As per a report from WCCFTech, Intel’s 11th Gen Rocket Lake-S CPUs will be landing in March 2021, along with the new 500 series motherboards. The company shared some news regarding its Rocket Lake processors a while back, stating that the launch will be sometime in early 2021, but this gives us a solid timeline.
As expected, the 11th Gen CPUs will be backward compatible with the existing 400 series boards, with PCIe 4.0 support likely limited to the higher-end Z490 chipset. Unlike Alder Lake-S which is expected by the end of 2021, Rocket Lake will be based on a homogeneous core architecture, featuring the 14nm backport of Sunny Cove, dubbed Cypress Cove.
Therefore, you can expect a decent IPC improvement with Rocket Lake, somewhere in the 12-15% range which paired with high boost clocks (up to 5.4-5.5GHz) should allow Intel to at least level with the newly launched Ryzen 5000 CPUs in gaming if not outright beat them.
The 11th Gen lineup is going to be Intel’s last 10nm product stack, with both Alder Lake, Ice Lake, and Sapphire Rapids slated to leverage the 10nm SuperFin process. This should allow for a more transparent comparison of Intel and AMD parts as the latter’s 10nm node is closer to TSMC’s 7nm which is what most of Ryzen CPUs are fabbed on.
