A leaked Geekbench 5 score of Intel’s upcoming Rocket Lake-S flagship shows a massive performance gain over Comet Lake in both single-threaded and multi-threaded workloads. Rocket Lake is going to feature an upgraded core architecture in the form of Sunny Cove (14 nm backport dubbed Cypress Cove), and pair that with the high boost clocks of the mature 14nm node.

This looks like an engineering sample with a boost clock of 5GHz, roughly 100MHz slower than the Core i7-10700K. Despite that, the Rocket Lake-S part scores 1,645 points (vs 1,220 for the 10700K) in the single-core test and 9,783 points (vs 7,204 for the 10700K) in the multi-threaded test. That’s an improvement of 30-35% in the single-threaded segment and close to 40% in the multi-threaded section.

Let’s have a look at the performance breakdown to get a better idea of where the gains are coming from:

Right off the bat, the crypto and AES scores stand out. Rocket lake is more than twice as faster compared to Comet Lake in this test (1,637 points vs 4,323 points). The integer and floating-point gains are more modest, somewhere in the 20-25% range which is what we expect to see in most real-world performance tests.

Regardless, a 25% increment should be enough to put ample pressure on AMD’s Ryzen 5000 CPUs and offer similar performance in gaming, if not outright beat them.