[Hardware] Intel Rocket Lake Price, Benchmarks, Specs and Release Date, All We Know

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Intel's 11th-Gen Rocket Lake is purportedly headed to the launch pad for blast off in late March, promising to upset our list of Best CPUs for Gaming and CPU Benchmarks Hierarchy. Rocket Lake certainly couldn't come at a better time for Intel, either – AMD's Ryzen 5000 processors have thundered into the desktop PC market, upsetting Intel's Comet Lake chips and taking the lead in every metric that matters, including gaming. 

Intel's response comes in the form of Rocket Lake, and the company says the chips come with a 19% improvement in instruction per cycle (IPC) throughput and blistering 5.3 GHz (+) clock speeds that will reestablish its performance leadership in gaming.

Rocket Lake will bring the backported Cypress Cove architecture to the desktop PC, Intel's first new microarchitecture in six years. But unlike the forward progress we see with the company's 10nm Tiger Lake chips for laptops, Rocket Lake-S represents 14nm's last hurrah on the desktop and marks the seventh and final iteration of the longest-lived leading-edge node in Intel's history (it debuted in 2015). 

Intel's current integrated graphics are woefully inadequate for gaming, and we haven't seen a meaningful iGPU performance boost for desktop PCs since Kaby Lake arrived back in 2016. This changes with Rocket Lake, which comes with Intel's performant 12th-gen Xe graphics. Intel says the new engine doubles graphics performance over the previous-gen chips, bringing 1080p-capable gaming (albeit with low fidelity settings) to mainstream CPUs. 

Rocket Lake supports the PCIe 4.0 interface, which provides twice the bandwidth of PCIe 3.0. That addresses a key weakness exacerbated by AMD's now two-year-long advantage with its uncontested leadership position in I/O connectivity. Intel has also bumped up Rocket Lake's memory throughput to DDR4-3200, a nice step up from the prior gen's DDR4-2933.  

So what's the catch? Rocket Lake tops out at eight cores and sixteen threads due to the backported architecture, a step back from the 10-core Comet Lake i9 models. "Backporting" is a method that allows Intel to take a new design built on a smaller process node, in this case 10nm, and etch it on an older, larger node (in this case, 14nm). 

Intel backported the 10nm Sunny Cove cores found in Ice Lake processors to the less-dense 14nm process to create Rocket Lake's Cypress Cove architecture, leaving the chip designers with fewer transistors to make the new chips. As a result, Intel had to remove two cores; there simply wasn't enough room in the chip package for a larger die. 

That's an odd development in light of Intel's 10-core Comet Lake flagships, not to mention that eight cores certainly feels inadequate in the face of AMD's 16-core Ryzen 9 5950X. Intel is betting heavily on its 19% IPC gains and high clock speeds to offset the lower core counts, and the company may have a split product stack, with Alder Lake hybrid chips coming in later to address the higher core count segment. Rocket Lake slots into Intel's 11th-gen processor family, but all signs also point to refreshed Comet Lake chips for Core i3 (and lower) 11th-gen processors, which is another interesting development. Intel has slowly teased out the details of the Rocket Lake chips, but the company hasn't provided the full details yet. However, retailer listings and a string of leaked benchmarks have pretty much filled in the gaps, so let's cover what we know so far.

Intel 11th-Gen Rocket Lake At a Glance
Maximum of eight cores, 5.3 GHz peak boost speed
New Cypress Cove architecture featuring Ice Lake Core architecture and Tiger Lake Graphics architecture.
Support for PCIe 4.0 - 20 lanes (four to storage)
New microarchitecture for the desktop
AVX-512, Thunderbolt 4 support
Intel plans to launch Rocket Lake in March 2021 
Intel 12th-gen Xe LP Graphics increase graphics performance by 50%
Support for DDR4-3200 for Rocket Lake, DDR4-2666 for Comet Lake Refresh
New overclocking features for more flexible tuning performance
Intel Deep Learning Boost and VNNI support
Backward compatible with 400-series motherboards (caveats apply)
Intel Rocket Lake Release Date and Availability
Intel has given an official Q1 2020 release window for Rocket Lake-S processors, but MSI narrowed it down to late March. We've also seen Intel's Rocket Lake packaging emerge, which takes a new design approach to liven up the series, so it's clear we're on the cusp of Intel's launch. 

Intel also officially announced that its 10nm hybrid Alder Lake-S chips would launch in the second half of 2021. That timeline indicates that Rocket Lake will likely serve either as a short-lived stopgap or as part of a split product stack for the mainstream desktop, with the Alder Lake chips stepping in as the high core count flagships. The Alder Lake-S processors are thought to come with DDR5 and PCIe 5.0 support, marking a big step forward for the desktop PC. 

Intel 11th-Gen Rocket Lake Specifications
Intel 11th-Gen Core Rocket Lake and Comet Lake Refresh SKUs*

Spoiler

    Cores / Threads    Base-Boost (Single/All Core)    TDP    iGPU    L3    Part Numbers
RKL-S Core i9-11900K (KF)    8 / 16    3.5 - 5.3 / 4.8    125W    Xe 32EU    16MB    BX8070811900K - BX8070811900KF
RKL-S Core i9-11900 (F)    8 / 16    2.5 - 5.2 / 4.7    65W    Xe 32EU    16MB    BX8070811900 - BX8070811900F
RKL-S Core i7-11700K (KF)    8 / 16    3.6 - 5.0 / 4.6    125W    Xe 32EU    16MB    BX8070811700K - BX8070811700KF
RKL-S Core i7-11700 (F)    8 / 16    2.5 - 4.9 / 4.4    65W    Xe 32EU    16MB    BX8070811700 - BX8070811700F
RKL-S Core i5-11600K (KF)    6 / 12    3.9 - 4.9 / 4.6    125W    Xe 32EU    12MB    BX8070811600K - BX8070811600KF
RKL-S Core i5-11600    6 / 12    2.8 - 4.9 / 4.3    65W    Xe 32EU    12MB    BX8070811600
RKL-S Core i5-11500    6 / 12    2.7 - 4.6 / 4.2    65W    Xe 32EU    12MB    BX8070811500
RKL-S Core i5-11400 (F)    6 / 12    2.6 - 4.4 / 4.2    65W    Xe 24EU    12MB    BX8070811400 - BX8070811400F
CML-R Core i3-10305    4 / 8    3.8 - n/a    65W    ?    8MB    BX8070110305
CML-R Core 13-10105 (F)    4 / 8    3.7 - n/a    65W    ?    6MB    BX8070110105 - BX8070110105F
CML-R Pentium G6605    2 / 4    4.3 - n/a    58W    ?    4MB    BX80701G6605
CML-R Pentium G6405    2 / 4    4.1 - n/a    58W    ?    4MB    BX80701G6405

*Specifications are not official; credit @harukaze5719 and @momomo_us

A flurry of leaked benchmarks have emerged from Asian regions, including full-on reviews of some Rocket Lake-S chips. That, along with listings at retailers and submissions to public databases, has given us a decently clear image of the new Rocket Lake family. However, these specifications are not official, and clock speeds can change as the chips come closer to market. Most of the tests are conducted on Intel reference validation platforms (RVP), indicating the silicon is still under development.

As we can see above, Intel spreads the Rocket Lake (RKL-S) chips into the familiar Core i9, i7, and i5 families, but there's a fly in the ointment: Intel has purportedly decided to use refreshed Comet Lake (CML-R) chips for its Core i3 and Pentium families. Those chips feature the same architecture as other Comet Lake chips but come with slightly increased clock speeds. 

As before, Intel offers graphics-less F-series models across its Core i9, i7, i5, and i3 families. The F-series models come with the same clock speeds and other features as the fully-featured models.  

Intel has confirmed that the Core i9-11900K, the new flagship model, comes with a dual-core 5.3 GHz boost and 4.8 GHz all-core boost, matching the previous-gen Core i9-10900K. It's noteworthy that these are Thermal Velocity Boost frequencies that only activate if the processor is under a certain temperature limit, but most motherboard makers ignore those limits anyway. That means the chips will likely operate at these speeds regardless of temperature limits, at least on higher-end motherboards. 

Intel has confirmed the chips feature a 150W PL1 power rating (at the base frequency), a 25W increase over the 10900K, and an identical 250W PL2 (boost) rating. Intel has also bumped up Rocket Lake's memory throughput to DDR4-3200, a nice step up from the prior gen's DDR4-2933, but some of the early benchmark leaks have shown the chip running at slower memory frequencies, meaning they aren't a good measure of what we'll see in the final shipping models. Additionally, the Comet Lake Refresh chips (Core i3 and below) support DDR4-2666, so we won't see marked improvements in terms of memory speed with the lesser Rocket Lake models. 

The Rocket Lake chips generally expose higher boost frequencies across the entire range, and Intel has confirmed that the chips come with the Xe LP graphics engine. Intel says it added a 'third more' EUs to the chips to boost performance up to 50% over the previous-gen UHD 630 graphics. It isn't clear if the increased EU count is over the existing UHD 630 graphics, which would mean we're looking at chips with a maximum of a lackluster 32 EUs, seemingly confirmed by the architecture breakdown below and the leaked specifications, or if it represents an increase over the Tiger Lake chips, which would beef up the Rocket Lake processors with 128 EUs.

Unfortunately, 32 EUs would hamper gaming performance significantly. On the other hand, doing 128 Xe EUs on 14nm would use up a considerable amount of die space, and most desktop users (at least in the DIY space) will simply use a dedicated GPU anyway. For now, it appears that Intel has carved the Xe LP graphics engine into UHD Graphics 750 (GT1) with 32 EUs, UHD Graphics 730 (GT1) with 24 EUs, and an as-yet-undefined UHD Graphics P750 (GT1) that may encapsulate the Iris graphics offerings.

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Intel's Xe graphics also bring in-built AV1 decode acceleration, which is helpful because the codec reduces bandwidth up to 20% for video streaming (such as 4K and 8K content). Rocket Lake also features Intel's 'new' Always-On QuickSync Video. This feature allows Xe Graphics to run concurrently with a discrete GPU so you can offload some workloads, like video streaming with QuickSync, to alleviate the burden on your discrete GPU. This feature has already been around for several years, but it required BIOS support, and you had to manually enable the integrated graphics unit after you installed a video card. Intel says the technique is now a supported and validated configuration that's enabled by default in the BIOS.

Intel Rocket Lake Price
Pricing details have emerged in the form of retailer listings in several foreign countries, but it's important to note that Intel hasn't revealed the official pricing for Rocket Lake yet. 2Compute, a Belgian retailer, currently lists the Core i9-10900K, Core i7-10700K, and Core i5-10600K for $555, $398, and $282, respectively. 

Using this as a gauge of its Rocket Lake listings, we see that Core i9-11900K and Core i7-11700K could cost up to 8.8% and 14.3% more, respectively, while the Core i5-11600K may arrive with a 3.9% higher price tag than the Comet Lake chips. However, we should take this information with a grain of salt - other retailers have listed the chips at slightly lower pricing than the Comet Lake equivalents. 

For now, the jury is out for Intel's Rocket Lake pricing, but given the general indications, we shouldn't expect a huge pricing delta compared to the Comet Lake processors.