Today, Intel officially unveiled the details on its 11th-gen Rocket Lake-S processors. led by the new flagship Core i9-11900K, with 8 cores, 16 threads, boosted clock speeds up to 5.3GHz, support for DDR4 RAM at 3,200MHz, a total of 20 PCIe 4.0 lanes, and backwards compatibility with Intel’s 400 Series chipsets. On paper, the new Core i9-11900K chip is actually a downgrade from last year’s top model, the Core i9-10900K, which offered 10 cores and 20 threads and a similar boosted clock speed of 5.3GHz.
Intel claims that these 11-gen Rocket Lake-S chips offer improvements in this generation, including:
- Up to 19% gen-over-gen IPC performance improvement.
- Up to 50% better integrated graphics performance with Intel UHD graphics featuring Intel Xe graphics architecture.3
- Deep Learning Boost and Vector Neural Network Instructions support to accelerate artificial intelligence (AI) inference — vastly improving performance for deep learning workloads.
- Enhanced overclocking tools and features for flexible overclocking and tuning performance and experience.
The 11-gen Rocket Lake-S processors are still 14nm chip. When the chips were first announced at CES 2021, many expected to see 10nm chips from Intel. While the new processors aren’t 10nm, they do have Intel’s Cypress Cove cores. The Cypress Cove cores have improvements from the 10nm core designs, which brings support for Intel Xe integrated graphics and faster processing speeds.
