It looks like Intel just can’t get a break. After the reported delay of the 10nm Ice Lake-SP to early 2021, it appears that the 11th Gen Rocket Lake-S desktop CPUs have also been pushed back to 2021. As per a report from VC, Intel will now launch the 14nm Rocket Lake processors in March 2021. Previously, these chips were slated to release in the last quarter of 2020.
Rocket Lake is expected to be Intel’s last 14nm lineup with a new core architecture derived from Sunny/Willow Cove and the Gen11 Xe integrated graphics. It’ll also feature improved overclocking capabilities, up to 20 PCIe 4.0 lanes, a better display and media engine, and some other features that have been long overdue.
While Comet Lake-S has a maximum of ten cores in the form of the flagship, Core i9-10900K, Rocket Lake-S is expected to top out at 8 cores and sixteen threads. It’s unclear how this will make the latter look compared to the former, as IPC gains are supposed to be minimal, and I highly doubt Intel can further push the clock speeds. The 12th Gen Alder Lake-S processors are going to feature the hybrid core architecture, with up to 8 performance cores and 8 low power cores. From what we’ve already seen, these parts will pack a massive L3 cache of 30MB with a new L2 cache subsystem.
