Intel Rocket Lake

BLASTING OFF IN THE NEW YEAR.

Intel’s 11th-Gen Rocket Lake is headed to the launch pad in the first quarter of 2021, and it couldn’t come at a better time. AMD’s Zen architecture has thundered into the desktop PC market, steadily taking chunks of market share in a segment long dominated by Intel. Intel’s response will come in the form of Rocket Lake, but unlike the forward progress we see with the company’s 10nm Tiger Lake chips for laptops, the chips are 14nm’s last hurrah on the desktop.

Rocket Lake could bring Intel’s first new microarchitecture to the desktop PC in five years. 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. That addresses a key weakness exacerbated by AMD’s now year-long advantage with its uncontested leadership position in I/O connectivity.

Test results have also emerged for six-core 12-thread Rocket Lake processors, but there are no indications of Rocket Lake chips with more than eight cores. The Rocket Lake processors are said to have a 125W maximum TDP rating, which aligns well with the standard power envelopes we see with Intel’s flagship chips. It certainly feels like a regression for Intel to step back to eight cores, as Comet Lake-S (CML-S) sports up to 10 cores within the same TDP envelope. Given that Rocket Lake will come with a new microarchitecture, it appears that Intel is betting on drastically-improved instruction per cycle (IPC) throughput to offset the lower core counts.

“Test results have also emerged for six-core 12-thread Rocket Lake processors, but there are no indications of Rocket Lake chips with more than eight cores.”