All You Need To Know About Intel Rocket Lake
Intel announced a new architecture named 11th-Gen Rocket Lake that will be released in the first quarter of 2021. AMD’s Zen architecture has thundered into the desktop PC market, steadily taking chunks of market share in a segment long dominated by Intel.
Rocket Lake chips will have a 14nm process which is not what we expect now when the team red already switched to 7nm. We already know with certainty that Rocket Lake will come with support for the PCIe 4.0 interface, which provides twice the bandwidth as PCIe 3.0.
Intel 11th-Gen Rocket Lake At a Glance
- Support for PCIe 4.0
- 14nm processor
- New microarchitecture for the desktop
- AVX-512, Thunderbolt 4 support
- Intel plans to launch Rocket Lake in Q1 2021
- Intel 12th-gen Xe LP Graphics provide step-function increase in integrated graphics performance
Intel 14nm Rocket Lake Release Date
Intel has finally given an official release date for the Rocket Lake-S processors, which will land in Q1 2021. A recently leaked roadmap, which lines up largely with Intel’s announced launch date, indicates we will see a full roster of 500-series motherboards, including Z590, H570, B560, and H510 variants.
Intel 11th-Gen Rocket Lake Specifications and Performance Benchmarks
A test submission to the publicly-accessible 3DMark benchmark database revealed the highest core-count Rocket Lake model we’ve seen to date. This model comes with 8 cores and 16 threads and is listed with a 3.2 GHz base frequency and 4.3 GHz boost.
Intel’s hyper-optimized 14nm process currently boosts to 5.3 GHz on a single core with the 10-core Core i9–10900K, and we expect an eight-core Rocket Lake model to meet or exceed that watermark.
Intel 11th-Gen Rocket Lake Motherboard
Can you use your 400-series motherboard for Rocket Lake processors? Yes.
The Rocket Lake processors will drop into the Socket 1200 interface, so current-gen 400-series motherboards will support the chip. Many Z490 motherboards support the PCIe 4.0 interface, which motherboard vendors indicate is to provide support for the ‘future’ processors that are undoubtedly the Rocket Lake family.
Socket 1200 motherboards will be short-lived. According to Intel’s own documentation, the hybrid Alder Lake-S processors that arrive in the latter half of 2021 will drop into Socket 1700. That means there will be no forward compatibility for Socket 1200 motherboards with future Intel processors.
Intel Rocket Lake Architecture
It is clear from the test submissions that the Rocket Lake processors come with a revamped cache hierarchy, and support for AVX-512 further points to a new microarchitecture for the desktop. Add in that the internal PCIe subsystem has been reworked to accommodate an x4 direct connection from the CPU to NVMe storage, and that the DMI lines have been increased from four to eight, and it’s clear that Intel has made significant alterations to the design.
Sunny Cove debuted with Ice Lake processors and imparted an 18% IPC gain over Skylake, at least according to Intel. Geekbench test submissions list Rocket Lake’s cache configuration at the same 2MB of L3 cache per core as Sunny Cove and the L2 is also the same 512KB per core. That suggests Rocket Lake will have Sunny Cove cores, but it isn’t quite that simple.
