One of the most anticipated CPU launches of the decade is finally here. Yes, we are talking about Intel’s Rocket Lake lineup. The CPU brings along with its intel’s first-ever major release on the 14nm process node and it is also the first CPU from Intel to support PCIe 4.0.
The performance which we have seen until now in leaked benchmark and scores gives us the idea, for the first time in almost a year, Intel will be able to compete against AMD’s Zen architecture.
Intel’s Rocket Lake processors are limited to 8-cores, however, they contain Intel Deep Learning Boost and up to 50% better-integrated graphics performance. So, it will be tough competition against Rocket Lake and AMD’s Zen-3 in the gaming segment.
The processors will also house exactly 20 lanes of PCIe 4.0. They will also have native support for DDR4-3200 RAM without overclocking the IMC. 10bit AV1 and 12bit HEVC are now natively supported as well. To make its processor competitive in gaming, Intel’s integrated graphics also supports Resizeable BAR.
The Z590 chipset is the platform of choice for Intel’s Rocket Lake processors, but the new CPUs will also support Z490 with bios upgrades. The Rocket Lake family also supports USB 3.2 Gen 2×2, along with x8 DMI Gen 3.0 for twice the bandwidth between the chipset and CPU. WiFi 6E support along with Thunderbolt 4.0 Support is also available.
According to official sources, the Core i9 11900K can boost up to 5.3 GHz with Intel Thermal Velocity Boost and an All-Core of 4.8GHz with the same. Speaking of the Core i7 11700K, it can boost up to 5.0 GHz and an all-core of 4.6 GHz. The Intel Core i5 11600K on the other hand has 6 cores and can boost up to 4.9 GHz and 4.6 GHz all-core respectively. as of now, intel didn’t release any Core i3 for its Rocket Lake.
Benchmarks
Coming over to the benchmarks received on the launch day, we found that, games that rely on fewer threads perform better on the Rocket Lake. So, we believe that in high-end games the processors will lose to AMD’s Zen-3 as the latter has a higher core count.
The Core i9 11900K outperforms the older Core i9-10900K by 11%. Intel also tested the Rocket Lake against AMD’s RX 5900X and it outperformed the latter by 7.5%. But the gaming tests were only conducted at 1080p and not on 4K. coming to the Core i5 11600k which was tested against the older Core i5 10600k, the former outperformed the latter by 11.5%.
Pricing
The flagship Core i9 11900K is available for purchase for only $539 whereas the KF variant is available for $513 or $64 per core. This price seems to be the maximum which Intel is charging in this series, and the rest of the options are ridiculously cheap. The Core i7-11700F has a price tag of just $289 or $37 per core.
