SANTA CLARA, Calif. — Intel has restarted production of its 13th and 14th Generation Core processors, a chip family nearly three years removed from its original launch, specifically to supply the Chinese personal computer market amid an unprecedented global memory shortage that has made the older platform’s compatibility with DDR4 memory a newly valuable asset rather than a legacy limitation.

The move, first reported by ChannelGate, reflects a broader and somewhat counterintuitive trend reshaping the PC component market in 2026: the surging demand for artificial intelligence computing has created a chip shortage so severe across every memory category that manufacturers and consumers in certain markets are turning back to older, DDR4-compatible hardware platforms rather than competing for the limited supply of DDR5 that the AI industry is consuming at record rates.

Intel’s 13th Generation Core processors, based on the Raptor Lake architecture and launched in late 2022, and the 14th Generation Raptor Lake Refresh chips that followed roughly a year later in 2023, both share the same LGA-1700 socket and support both DDR4 and DDR5 memory. That dual-memory support, which Intel built into the platform at a time when DDR5 was still too expensive and scarce for mainstream adoption, has taken on entirely new commercial significance in 2026 because vast amounts of DDR4 memory capacity currently sit underutilized while DDR5 remains under extraordinary demand pressure from data centers and AI accelerator systems.

By restarting Raptor Lake production, Intel can absorb some of that available DDR4 supply and channel it toward PC OEM manufacturers and do-it-yourself PC enthusiasts in mainland China, a market that remains one of the world’s largest consumers of desktop processor hardware across both gaming and productivity computing categories. The restarted production targets specifically those use cases rather than enterprise or workstation applications, positioning the older generation chips as a pragmatic, cost-effective solution for consumers who want capable computing hardware but cannot easily access or afford DDR5-based systems in the current supply environment.

The original 13th Generation Core lineup launched in October 2022 and covered a full product stack from entry-level Core i3 chips to the flagship Core i9-13900KS, which pushed boost frequencies to 6.0 gigahertz, an industry milestone at the time of its release. Intel then shipped the 14th Generation Raptor Lake Refresh in late 2023 on the same LGA-1700 socket, offering moderate performance improvements through targeted adjustments to die-to-die frequency, ring bus frequency and core base and boost clock speeds rather than a fundamental architectural redesign. The flagship of that generation, the Core i9-14900KS, pushed the single-core boost frequency to 6.2 gigahertz, a 200-megahertz improvement over its predecessor.

Both generations came with a significant controversy attached to them in the form of instability issues that affected high-end Raptor Lake and Raptor Lake Refresh desktop processors, particularly when run with elevated power and voltage settings. Intel issued multiple microcode updates throughout 2024 and 2025 to address those stability problems, and the company eventually extended warranty coverage for affected chips as documentation of the issue accumulated in the enthusiast community. The production restart presumably involves chips manufactured with the updated microcode and voltage guidance already incorporated, though Intel has not provided specific detail on whether the restarted production includes any physical or silicon-level changes to the chips beyond the software fixes previously distributed.

Intel is also expected to increase supply of 10th and 12th Generation Core processors through a parallel production expansion, according to ChannelGate, though the primary focus of the restart effort is concentrated on the 13th and 14th generation platforms. The 12th Generation Alder Lake processors, launched in late 2021, also supported both DDR4 and DDR5, making them another viable option for the same market dynamic, though the 13th and 14th generation chips offer better performance efficiency and a wider ecosystem of compatible hardware that is likely already embedded across the Chinese retail and OEM supply chain.

The broader context for Intel’s decision is a global PC market that has been quietly recovering from the post-pandemic demand collapse even as the AI chip boom consumes the sector’s most advanced manufacturing capacity. Worldwide PC shipments rebounded through 2025 and into 2026 as consumers and enterprises that deferred hardware upgrades during the years of post-pandemic correction began refreshing aging equipment, a replacement cycle that analysts have expected to accelerate further as artificial intelligence features become more integrated into client computing devices. China’s domestic PC market, which operates with a distinct mix of local OEM brands, international PC makers and a substantial enthusiast gaming segment, remains large enough that even a targeted production restart for a three-year-old chip generation can generate meaningful commercial volume.

For Intel, the production restart also carries practical manufacturing logic beyond its commercial rationale. The LGA-1700 platform tooling and production lines are already established assets that can be reactivated without the full capital expenditure of building out a new process node or manufacturing flow from scratch. Restarting production on mature nodes allows Intel to utilize manufacturing capacity that might otherwise sit idle as the company concentrates its leading-edge node efforts on newer architectures intended for the AI PC and data center markets, where competition from AMD and Qualcomm has been intensifying throughout the first half of 2026.

Demand for semiconductors across all categories remains at historic levels, driven by the AI industry’s extraordinary appetite for computing hardware at every tier of the market. That demand has not only kept advanced memory and logic chips scarce at the top of the market but has cascaded backward through supply chains in ways that have made even relatively mature, established platforms newly relevant in markets and applications where the primary constraint is availability and cost rather than raw performance. Intel’s decision to restart Raptor Lake production for China illustrates how unusual the current moment is for the semiconductor industry, a period in which the best available product is not always the most commercially rational one, and the industry is reaching back several generations to find components it can actually build and sell to customers who need computing hardware now.

Costco’s iconic $4.99 rotisserie chicken has earned a cult-like following among shoppers for years, but Consumer Reports says Sam’s Club now has the best bird in the warehouse club business.

After evaluating rotisserie chickens from 10 grocery chains, warehouse clubs and big-box retailers, Consumer Reports named Sam’s Club’s Member’s Mark Seasoned Rotisserie Chicken its top overall pick, edging out Costco’s Kirkland Signature bird.

According to Consumer Reports, tasters gave Sam’s Club the edge for its flavor, seasoning and juicy texture. Costco’s chicken also landed among the publication’s top picks, though reviewers found the seasoning to be less consistent between samples.

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Rotisserie chickens cook inside a commercial roasting oven. Consumer Reports evaluated chickens from warehouse clubs, grocery stores and big-box retailers based on taste, nutrition and other factors. (Getty Images / Getty Images)

The results may come as a surprise to Costco shoppers, whose devotion to the retailer’s rotisserie chicken has helped make the $4.99 bird one of the company’s signature products.

Costco has held the price steady for years despite inflation, using the popular item as one of its best-known value offerings and a draw for shoppers. The retailer’s loyal customers have even voiced frustration over seemingly minor changes to the product, including 2024’s switch from plastic clamshell containers to bags.

Consumer Reports did not publish a traditional first-through-10th ranking. Instead, it grouped the chickens into those it considered flavorful enough to serve on their own and those better suited for recipes such as soups, salads and sandwiches.

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Rows of freshly cooked rotisserie chickens are displayed for sale at a grocery store. Consumer Reports recently ranked rotisserie chickens from 10 major retailers, naming Sam’s Club its top overall pick. (Getty Images / Getty Images)

Along with Sam’s Club and Costco, the top group included Stop & Shop, Walmart, Wegmans and Whole Foods Market. BJ’s Wholesale Club, Hannaford, ShopRite and The Fresh Market fell into the second category.

FOX Business has reached out to Costco and Sam’s Club for comment.

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A Costco store in Vallejo, Calif., May 29, 2025. (David Paul Morris/Bloomberg / Getty Images)

The evaluation went beyond taste. Consumer Reports purchased between 10 and 13 chickens from each retailer across multiple store locations and shopping trips.

Researchers weighed each bird, compared sodium levels with nutrition labels, conducted blind taste tests and screened the meat and packaging for chemicals commonly associated with plastics.

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Among its findings, Consumer Reports said it detected no PFAS in any of the meat or packaging it tested. It also found that many chickens weighed more than the net weight listed on their labels, with Whole Foods’ birds averaging about a pound heavier than advertised, effectively lowering their per-pound cost.

“We don’t have robots that are nearly as good at understanding the physical world as a rat,” says Yann LeCun, one of the leading figures in the world of artificial intelligence.

He worked at Facebook-owner, Meta, for a decade, where he was chief AI scientist, but left in 2025 and founded Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs (AMI Labs).

His goal is to move AI beyond current systems like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. They have their uses, he says, but will never be able to tackle complicated situations in the real world, like getting a robot to do household chores.

“They’re not a path towards human level or human-like intelligence, or even animal-like intelligence, because they cannot deal with real world data, they just are not built for that,” he tells me on the sidelines of VivaTech, France’s leading technology conference.

So, Paris-based AMI Labs is busy developing a new type of artificial intelligence not based on the tech behind ChatGPT and its rivals.

Investors think it has potential. Earlier this year AMI Labs announced that it had raised more than $1bn (£760m), with investors including US computer chip giant Nvidia and the fund that manages the private wealth of Amazon-founder Jeff Bezos.

That so-called seed funding round – the earliest round of start-up fundraising – was one of the biggest of its kind in Europe.

Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT are extremely good at some things like coding, mathematical problems and generating text, LeCun says.

But he argues that these are well defined and predictable problems.

“They [LLMs] basically just accumulate knowledge… They can regurgitate something, you train them to regurgitate, but they’re not particularly smart. They don’t have an underlying understanding,” he says.

In the real world there is a bewildering array of outcomes to any action, which requires a more flexible type of artificial intelligence.

LeCun holds a pen upright on its tip. What happens when you let go, he asks? Even a toddler would know that the pen would topple over. But no human would bother to guess in which direction the pen might fall, there’s no way to tell.

But an LLM might try to generate a single prediction about the pen’s next move based on statistical patterns from its training data.

The prediction would almost certainly be wrong, because the system is not reasoning about the physical reality of the situation – it is generating what appears to be statistically plausible.

LeCun says the system his company is developing, called Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA), is set up to deal with problems like that.

It creates abstractions of the real world that allow it to assess the outcomes of actions.

Creating these abstractions involves difficult maths, but essentially they filter out useless information, just leaving the AI with useful pictures of the world.

In the case of the pen, the AI would know that there’s no point in trying to predict which way the pen would fall.