Intel’s upcoming Raptor Lake CPU series could get Digital Linear Voltage Regulator, reducing TDP by 25%

According to a recent and interesting thread that has recently appeared on Reddit, we get to see some interesting concepts which cover the topic of Digital Linear Voltage Regulator (DLVR) which might be used with the upcoming Intel Raptor Lake CPU series.

This thread when visited points to patent hunter Underfox, and it appears that it has been discovered that Intel had plans for DLVR since January 2020 at least. However, the patent was not published till July 8th this year and the interesting fact here is that this is not the first time we are hearing about DLVR.

This acronym had already appeared in a leaked slide that we posted exclusively back in March 2021, except at the time we had no idea exactly what it meant. For those who don’t know, DLVR stands for Digital Linear Voltage Regulator and it is explained by Intel in a patent called “Digital Linear Regulator Clamping Method and Apparatus”.

According to the document, by placing an additional voltage regulator in parrel to the primary regulator such as on a motherboard, the power consumption of the processor core can be lowered and this power delivery modification is cheap to implement and also has pretty much low complexity of tuning.

On this note, Intel researchers have claimed that it is also important to determine the input voltage for the regulator. This is to account for sudden loading requirements for the SoC, CPU, or GPU and its also believed that higher than the necessary voltage for the regulator will generate more heat and power consumption.

This increase in voltage is caused by several factors, mainly motherboard load-line (LL) and maximum processor current requirement, as well as by inaccuracy in motherboards voltage regulator.

Intel researchers also conclude that DLVR is capable of reducing CPU voltage by 160mV, which translates to a rough of about  20% to 25% drop in CPU power consumption. A 21% of voltage drop on the CPU translates to approximately 7% performance gain. But, the researchers have also stated that some of the features may require an upgrade to Intel 700 series motherboards.

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