[Hardware] Intel's Rocket Lake Blasts Off With Fewer Cores, Higher Pricing

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Intel's Rocket Lake Blasts Off With Fewer Cores, Higher Pricing

 

Intel has spent a long five months on the ropes after AMD's Zen 3-powered Ryzen 5000 chips beat the company's Comet Lake processors in every metric that matters, taking an unprecedented lead in our Best CPUs and CPU Benchmark hierarchy, but now Intel is finally blasting back with its 11th Gen Rocket Lake chips. Today Intel has finally revealed the official specs and pricing for Rocket Lake in advance of the March 30th embargo date for full reviews and retail sales.

However, while much of AMD's successful formula has consisted of more cores, a newer architecture, and a newer and denser 7nm node, Intel is launching a new architecture on its older less-efficient 14nm node, but with fewer cores and a higher price tag.

As a result, Rocket Lake's flagship $539 Core i9-11900K comes to market with eight cores while the previous-gen Core i9 family came with 10 cores and AMD's leading chips stretch up to 16. Surprisingly, Intel has actually hiked its recommended pricing on its highest-end chips despite this seeming deficiency, signaling that it thinks its eight-core chips have the chops to take on AMD's competing models.

Much of Intel's confidence stems from its first new microarchitecture for the desktop PC in the last six years, Cypress Cove. Intel says it backported its Sunny Cove design from the 10nm process to its aging 14nm to create the new design, a necessity because 10nm couldn't support the higher frequencies needed for desktop PCs (we imagine yields might have played a role, too).

Intel admits that Rocket Lake's lowered core count can lead to reduced gen-on-gen performance in heavily-threaded applications, but the Cypress Cove architecture brings a 19% improvement in instruction per cycle (IPC) throughput and Rocket Lake also tops out at a blistering 5.3 GHz that Intel says will help reestablish its performance leadership in gaming. Naturally, higher IPC and fast clocks help offset the step back to fewer cores, at least in most applications, but there will be areas of regression.

Rocket Lake has plenty of other notable advances, too: Intel stepped forward to faster DRAM speeds (though that comes with a big caveat), finally adopted the PCIe 4.0 interface, added AVX-512 support and AI-boosting DL Boost technology, and also moved to the integrated UHD Graphics 750 engine that hails from the company's 10nm Tiger Lake chips. Intel says these Xe-powered graphics provide up to 50% more performance than preceding models. Intel also has its eyes on other gaming optimizations with added support for Resizable Bar, which boosts gaming performance with supported discrete GPUs, and caters to the enthusiast crowd with a host of overclocking features to wring more performance from the silicon, including unlocked memory overclocking with cheaper B- and H-series motherboards. We finally have all of the new details; let's dive in. 

Intel 11th-Gen Core Rocket Lake-S Specifications and Pricing
Intel's chip specifications have become an incredibly confusing affair for most normal folks, with different specifications for Thermal Boost Velocity (TVB) in both single and all-core flavors, along with separate all-core boost turbo, Turbo Boost 2.0 (TB2) and Turbo Boost 3 (TB3) ratios all combining to create a stunningly complex mishmash of specs — sometimes all on a single model. To present the data in a digestible format, we've boiled that down to the peak frequencies listed in the table below. We've also culled a few of the less interesting models, at least in terms of the competitive landscape, from the table to focus on the key competitive price bands. We'll provide the full specs and list of models later in the article.

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 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, which we'll cover a bit later. Intel also continues to offer graphics-less F-series models that offer the same specs as their full-featured counterparts, but at a lower price point.