Several months after initial rumors revealed that the 14900KS might feature a 6.2GHz boost clock, a spec sheet leak from @momomo_us on X (Twitter) has given us a second confirmation that the 14900KS will most likely feature the blisteringly high CPU clock. The i9-14900KS is reportedly an upcoming CPU from Intel that will succeed the previous-gen i9-13900KS and be the first chip to break the stock-clocked 6GHz barrier.
The leak revealed detailed specifications of the i9-14900KS, from its frequencies, down to its temperature limits, cache capacities, and TDP. If this leak is indeed legit, Intel will yet again break a frequency record by having the first CPU ever to break the 6GHz barrier without overclocking. The i9-14900KS is the first chip to sport a turbo boost frequency beyond 6GHz, with the company’s older i9-14900K flagship and previous-generation i9-13900KS featuring a turbo boost frequency of 6GHz flat. AMD is well behind in the frequency race, with its highest-clocking Zen 4 CPU hitting 5.7GHz.
Besides clock speed, the leaked spec sheet reveals that the i9-14900KS will sport the exact same specifications as its i9-14900K counterpart, including its “Tetracosa-core” 24-core configuration, 32MB of L2 cache, 36MB of L3 cache, and UHD 770 integrated graphics. This is not surprising, since previous ‘KS’ models have similarly stuck to the specs of their i9-14900K counterparts.
The 6.2GHz boost clock shows how successful Intel is at squeezing as much frequency out of its CPU architectures. As a reminder, Raptor Lake Refresh is technically a refresh of a refresh, with 13th Gen Raptor Lake being a refreshed version of 12th Gen Alder Lake. From Alder Lake’s i9-12900KS to the i9-14900KS, Intel has managed to squeeze 700MHz out of its first hybrid CPU design, with slight tweaks to its P-core design (Raptor Cove) and optimizations to its Intel 7 process node.
However, if we’ve learned anything we know all of this extra frequency juice comes at the cost of power — and lots of it. Intel’s 14th Gen Raptor Lake Refresh CPUs are among the most power-hungry CPUs to date in the hybrid-CPU era. In our testing, we found the i9-14900K can pull up to 50W more watts than the i9-13900K, and that chip already hits well over 200W under heavy workloads. In fact, previous reports have specified that the i9-14900KS could pull up to a whopping 410W under max load.
It’s worth mentioning that these chips only pull these crazy high-power numbers with the default profiles in motherboard firmware. If you enforce Intel’s specified power limits manually in BIOS, these chips will consume far less power (at the cost of multi-core CPU performance). Enforcing default power limits can not only save power and make the chips run more efficiently, but it can also improve stability for chips that have lost the silicon lottery.
Pricing information was not published in the leaked spec sheet, but previous reports indicate that the new ‘KS’ chip will share the same $699 MSRP as its predecessor. This means that the i9-14900KS won’t have a price increase, but it will still be a very expensive chip regardless. By comparison, the outgoing i9-14900K costs ‘just’ $549.99 on Newegg at the time of writing. Spending an additional $150 for a measly 200Mhz is a lot for a little, especially when you could probably overclock a 14900K to 6.1GHz or 6.2GHz on your own.
Information pertaining to a release date was also not shown, but previous rumors speculate that the chip could arrive in less than a month. That sounds about right, because Intel is also busy preparing its 15th Gen Arrow Lake-S for launch later this year. Intel has to launch its 14900KS as soon as possible so its sales don’t get cannibalized by its next-generation parts.