Intel Core i9-11900K Rocket Lake S flagship chipset coming in Q1 2021 to take on AMD Zen 3-based Ryzen 5000

Intel has announced that its flagship Core i9-11900K chipset will arrive in the first quarter of 2021 at the CES 2021. The chipmaker previewed the upcoming 11th-generation Rocket Lake S chipsets for desktops that will take on AMD’s Zen 3 chipsets that were launched last year. Intel has claimed that its new chips will have 50 per cent better integrated graphics while the instructions per cycle will be bumped up to 19 per cent higher. And finally, there will be better AI performance on Intel’s upcoming flagship processor.

For the new Core i9-11900K chipsets, Intel took a page from its old playbook and moved back to the eight-core performance based on the 14-nanometre architecture. This seems underwhelming in front of the 10-nanometre process but Intel is touting its new Cypress Cove cores that bring the performance improvement of the 10nm process to the 14nm, allowing faster speeds without needing extra cores. The current 11th-generation models have 10 cores with 20 threads but Intel says the overall performance of the Rocket Lake S chipsets will be better comparatively.

The top-end model, the Core i9-11900K has an eight-core, 16-thread chipset that has a boosted speed of 5.3GHz. There is support for DDR4 RAM with a frequency of 3200MHz and a total of 20 PCIe 4.0 lanes for storage. Intel is also touting backward compatibility on the upcoming chipset with the Intel 400 Series chipsets, such as the Intel Core i9-10900K. Previously, the Core i9-11900K visited the Geekbench 5 benchmarking platform where it resulted in an 18 per cent improvement in single-core performance over the Core i9-10900K processor, which means the upcoming Intel processor is going to be significantly faster

However, while Intel is promising a bright future of desktops with the Rocket Lake S chipsets, AMD is already ready with the ammunition. The rival chipmaker had launched the Zen 3 microarchitecture for desktop chipsets, such as the Ryzen 5000 series and the Ryzen 4000 series is also expected to feature the Zen 3 architecture soon. In benchmark results performed in December last year, the Zen 3-based Ryzen 5800X chipset outperformed an early version of the Rocket Lake S chipset with significant differences in the single-core and multi-core performance. But these scores do not factor in the performance boost that the Cypress Cove cores will bring. And this new technology from Intel is going to be a game-changer for desktop processors.

In addition to announcing the launch timeline for the Rocket Lake S chipset, Intel teased the 12th-generation Alder Lake processors and launched four new processor families for notebooks. It launched the new 11th-generation vPro mobile processors for ultralight business laptops that bring 23 per cent performance improvements over the last generation chipsets. For gaming laptops, Intel launched the 11th-generation H-series CPUs with TDP (Thermal Power Design). The base TDP of these processors is 28W but it can go up to 35W with the boost. Intel also launched the Evo vPro and N-Series Pentium Silver and Celeron processors for regular business and education markets.