A Geekbench score of what is likely the next-gen Core i7 or Core i9 has surfaced and the results are less than overwhelming. The CPU in question is a hyperthreaded octa-core part with a base clock of 3.4GHz and a boost of 5GHz. Considering that 11th Gen Rocket Lake processors will feature a new core architecture (Willow Cove), the primary gains should come from a higher IPC and thereby better single-threaded performance. Let’s have a look:
Interestingly, the cache configuration is the same as Sunny Cove, rather than Willow Cove. There’s a chance that Rocket Lake may feature the former rather than the latter. Intel hasn’t said anything (officially) on the matter as of now.
That’s an approximate increase of 10% in terms of single-threaded performance. Not that great, if you ask me. Looking at the IPC, you’re looking at an approximate gain of 15%. If Zen 3 features an IPC uplift of around 20% while also featuring 200-300MHz higher boost clocks, then Intel’s lead in gaming performance will likely become redundant.
Looking at the single-core performance in more detail, you can see that Rocket Lake features an especially improved AES (encryption) capabilities, with ray-tracing also seeing a significant uplift. Interestingly, the machine learning and speech recognition performance appear to be worse off with Willow Cove. This is likely an anomaly, but overall it seems that the single-threaded performance won’t see any major boost with Rocket Lake.
At the same time, if the Core i9s top out at 8 cores, AMD will take a considerable lead in multi-threaded workloads such as content creation and productivity. Not looking all that bright for Intel. Rocket Lake is slated to launch in Q1 2021.
