPUs have been marketed as both a refresh of the previous 13th-gen and a direct competitor to AMD’s Ryzen 7000 series in both price and performance. While the gains over the 13th-gen CPUs have been slight, the prices have not moved much between generations, which has not sat well with consumers. But with Black Friday in full swing, it remains to be seen what Intel will do for both generations of CPUs to entice would-be buyers in the short term.
However, one part of the world has already acquired Intel’s latest budget offering. According to sources courtesy of Wccftech, the Intel Core i3-14100 is available in China for around $120 at a Chinese third-party retailer called Goofish, and the available units have been marked as qualification samples. While this means that these processors are not intended for the general market, retail chips and qualification samples have usually had little to no differences between them in terms of performance. As for the specifications, the i3-14100 is a quad-core CPU with eight threads and all four cores listed as power cores. While it lacks the efficiency cores ofother Intel CPUs currently available, the Intel Core i3-14100 has a 3.5GHz base clock speed, which can be boosted up to 4.7 GHz, and has a base power draw of around 60W. Compared to its predecessor, the i3-13100, this 14th-generation Intel CPU has a slightly higher base and boosted clock speed for a similar price.
This means that despite lacking cores, the low power draw and price point may make the Intel Core i3-14100 worth considering for budget builds. By comparison, the i5-14400F has six power cores, four efficiency cores, and a similar boost clock speed for around $220. In addition, AMD’s previous-generation Ryzen 5 5500 is a similarly priced six-core CPU and has a base clock speed of 3.6 GHz, which makes ita viable alternative for budget gamers.
Though it remains a mystery how it will stack up in terms of gaming at a resolution of 1080p, the Intel Core i3-14100 will be officially released afterIntel Core Ultra Meteor Lake laptopshit the market. Only time will tell how consumers will react.
Intel Core i3-13100
The Intel Core i3-13100 is a 4-Core, 8-Thread Raptor Lake-based CPU that is decent for entry-level gaming while offering access to both, newer tech and a solid upgrade path thanks to it being from the latest 13th-generation Intel CPU offerings. It delivers acceptable single-core and somewhat lackluster multicore performance given its limitations of being a quad-core CPU consisting entirely of Rocket Lake P-Cores.
