An octa-core Rocket Lake-S CPU has been spotted on 3DMark (the first of its kind). The discovery was made by the well-known leaker, _rogame who also shared some Tiger Lake benchmarks.
The Rocket Lake part is more interesting as officially Intel hasn’t said a word about it. Whatever we know is through leaked partner slides and obscure rumors. The chip in question is an octa-core CPU with a base clock of 1800MHz. Considering that it’s a pre-engineering sample, the boost clock still hasn’t been finalized. Basically, all this confirms is that Rocket Lake-S exists, and it’ll roll out sooner than later, possibly late 2020 or early 2021.
We know the bare basics about Rocket Lake. Firstly, it’ll be a 14nm chip, featuring a backport of either the 10nm Sunny/Willow Cove core architecture. The core counts will most likely top out at ten, with speeds comparable to Comet Lake-S, and hopefully a better power profile.
It’s most likely going to retain the LGA1200 socket that is expected to launch with Comet Lake, and form Intel’s 11th Gen desktop lineup. It’s not clear whether Comet Lake-S will be discontinued or if it’ll exist side by side with Rocket Lake-S. There’s also the matter of Alder Lake which is to be Intel’s first 10nm desktop stack. Rumors suggest that it might land in 2021 too. That would mean three consecutive lineups in less than two years.
In my opinion, Alder Lake won’t come before 2022, and Rocket Lake-S is being planned to compete with AMD’s Ryzen 4000 (Zen 3) processors. A late 2020 launch date for both lineups would make complete sense.
