Given they're over two and half years old and plagued with reliability concerns, you might be surprised to learn that Intel's Raptor Lake CPUs are selling like high-temperature baked comestibles. That's according to Intel itself in its latest earnings call for investors.

Raptor Lake refers to Intel's 13th and 14th Gen CPUs for mobile and desktop. Michelle Johnston Holdhaus, CEO of Intel Products, explained that cost is the driving factor behind the ongoing success of these chips, which first went on sale in October 2022, a relative age ago by the standards of computer chips.

"We're not pushing the old parts based on margins. What we're really seeing is much greater demand from our customers for N minus one and N minus two [referring to the two previous generations of CPUs before Intel's current Arrow Lake, meteor Lake and Lunar Lake processor families] products, so that they can continue to deliver system price points that consumers are really demanding. As we've all talked about, the macroeconomic concerns and tariffs have everybody kind of hedging their bets in what they need to have from an inventory perspective. And Raptor Lake is a great part," Holdhaus says.