Intel has announced its 11th-generation desktop lineup, bringing the Cypress Cove microarchitecture to desktop, along with a ton of new features.
At CES 2021, Intel has followed up its 10th-generation Comet Lake-S processors with new Rocket Lake-S processors, led by the Intel Core i9-11900K, just under a year later. This marks a remarkably short generation of processors for 10th-generation Comet Lake processors like the Core i9-10900K, but Intel has brought some new features and compatibility that soften the blow a bit. Namely, the new 11th-generation processors will be compatible with existing 400-series motherboards after a BIOS update, and this new generation brings PCIe 4.0 compatibility to Intel’s desktop platforms for the first time. Intel Rocket Lake processors were announced at CES 2021, but aren’t available yet. We still don’t have a solid release date. However, with all the rumors pointing to a March release date even before CES, and with Intel claiming they’re coming “later in Q1,” we’re sure they’ll come out within the next couple of months. Led by the Intel Core i9-11900K, these processors will peak at 8 cores and 16 threads, which might seem like a bit of a step back from the Core i9-10900K’s 10 cores and 20 threads. Intel claims that by backporting the 10nm Cypress Cove core design to the 14nm manufacturing node, there are simply too many transistors to fit more than 8 cores on the CPU die. However, that loss of two cores in the flagship comes with a supposed 19% uplift in Instructions per Clock (IPC) performance.
