Intel Rocket Lake-S CPU Skyrockets to 6.9 GHz Under Liquid Nitrogen

Rocket Lake-S
Rocket Lake-S (Image credit: VWorld/Twitter)

Two videos leaked via VWorld show a secret overclocking meeting at Gigabyte's OC labs. The videos reveal an unidentified 11th Generation Rocket Lake-S shooting up to 6.9 GHz (6,923 MHz) under the influence of liquid nitrogen.

The highest we've seen from a Core i9-10900K is 7.7 GHz (7,707 MHz) so Rocket Lake still has a fair bit if distance to travel before smashing Comet Lake's record. Comet Lake, like its previous antecessors, is based on Skylake microarchitecture though, and Rocket Lake does wield the new Cypress Cove cores so it'll be interesting to see how high Rocket Lake can go.

While the details are slim, the processor from the video may be the Core i9-11900K. However, it's impossible to say for sure since Rocket Lake-S maxes out at eight cores. Leaked specifications showed that the Core i7 models will allegedly feature eight cores too, suggesting that the clock speeds will ultimately be what separates a Core i7 SKU from a Core i9 SKU. Therefore, the processor from the video could very well be a Core i7-11700K too.

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The brief CPU-Z screenshot exposed the mysterious chip with a 16MB L3 cache and 4MB of L2 cache, which coincides with the configuration on Rocket Lake-S. For reference, Comet Lake-S features 256KB of L2 cache per core, while Rocket Lake-S sports 512KB per core. Furthermore, the processor from the video reportedly supports AVX512F and SHA, two instruction sets that are baked into Rocket Lake-S and not Comet Lake-S.

Judging by the BIOS' graphical user interface and the PCB design, the motherboard is unquestionably from Gigabyte. It's likely a Z590 motherboard that hails from the brand's elite Aorus lineup. The mysterious overclocker also pushed the memory to 6,666.66 MHz with a whopping 1.83V.

Many believe that Intel will finally announce Rocket Lake-S at CES 2021. If that's so, Intel or some other motherboard vendor will probably boast about their overclocking feat.

Zhiye Liu
RAM Reviewer and News Editor

Zhiye Liu is a Freelance News Writer at Tom’s Hardware US. Although he loves everything that’s hardware, he has a soft spot for CPUs, GPUs, and RAM.

  • Geef
    Well, at least this time they aren't hiding the fact its using liquid nitrogen.
    Reply
  • apone
    Or they could just stop beating the dead horse that is Intel's current architecture and come up with a new design. We're up to "11th Gen" core iX chips. Pretty sure the branding luster is long gone...
    Reply
  • PCWarrior
    apone said:
    Or they could just stop beating the dead horse that is Intel's current architecture and come up with a new design. We're up to "11th Gen" core iX chips. Pretty sure the branding luster is long gone...
    But 11th gen is using a new architecture with an 18-20% IPC increase (on average) over Skylake. On top of that Intel now includes AVX-512 in the mainstream lineup. You also have several IO changes: (i)going from PCIe3 to PCIe4, (ii)direct CPU lanes increased from 16 to 20 and (iii)DMI3 will use a x8 link to the chipset instead of x4.

    In most ways the above are equivalent (or better) to going from Zen2 to Zen3 in terms of per core performance increase and going from ZEN/ZEN+ to Zen 2 in terms of IO and features. And you get both within one generational leap.
    Reply
  • JfromNucleon
    PCWarrior said:
    And you get both within one generational leap.
    Certainly a long overdue one.
    Reply