Rocket Lake is 18% faster in Single-Core performance than i9–10900K

In the latest Rocket Lake teaser, Intel touted double-digit instruction per cycle (IPC) gains. If the recent UserBenchmark results are accurate, we might be looking at improvements up to 21%.

Rocket Lake chips will have eight cores and 16 threads, a base clock of 3.4GHz, and a 4.2GHz boost clock.

The Rocket Lake sample was running on MSI’s Z590-A PRO-12VO (MS-7D10) motherboard. The last part of the model name (12VO) particularly caught our eye as it may be referring to Intel’s ATX12VO specification, which aims to replace the chubby 24-pin power connector with a 10-pin one instead.

Here’s the difference between Rocket Lake and Comet Lake:

Rocket Lake expects to max out at eight cores. So the Core i7–10700K is the logical comparison. For reference, the Core i7–10700K has a 3.8 GHz base clock and a 5.1 GHz boost clock, but with all of that, he is unable to beat Rocket Lake.

As we see in the benchmarks, Rocket Lake beats or equals the i9–10900K (which has a 3.7GHz base clock and a 5.3GHz boost clock).

So Rocket Lake will not have the fastest speed clocks, but it’ll be powerful. So Intel here wants to do what AMD did, lower clock speed but more power and hopefully lower TDB.