Intel Rocket Lake-S computer games are here

This week, Intel announced its 11th generation S-Series desktop CPUs, codenamed Rocket Lake-S. These game-oriented processors are optimized for high clock speeds and performance, and come in 19 SKUs ranging from i5-11400T to 19-11900K.

The new chips, based on Intel’s Cypress Cove architecture, claim a 19 percent increase in instructions per clock cycle – a very well-known figure, as this is the same number that AMD claimed for IPC increase between the Zen 2 and Zen. 3 architecture. We will be doing practical benchmarking in the near future to determine how important the “up to and including” hedging on the claim matters.

Meanwhile, we are cautiously optimistic about the performance of ‘up to 19 percent IPC’ and ‘up to 50 percent iGPU’ that Intel claims. As usual, the very large numbers that Intel is showing to the new generation of processors do not have much to do with overall CPU performance – they are pretty much directly linked to AVX-512 optimized workload. But the 19 percent is not paired with AVX-512, nor does it cost the price of reduced clock speeds or a higher TDP.

Intel is also releasing a new Z590 motherboard chipset. Orchards built on Z590 offer 20 PCI Express 4.0 lanes, USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 20Gbps ports, Thunderbolt 4 and enhanced direct memory interface. The new boards also support 10th generation processors, but older CPUs do not have PCIe 4.0 support, so do not expect a new Z590 card to unlock them.

Rocket Lake-S CPUs are not compatible with H410 or B460 boards, and compatibility with Z490 is uncertain at best. If you want a Rocket Lake-S-CPU, we highly recommend a new Z590 board to match it.

In another well-known story for Intel is the core score that the new generation is giving up, even though it is only at the Core i9 level. The i9-10900K was a 10-core, 125W TDP component with a maximum single-core gain of 5.3GHz; the i9-11900K corresponds to the TDP and frequency, but drops to eight core points. Core i7 and Core i5 CPUs remain 8c / 16t and 6c / 12t, respectively.

Ars has product samples from the i9-11900K and i5-11600K processors on hand, along with a new Z590-based motherboard. We will of course present practical benchmark results later this month.

List by Intel

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