The more we hear about Intel’s 11th Gen Rocket Lake-S CPUs, the less interesting they seem. Rocket Lake will be the first mainstream desktop processor family from Team Blue to feature a new core architecture since 2016’s Skylake. Rumored to be a backport of the 10nm based Willow or Sunny Cove, it’ll continue to utilize the 14nm process, and hopefully, bring some meaningful improvements in terms of IPC and single-threaded performance. From everything we’ve seen and heard about these processors till now, that appears to be unlikely though.
Intel 11th Gen Rocket Lake @ 5GHz: 10% Better Single-Threaded Performance than 10th Gen Comet Lake
A while back, Geekbench benchmarks of an 8 core|16 thread Rocket Lake chip (likely the next-gen Core i7) were spotted which showed an IPC gain of just around 10-15%. Considering that Intel is already running these chips at around 5GHz, just cranking up the clocks as was done with Skylake won’t really help. Increasing the core counts is also a bust as the monolithic design limits it to eight or at best, ten. An SiSoft benchmark of the same octa-core Rocket Lake part has surfaced which isn’t very convincing either:
As you can see, the Rocket Lake chip barely manages to keep up with the Ryzen 7 3800X and this isn’t even the part it’s going to compete with. The Zen 3 based Ryzen 4000 processors are what Intel’s 11th Gen CPUs will go up against, but from what we’ve seen it’s highly likely that we’ll see a repetition of what happened this generation. A slight lead in gaming for Intel with AMD maintaining a heavy advantage in everything else from content creation to compression, encoding, and productivity.
