MSI has confirmed in a statement that Intel’s 11th Gen Rocket Lake-S CPUs will be launching at the end of March with support for all 10th Gen 400 series motherboards including the H410, B460 as well as Z490. PCIe 4.0 support is likely to be limited to the latter, with the Core i5 and higher chips.
Intel’s 11th Gen Rocket Lake-S processors will feature the Sunny Cove core architecture, backported to the 14nm node and dubbed Cypress Cove. It’s the first major upgrade to the company’s desktop CPU architecture in over five years. Unfortunately, the 14nm node will be retained once again which should allow for higher boost clocks for up to 5.3GHz,
The downside is that the Core i9-11900K will top out at eight cores just like the the Core i7-11700K. However, from we what we’ve seen in existing benchmarks, the single-threaded performance should be pretty strong, allowing better gaming performance than rival Ryzen 5000 CPUs.
One important point to note is that only the Core i5, i7 and i9 parts will leverage the Rocket Lake-S design while the lower-end i3s and Pentium/Celeron lineup will continue to use the old Skylake core (Comet Lake Refresh). These chips will be paired with the Gen 9.5 integrated GPUs while the higher-end Rocket Lake-S lineup will feature the Gen11 Xe iGPUs.
