Intel Rocket Lake FAQ: What you need to know about the upcoming CPUs

Intel Rocket Lake FAQ: What you need to know well-nigh the upcoming CPUs

(Image credit: Intel)

Intel is getting beaten upwards by AMD in the CPU market over the last few years. That said, Intel Tiger Lake 10th gen chips proceed to offer sturdy competition against AMD and now CES 2022 has shown us the beginnings of how Intel plans to respond to continued pressure with the introduction of Rocket Lake 11th Gen Due south-Series chips.

At first blush, some of the figures might seem a little confounding as information technology's not all direct-forward improvements for Intel's adjacent generation. Intel'southward plan to fight back includes rolling dorsum to a 14-nanometer process from a previous generation vs. Ryzen 5000'southward 7nm, and to use an eight-core processor to Ryzen'south 16 cores.

So what gives?

New 14nm Cypress Cove architecture

Role of the reply is that CPUs are complicated and a smaller process size isn't a perfect measure of improvement. Make no mistake, fifty-fifty though we only have Intel'due south own claims and early leaked benchmark specs for Rocket Lake to go by, Ryzen 5950X owners probably won't demand to sweat. However, Cypress Cove is a brand new architecture that still brings a lot of improvements to the table even if it'southward not going to sit on top of the mount.

Cypress Cove brings PCIe 4.0 to Rocket Lake, giving a operation heave to one thousand.2 SSDs and other similarly attached components. During their CES presentation, Intel claimed next-gen Xe Graphics will crash-land performance in this category past 50%; it appear VNNI DeepLearning AI-assisted processing, improved DDR4-3200 memory and capability to run three displays at 4K 60 frames per second using the latest DisplayPort and HDMI standards.

Release Dates and Cost

We don't have whatsoever confirmation on price withal from any official sources, but we should await to take them presently. Intel officially stated a Q1 2022 release for Rocket Lake desktop products, just some motherboard manufacturers have already indicated a more specific March release window. Mobile versions of the processor accept nonetheless to be officially disclosed, and so wait details on laptop configurations to come a little later in the aforementioned way they did for the Ryzen 5000 CPUs.

Performance Outlook

Rocket Lake 11th Gen CPUs, according to the early leaks at least, should outperform their 10th Gen Tiger Lake equivalents despite the "backported" architecture. Compared to AMD, Intel has generally favored single-threaded performance and overclocking and information technology looks similar those two aspects will still agree truthful for Rocket Lake. While multi-thread processing volition probably get AMD's way, gaming applications should come across a large do good from a stronger single-thread-capable CPU since that's the style many games are yet designed to work. However, with Ryzen CPUs sitting at the eye of both PS5 and Xbox Serial X and S, that's all beginning to alter.

Alder Lake 10nm Process Coming Before long

Rocket Lake will be followed later this twelvemonth by Alder Lake, a 10nm process that volition employ a completely different approach to architecture and CPU core design to assistance close the gap AMD has created. PCIe 5.0 and DDR5 memory have both been announced for Alder Lake processors, making the 10nm chips a much bigger pace forward compared to Rocket Lake.