Intel has secretly increased the recommended retail prices for some of its Alder Lake processors, raising the suggested retail price by 10%.
This isn’t entirely an unexpected move, as Intel signaled its intention to increase the prices of most of its chip products by 10% to 20% last year – we just weren’t sure if it was for consumer processors. Now we know it does, but the price hike leaves us in the odd position that some Alder Lake CPUs are now more expensive than their newer, faster Raptor Lake counterparts.
How Tom’s gear (opens in a new tab) spotted, Intel has not formally announced any price increase for the 12th generation series, but has updated the recommended prices in its Ark database, which lists all Core family processors (and other products), to show the mentioned 10% price increase.
This means the flagship Core i9-12900K now has a suggested retail price of $648 in the US, up $59 from its previous price of $589. This compares to the current generation Core i9-13900K, which still has a suggested retail price of $589 as per Intel’s database.
Similarly, other Alder Lake models are now more expensive, such as the Core i7-12700K with a new MSRP of $450 (down from $409), compared to the Core i7-13700K which is still $409.
The Core i5-12600K, Core i5-12400 and Core i3-12100 also had a 10% mark on the previous MSRP.
Analysis: Raptor Lake is sure to be the next excursion destination, and soon?
The first thing to note is that this has only happened in Intel’s product database, and the 10% increase is yet to be reflected in actual retailers selling these Alder Lake CPUs. In other words, as you’d expect, the Core i9-12900K can still be purchased for much less than the Core i9-13900K (at Newegg in the US, for example, the former costs $410 and the latter $610, at least at the time of writing).
These price increases will take some time to affect actual retailer inventory, but make no mistake – they will reveal themselves over time as Intel is now charging more for these Alder Lake chips. Similarly, while it’s obviously rather ridiculous for Alder Lake products to be more expensive than Raptor Lake’s faster silicon, this situation won’t last long.
We expect this 10 percent increase – as it will surely be the same level of increase used – to come to Raptor Lake processors soon, because otherwise it just doesn’t make sense. We imagine Intel wants to raise Alder Lake first, since the Raptor Lake CPUs are so new, Team Blue wants to give it a bit more time before they raise the suggested retail price on them so as not to create any bad feeling around these price increases (or at least them minimize).
Of course, this is a broad signal to consumers to expect Intel’s CPUs to become more expensive in the near future, and that means the company will look less competitive with AMD, which has recently slashed the prices of its Ryzen 7000 CPUs.
Prices for AMD Zen 4 processors dropped significantly on Black Friday, and these discounts continue throughout the holiday season, and even now, some big price cuts still apply to many Ryzen 7000 models.
Given that cheaper AM5 motherboards are expected to arrive soon enough, and the total cost of upgrading to Zen 4 will be further reduced – from an admittedly (relatively) expensive level – Intel could leave the door open for AMD to get back into the game with Ryzen 7000. This is something AMD has been fighting against Raptor Lake so far, which was primarily the reason for the aforementioned price cuts.