A new Intel CPU has just leaked, and it’s among the more intriguing new processors we’ve seen in some time. The Intel Processor 310 is a brand new product based on the company’s latest Raptor Lake-S architecture, but it has just two cores.
This tiny amount of processing cores stands in stark contrast to most of the rest of the company’s Raptor Lake lineup, with its Intel Core i-branded chips bottoming out at four cores and rising to 24 cores for its flagship Core i9 14900K. As such, it’s fair to say this new Intel chip won’t be a best gaming CPU contender. However, there’s enough here that makes us wonder just what it would be like to use such a lowly chip as a gaming CPU.
Crucially, the new CPU does appear to include support for Hyper-Threading, which allows each core of the CPU to handle two application threads at a time, in effect appearing to your system as – and somewhat acting as – a quad-core chip. This factor alone means that the chip stands a chance of at least running most modern games, which wouldn’t be the case with a purely dual-core chip, as many games now require at least a quad-core processor.
The details of this chip were spotted on the Geekbench website – a regular source of CPU leaks, as tests using the app can automatically update the website with the test result – X (formerly Twitter) user @BenchLeaks noticed the new data for this one. The full test run shows the performance, name, and other details of the CPU, as shown further down this page.
Notably, the new processor can run at up to 4.1GHz, which is well below the 6GHz of its fastest Raptor Lake chips but is still a perfectly decent pace for lighter workloads. The chip also has 6MB of L3 cache – compare that to the 96MB of the AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D, for instance. It’s also shown using 8GB of DDR4 RAM running at 3200MT/s, configured in a single-channel arrangement, meaning there’s only one stick of memory.
While this chip is technically still a new, unannounced model, we actually can surmise several more details about it as Intel also announced a near identical chip called the Intel Processor 300 last year, the details of which are on Intel’s website here. This chip uses just the P-Cores of Intel’s modern Raptor Lake architecture, so there are no power-efficient E-Cores, and it’s rated to use just 46W of power. The 310 just appears to be a very slightly faster-clocked version of that chip.
As for the performance of this CPU, the use of a single-channel memory configuration in this test will potentially limit its performance a little, but its Geekbench single-threaded score of 2,152 is actually still enough to beat the likes of the AMD Ryzen 7 5800X and hold its own against other low-level Intel Core i3 chips. However, its multi-threaded score of 4,254 is very low, with only the likes of the Intel Core i3-10100 (a four-year-old chip based on an old architecture) being beaten by it.
We don’t yet know the Intel Processor 310 price, but considering the Intel Processor 300’s recommended price range is $82-$92, we’d hope this chip wouldn’t cost any more than $10 extra. An exact release date is also not yet known.
So, in the meantime, we’d recommend reading our Intel Core i5-12400F review to see the best cheap gaming CPU we currently recommend. It costs just $110, which isn’t much more money, and it has six P-Cores with a 4.4GHz boost clock.
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