According to a report from the Asian outlet, HKEPC, Intel’s 11th Gen Rocket Lake-S processors are going to hit the market next month, with an announcement slated for late Feb/early March. Although the Rocket Lake chips are going to top out at 8-cores, a regression compared to the existing Comet Lake-S lineup which features multiple 10-core parts, a new core architecture (Sunny Cove) and high boost clocks promise to retake the gaming crown.
With a launch date of March 15th, Rocket Lake is expected to have a short life span of just under a year. The 12th Gen Alder Lake-S lineup which is going to be the first major architectural overhaul to Intel’s consumer offerings across the board is slated to land in December 2021.
Other than being the first 10nm desktop processor family from Intel, Alder Lake-S will feature two brand new core architectures, namely Golden Cove and Grace Mont, with the former offering an IPC boost of nearly 20% over Willow Cove and the latter being on par with Skylake despite having a much lower power draw.
The 12th Gen processors are supposed to be announced in September, just seven months after the Rocket Lake-S launch. These chips are going to offer as many as 16 cores and 24 threads, with a high-performance and low-power core cluster each. These parts will also be the first to make use of the 10nm Enhanced SuperFin node, increasing power-efficiency by up to 15% compared to the 10nm SuperFin process that powers the 11th Gen Tiger Lake-U lineup.
On AMD’s side, the Zen 3 refresh (Warhol) is expected to launch around the same time as Alder Lake-S. Considering that it’s essentially the same design with minor improvements such as increased boost clocks, better boost residency, etc, we expect Intel to offer the faster chips till AMD finally launches its 5nm-based Zen 4 processors in 2022.
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