Yesterday, Intel officially lifted the curtains of its 11th Gen Rocket Lake Desktop CPU which will be launching in Q1 2021. Intel provided a high-level overview of the features and some specifications that its lineup would feature which definitely are their way of saying to consumers that we've also got something coming for the mainstream desktop segment. Now the latest benchmarks of Intel's Rocket Lake CPUs have leaked within UserBenchmark database (via TUM_APISAK) that show some huge gains in single-core performance on early engineering samples.

Intel's 11th Gen Rocket Lake "Core i9-11900K" ES Desktop CPU With 4.2 GHz Max Clocks Tested, Huge Single-Threaded Lead Over Skylake With Cypress Cove Cores

The benchmarks show an unreleased 11th Gen Intel Rocket Lake Desktop CPU. The CPU comes with 8 cores and 16 threads which should be the maximum core and thread count on the Rocket Lake lineup. The CPU also has its clock speeds listed at 3.4 GHz base and 4.2 GHz boost which are lower than what Intel has hinted us. According to Intel themselves, the Intel Rocket Lake Desktop CPUs will come in Core i9, Core i7, Core i5 flavors and rock frequencies beyond 5 GHz so 4.2 GHz max clocks are not even close to the final retail variants which launch early next year.

Another surprising thing about this benchmark is that it was ran on a Z590 motherboard. The board will rock the LGA 1200 socket, supporting both 10th Gen Comet Lake and 11th Gen Rocket Lake CPUs before the company is planned to transition to yet another socket in Q3 2021 which is LGA 1700. Other notable specs about the test setup include 32 GB of DDR4-2667 memory and a 160 GB WD Blue HD. The test benchmark was carried out by a Taiwanese company so we most definitely know who is behind this leak (leaving on readers to figure this out).

We don't officially know what the CPU is going to be called but considering the 8 core & 16 thread chips is where Rocket Lake maxes out, we are either looking at the Core i9-11900K or the Core i7-11700K. The CPU scores 179 points in 1 core, 368 points in 2 core, 682 points in 4 core, 1115 points in 8 core and 1623 points in 64-core tests. The table below shows how these results fare against Intel's existing 10th Gen lineup.

Intel 8 Core & 16 Thread Rocket Lake Desktop CPU Benchmarks:

As you can see in the benchmark table above, the Intel Rocket Lake Desktop CPU is up to 21% faster than its predecessor, the Core i7-10700K which has the same amount of cores & threads within single-core benchmarks. At the same time, the Core i7-10700K has a clock advantage of 5.1GHz which is 21% faster than the 4.2 GHz. Given these numbers, a 5 GHz+ Rocket Lake CPU is going to destroy the Core i7-10700K in single-threaded workloads. The CPU was also 18% faster than the Core i9-10900K which has a clock speed advantage of 26% at 5.3 GHz.

The things quickly change in multi-core tests since the ES has much lower all-core boost rates than the 5 GHz+ rates of the 10th Gen Core i7 and Core i9 CPUs. Despite that, the Intel Rocket Lake CPU does come out ahead of the 10700K by 7% in 8-core and 4% in 64-core tests. This goes off to show that Intel claims about Rocket Lake Cypress cove cores offering double digit gains over the existing Skylake offerings might be true after all but we still need to wait for more results to evaluate how good Rocket Lake performs. If these gains are carried over in the final retail samples, than Intel's 11th Gen CPUs can quickly retake the single-core performance crown from AMD's Ryzen 5000 Zen 3 family which are looking to be insanely fast single-threaded chips themselves with a massive 19% IPC gain over its predecessors.

Here's Everything We Know About The 11th Generation Rocket Lake Desktop CPUs

Intel's Rocket Lake-S desktop CPU platform is expected to feature support on LGA 1200 socket which will make its debut with Comet Lake-S CPUs although on 400-series motherboards. The Intel Rocket Lake-S processors will be launching alongside the 500-series motherboards but it has since been confirmed that LGA 1200 motherboards will offer support for Rocket Lake-S CPUs, especially given the fact that PCIe Gen 4.0 is a prominent feature of Z490 motherboards which would only be enabled with the use of Rocket Lake-S desktop CPUs.

Main features of Intel's Rocket Lake Desktop CPUs include:

Increased Performance with new Cypress Cove core architectureNew Xe graphics architecture (Up To 50% higher Performance Than Gen9)Increased DDR4 3200 MHz Memory SupportCPU PCIe 4.0 Lanes (Available on Z490 & Z590 Motherboards)Enhanced Display (Integrated HDMI 2.0b, DP1.4a, HBR3)Added x4 CPU PCIe Lanes = 20 Total CPU PCIe 4.0 LanesEnhanced Media (12 bit AV1/HVEC, E2E compression)CPU Attached Storage or Intel Optane MemoryNew Overclocking Features and CapabilitiesUSB Audio offloadIntegrated CNVi & Wireless-AXIntegrated USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 (20G)2.5Gb Ethernet Discrete LANDiscrete Intel Thunderbolt 4 (USB4 Compliant)

The architecture for Rocket Lake CPUs is said to be a hybrid between the Sunny Cove and Willow Cove design but will feature Xe Gen 12 GPU architecture. We have also been told that the Z590 motherboard series with Thunderbolt 4.0 support will be announced later this year so expect more information on Rocket Lake CPUs in the coming months.

Intel Mainstream CPU Generations Comparison: