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

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.

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.