Rocket Lake will be the successor to Intel’s Comet Lake CPUs, and they’re arriving soon. Here’s everything we know about them and what improvements to expect.
Intel’s 11th-generation Rocket Lake desktop CPUs will be team blue’s answer to AMD’s Zen 3 chips, and they’re going to be an interesting bridge between technologies as Intel continues to iterate on its 14nm process. They are the follow-up to last year’s 10th-gen Comet Lake chips, which officially debuted in the spring. Rocket Lake has been officially announced, though Intel hasn’t provided any firm details yet. Still, we’ve got all the details on what these chips will support, potential configurations, cost predictions, and more. For further information, read our guide on CPU. No official price information is available for Rocket Lake CPUs at this time, but the previous generation of Comet Lake chips is available for between $120 and $550, and it’s likely that Rocket Lake won’t stray too far out of that range. Some unique features for the Rocket Lake series (which we will examine below) could affect pricing in unexpected ways, however. As for a release date, it seemed likely in the beginning that Intel would release Rocket Lake toward the end of 2020, which made sense according to the road maps sources had seen. Intel has announced since that its next generation of desktop processors is coming in 2021, though has yet to provide a release date. As leaks and rumors mounted, many expected more information on Intel’s 11th-gen desktop platform at CES 2021. Although Intel briefly touched on its desktop platform, the majority of its CES 2021 presentation was dedicated to the mobile market. Rocket Lake was officially announced, but Intel didn’t provide any specs or pricing information. Rocket Lake chips are, once again, based on Intel’s heavily revised 14-nanometer semiconductor manufacturing process. Intel has managed to move to a 10nm node in low-power form factors, such as chips for Ultrabooks, but appears to be stuck on 14nm for its desktop parts. There will, however, be some important changes. Rocket Lake will feature a revamped Willow Cove core that draws inspiration from the 10nm process and has been seen in recent-generation Tiger Lake processors). Early leaked benchmarks suggest that Rocket Lake will top out at eight cores with 16 threads, down from the 10 cores and 20 threads supported on the Intel Core i9-10900K. The desktop Rocket Lake-S CPU is expected to be called the Intel Core i9-11900K, according to the Ashes of the Singularity benchmark that was leaked and posted by Twitter user @TUM_APISAK. That benchmark revealed that the Intel Core i9-11900K will ship with a base clock of 3.5GHz, though it’s still unclear if final specifications will change when the silicon ships. Presumably, this benchmark, if real, was taken on an early engineering sample of the processor. To give Rocket Lake the performance it needs to take on rival AMD’s latest Ryzen processors, Intel is rumored to be making significant architectural changes to the processor’s design that will give gamers an extra boost, including larger L1 and L2 cache sizes.
