According to sources close to WCCFtech, Intel will be announcing (not launching, mind you) its 11th Gen Rocket Lake-S CPUs at CES 2021 in January. Yeah, that’s just next month, but before you get excited, the hard launch won’t be happening before the last week of March.
The first announcement pertaining to the 11th Gen desktop lineup is scheduled for the 11th of January, during Intel’s CES 2021 keynote. Both the Rocket Lake-S CPUs as well as the Z590 motherboards will be detailed at the event, but only the latter by available in the market for the time being.
The CPUs which will form the company’s last 14nm lineup will come to the market by the end of March. The initial embargo (review embargo?) is slated to lift on the 1st of March while the actual launch is scheduled for the 19th of March.
The Rocket Lake-S CPUs will feature the Sunny Cove core, the same as the Ice Lake-U lineup. The 14nm backport of this core has been dubbed Cypress Cove and should bring a decent IPC post of around 15% to Intel’s desktop core, something we haven’t seen in several years. Paired with boost clocks as high as 5.4GHz, it should be enough to tackle AMD’s newly launched Ryzen 5000 CPUs, at least in gaming workloads.
Courtesy of a certain Twitter user, we already have the entire specifications of the 11th Gen lineup. First, we have the Core i3s with four cores and eight threads and the UHD 630 iGPU with 24EUs and a TDP of 65W (35W for the T variant), and an L3 cache of up to 8MB.
Update: We have a lock on the frequencies of the Core i5-11400 and the Core i7-11700, courtesy of 188号.
Update 2: According to certain reports, the Core i3 and Celeron/Pentium parts will be a Comet Lake-S refresh, using the older Skylake core architecture while the Cypress Cove design will be exclusive to the higher-end Core i5, i7 and i9 offerings.
The Core i5s feature six cores and twelve threads, with a TDP of 125W for the K variant and 65W for the non-K. The L3 cache is pegged at 12MB for all the hex-core parts while the Gen11 Xe graphics will pack 32EUs for the higher-end models and 24EUs for the lower-end 10400 series.
Finally, we have the Core i7 and i9 parts. Similar to the i5s, the K variant will have a base TDP of 125W while the non-K will be limited to 65W (PL1). Both chips have 16MB of L3 cache and 32EU integrated GPUs, and the only difference will be with respect to the core clocks. Unlike Comet Lake-S, the Rocket Lake-S flagship (Core i9-11900K) will be limited to eight cores rather than 10, with 16 virtual cores or threads.
