Intel has finally unveiled the 11th Gen Rocket Lake S CPU lineup. The Rocket Lake CPUs are the first major revision in the Intel 14nm process and are also the first Intel platform with complete support for PCIe gen 4.0.
Intel has managed to deliver an outstanding IPC gain of 19% while staying on the same 14nm process, which is huge, to say the least. The 11th Gen Rocket Lake lineup is based on the Cypress Cove cores which bring a big performance gain as compared to the last generation. Intel’s Rocket Lake processor also contains Intel Deep Learning Boost and up to 50% better-integrated graphics performance.
In Rocket Lake, each CPU will house exactly 20 lanes of PCIe 4.0. Apart from Deep Learning Boost and VNNI support, it will also have native support for DDR4-3200 RAM without overclocking. 10bit AV1 and 12bit HEVC are now natively supported as well. The integrated graphics also has support for Resizeable BAR which provides a significant boost in supported games.
Intel also unveiled the new 500 series chipsets for Rocket Lake processors and the Z590 chipset is the platform of choice for Intel’s Rocket Lake. Rocket Lake processors will also work with Z490 motherboards with a BIOS upgrade. The Z590 chipset offers USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 support along with x8 DMI Gen 3.0 for twice the bandwidth between the chipset and CPU. Memory overclocking is also enabled and WiFi 6E support along with Thunderbolt 4.0 Support. Z590 Chipset will also support the 10th Gen CPUs.
Intel has made some great changes to the Intel Extreme Tuning Utility. Users will now be able to change the memory frequency and the clock speed of the processor without having to go to the BIOS.
Intel has also released benchmark numbers for the Rocket Lake flagship CPU, the Intel Core i9-11900K. And in its benchmarks, the i9-11900K beats the AMD Ryzen 9 5900X. On average the Core i9 11900K outperforms the older Core i9-10900K by 11%.
Compared to AMD Ryzen 9 5900X, the Intel i9-11900K outperforms the Zen 3 CPU by 7.5% in 1080p benchmarks.
Intel has priced the 11th Gen Rocket Lake CPUs very decently. The flagship Core i9 11900K is available for purchase for only $539. The KF variant is available for $513 USD or $64 per core. These prices are great when compared to the Ryzen 5000 series CPUs.
We will have to wait for the 3rd party benchmarks to see how well the Rocket Lake processors really perform.
