Intel Rocket Lake-S: end of January + technical details

We have mentioned several times the launch of Rocket Lake-S initially scheduled for the second quarter of 2021. Several of our sources have told us that contrary to the information provided by Intel, this 11th generation will be launched at the beginning of January.

January launch but what about the real availability?

We can now definitively confirm this information. Intel plans to launch a complete range of Rocket Lake-S CPUs in January (we don’t know yet if it’s for the CES or for the end of January). The real issue is the availability of these CPUs. Concretely, if Intel’s Gen 11 is correctly available in the first quarter, the blue will pull the brown from the fire. AMD is for the moment unable to deliver its Ryzen 5000 in volume and the situation is not expected to improve over the first few months of 2021. However, it is more likely that we will once again see a paper launch . A practice that we would like to forget and which has the consequence of disturbing everyone: customers who don’t know where to stand anymore, retailers who are pestering on the “publicity” given to a product that won’t be available for a while etc, etc., etc.

Rocket Lake-S: regaining leadership in gaming

It has been explained here how Intel has been able to “deal” with the constraints that have been its own for some time in an attempt to reposition its CPUs as the choice of gamers. Of course, all this will have to be checked in the facts. Some elements are however leaking on the behaviour of this range. In the last few hours the Core i9-11900K, consisting of 8 cores and 16 threads has been seen (a priori). This CPU could reach a Turbo frequency for a single core of 5.30 GHz and would hold 4.80 GHz on all cores in the best case. Its base frequency would be 3.50 GHz. Our friend APISAK was able to retrieve the scores of this CPU under Ashes Of Singularity. This gives us a performance of 63 FPS in 1080p with Crazy graphics settings when the CPU is accompanied by a Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti under the DirectX 12 API. Under the same API, version, resolution, GPU and graphics settings, an AMD Ryzen 9 5950X gets 57.1 FPS. We can therefore draw the conclusion that in this particular case, Intel’s processor is 10.3% faster than the 5950X. However, a particular case cannot be generalized and we will be careful not to jump to conclusions. If Intel were to regain leadership in gaming, it should be noted that this would be done on a doomed platform (the 1200 socket) and at the price of a debauchery of energy (we are talking about a 250W ceiling…).