As per sources on Twitter, Intel’s 11th Gen Rocket Lake-based Core i7-11700K will cost less than $400, unlike the 10700K. Furthermore, it appears that the 11700K, thanks to the new Sunny Cove architecture will also feature a small increase in IPC, along with the L3 cache growing to 16MB. This should significantly improve gaming performance. Higher cache sizes have known to confer a notable boost to gaming workloads in both monolithic and MCM designs.
| CPU | C/T | Base Clock | Boost Clock | L3 Cache | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ryzen 5 5600X | 6/12 | 3.7GHz | 4.6GHz | 35MB | $299 |
| Core i5-11600K | 6/12 | 4.2GHz? | 4.9GHz? | 12MB? | $249? |
| Ryzen 7 5800X | 8/12 | 3.8GHz | 4.7GHz | 36MB | $449 |
| Core i7-11700K | 8/12 | 3.8GHz? | 5.10GHz? | 16MB | $379? |
Furthermore, the B560 boards are expected to support memory overclocking unlike the older B460 and B360 variants (CPU multiplier will still be locked), with up to 20 PCIe 4.0 lanes. This means that a Rocket Lake-based Core i7 (non-K) and a B560 board might just turn out to be a winning product, just enough to compete with the Ryzen 7 5800X. It’s unclear what the advantages of the Core i9 over the i7 will be, but we’re likely looking at a higher clocked CPU with boosts in the 5.4-5.5GHz range.
There’s also some info on the Core i5-11600K. It looks like the hex-core hyperthreaded CPU will cost approximately $249, undercutting the Ryzen 5 5600X by around $50. It’s likely that AMD will respond to this with a Ryzen 5 5600.
