INTEL CORE I9-11900K 0K
Team Blue strikes back ack but is it enough?
THERE’S LOTS TO TALK ABOUT here, so we’ll keep it brief where we can. This is Intel’s latest 11th-gen Core series of desktop processors. It’s also the company’s seventh iteration on the 14nm transistor design. It debuted 14nm with Broadwell (fifth-gen, successor to Haswell and Devil’s Canyon) in 2015, and since then the company has struggled to break past that 14nm barrier, with delay after delay proving costly. There have been several attempts, and Intel did see some success with low-powered laptop and ultrabook chips in 2019, thanks to the 10nm+ Ice Lake CPUs, but desktop parts never arrived.
As AMD has continued to push the limits of its architectural design and manufacturing processes, Intel’s had to pivot to keep up, increasing core counts, voltages, IPCs, and frequencies in the process, and working its way around the engineering and design problems induced by those unorthodox methods of improving performance.
With its 5000-series CPUs, however, AMD presented something that even Intel couldn’t match, with dominance in both single-core IPC and multicore capacity, and continued support for PCIe 4.0. Intel’s 10th-gen series, when it launched, was a hard pill to swallow for most people wanting to upgrade, as it only represented increased core counts, with slightly higher clock speeds and IPC, more heat, and, of course, a new socket.
Something had to change, and with the multicore, IPC, and gaming crowns absent from Intel’s marketing decks, a bold plan was put in place to back-port a well-established 10nm architecture to the 14nm manufacturing process. Thus Rocket Lake was born, built off the Cypress Cove architecture, itself a derivative of Sunny Cove, used in the 10nm Ice Lake laptop CPUs we mentioned.
That’s led to some interesting handoffs between the two very different platforms. Intel’s still using a monolithic chip design, as opposed to AMD’s modular style, but the cores, despite remaining on the 14nm process, are far denser than previous generations. Intel has also added its Xe integrated graphics (named UHD 730 or 750) to these CPUs for a gain of 40–50 percent performance dependent on model, finally included support for PCIe 4.0, with 20 lanes available, increased native DDR4 support to 3,200MHz, and added a few memory overclocking features here and there.
INTERESTING INTERFACE
More interesting are the chipset updates. With the new 500-series boards, we have a new DMI, with x8 PCIe 3.0 lanes (same bandwidth as x4 PCIe 4.0 lanes), memory overclocking enabled on H570 and B560 boards, discrete Wi-Fi 6E support as standard, Thunderbolt 4 support, and support for USB 3.2 Gen2x2. The reason for doubling the width of the DMI is likely because the boards also support 10thgen CPUs, so it’s not unreasonable to think you could install a 10th-gen chip and still get PCIe 4.0 performance from drives that aren’t running directly native to the CPU, but through the DMI. Neat. But we’re going to have to check that.
When we look at performance, things get even more interesting—because, sadly, it’s not that impressive. In our testing, we saw figures on average about 3 percent slower than our AMD Ryzen 9 5950X in single-core applications. In multicore scenarios, well, it just wasn’t pleasant to watch. Admittedly, that last part isn’t entirely a fair comparison, as the 5950X has twice the number of threads as the 11900K, but all the same…. It is better compared to the previous generation of chips, by about 8-14 percent on average, but as they weren’t competing anyway, well, yeah, it’s a tough sell.
So, what’s the positive takeaway from this? Well, it is an interesting architecture, perhaps a little lower on cores than we’d like, but it’s a solid contender. Being manufactured on a 14nm process in a time where we’re in a chip drought could be a massive boon to supply. As we’ve said multiple times, even this issue, you can have the best processors in the world, but if they’re not available for sale, it’s all for naught. The lower-end chips might actually be the more interesting parts— the Core i5-11400, in particular, could be ideal for a budget 1080p gaming machine. And if the architecture holds true, and Intel finally manages to deliver on its 10nm processes later this year, we could see some significant improvements, including more cores across its range. Is it going to be enough to beat AMD though? Hmmm….