And yes, Intel didn’t really announce its desktop CPUs today, but they gave a preview of what we can expect from its 11th Gen Core S-series Rocket Lake-S chips.
One of the first chips from the line we can expect is the Intel Core i9-11900K. We've talked about the 14nm fabbed chip many times already. Rocket Lake S is still a 14 nm design, but with Cypress Cove cores, Intel has backported an architecture originally intended for 10 nm to the older 14nm node. According to Intel, the performance per cycle (IPC) should increase by up to 19 percent.
This chip features 8 Cypress Cove cores, 16 threads and indeed gets 20 CPU-based PCIe 4.0 lanes. Updated is memory support at a native 3,200MHz. There will be Core i9, i7 and i5 variants, but Intel has not yet provided the exact model numbers or specifications. Rocket Lake-S chips have an integrated Intel Xe GPU that would be roughly 50 percent faster than the ones in Comet Lake. The Xe-GPU can also handle three 4k60Hz screens or two at 5k60Hz. The TDP frame of the flagship is designed exactly as with Comet Lake-S: the TDP and thus PL1 is 125 watts, the CPU can boost to a maximum of 250 watts (PL2) for the time Tau of 56 seconds, or until the exponential weighted moving average of the power consumption of the CPU has reached the level PL1.
Rocket Lake-S chips make use of the new Intel 500 chipset, but they’ll be backward compatible with higher end Intel 400 chipset based motherboards. A new motherboard is required if you want to take advantage of an PCIe x8 DMI and USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 (20G). Intel shows a slide with their own benchmarks in which the Core i9-11900K is 2 to 8 percent faster in certain games than the AMD Ryzen 9 5900X. These are tests with an RTX 3080 video card at 1080p resolution.
If you read the small print from the presentation then Core i9-11900K has a maximum clock speed of 5.3 GHz and a tdp of 125W. The Rocket Lake processors support DDR4 3200 memory, which was DDR4-2933 on the previous generation. The CPUs offer up to twenty PCIe 4.0 lanes and have an integrated USB 3.2 Gen2x2 controller. Intel has stated that the procs will be released in the first quarter of this year, presumably March.
I took some FPS comparisons from the presentation, you can check them below.
