After a tough year for Intel, with AMD making it look downright pedestrian in almost all cases with its new Ryzen 500 series, and barely cost competitive at the lower end with Ryzen 3000, team blue is set to swing back hard in 2021 with its Rocket Lake series of CPUs. Accepting that it's not going to win the top multi-threaded performance wars, it's going in on more intensive single threaded tasks and lower core performance battles. So far, the results look promising, with early leaked benchmarks of an Intel Core i7 11700KF managing to beat a higher-clocked Core i9 10900K.
Coming from perennial leaker, Tum_apisak, this leak shows the Core i7 CPU managing a score of 11,300 in the Ashes of the Singularity benchmark when running on Crazy settings at 1440p. That's a near three percent increase over stock 10900K numbers.
11th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-11700KF @ 3.60GHzhttps://t.co/BGnAmqsvF2
(not sure real or not)
because base clock higher than i9-11900K pic.twitter.com/6QoM7fWNE2— APISAK (@TUM_APISAK) December 23, 2020
The base clock for the 11700KF was said to be 3.6GHz, which is lower than the 10900K's suggesting that boost frequency would be lower too. That's hardly surprising, however, as the main performance improvements with Rocket Lake should come (not from a process shrink, don't be silly, Intel's still not ready for that) but from its new architecture. Cypress Cove is a backport of Ice Lake's 10nm Sunny Cove design, designed instead for 14nm. That's why the new top Rocket Lake chips can't do 10 cores on a single die. There just isn't the room.
But the efficiency improvements bring with them much needed performance gains it seems.
Rocket Lake is expected to debut in March 2021. If you're lucky, new-generation graphics cards might be back in stock then, making it possible to upgrade your whole system.
