Unnamed Intel Rocket Lake Eight-Core CPU Fails To Defeat Ryzen 3 3300X

Rocket Lake CPU (stock photo)
(Image credit: Shuitterstock)

A fresh round of Rocket Lake benchmarks (via Tum_Apisak) has set the rumor mill into action once again. The highest Rocket Lake configuration so far has been eight cores, so this nameless 11th Generation processor may be the flagship chip or a variant of it.

If you haven't been following Intel's products, Rocket Lake marks the end of the Skylake era. Exercising Intel's latest Cypress Cove cores, Rocket Lake is poised to bring a real performance upgrade for users, unlike the previous iterations of Skylake that only offered minor improvements to existing architecture to justify the introduction of a new product. Intel has deferred to say how much performance we should see exactly, but boasted about IPC (instruction per cycle) enhancements in the double figures.

SiSoftware listed this particular Rocket Lake-S sample with an eight-core, 16-thread configuration with 16MB of L3 cache. This description certainly matches that of the core specifications of a presumed octa-core Core i9 SKU.

Intel Rocket Lake Processor (Image credit: SiSoftware)

The Rocket Lake part reportedly runs with a 1.8 GHz base clock and 4.4 GHz boost clock. The processor's clock speeds are pretty far away from the values that we previously saw for another unidentified Rocket Lake processor, which flaunted a 3.41 GHz base clock and 4.98 GHz boost clock. In all likelihood, the SiSoftware chip could be an early engineering sample with a low 65W or 35W TDP. On the flipside, SiSoftware may be misinterpreting the clock speeds, which happens a lot when it comes to unreleased hardware.

Intel 11th Generation Rocket Lake Benchmarks

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ProcessorProcessor Multi-MediaProcessor Cryptography (High Security)Processor Financial Analysis (High/Double Precision)Processor Scientific Analysis (High/Double Precision)Processor Image Processing (Normal/Single Precision)Overall Processor Score
Rocket Lake (8 Cores)431.10 Mpix/s7.55 GB/s28.32 kOPTS21.79 GFLOPS325.18 Mpix/s4.04 kPT
Ryzen 3 3300X474.62 Mpix/s13.59 GB/s42.92 kOPTS28.08 GFLOPS 274.02 Mpix/s5.32 kPT
Core i5-9600K473.90 Mpix/s10.85 GB/s44.52 kOPTS30.50 GFLOPS354.65 Mpix/s4.16 kPT

Without a model name to pin the Rocket Lake processor to, it's pretty hard to deduct which processor it's replacing. Furthermore, we don't have all the details of the platform that was used in the tests, so we suggest you take these results with a pinch of salt for now.

The results from the SiSoftware submissions aren't very inspiring though. The octa-core Rocket Lake processor seemingly put out worse scores than the Ryzen 3 3300X quad-core processor and Core i5-9600K hexa-core chip. 

Rocket Lake will land in the first quarter of 2021. The processors are expected to be backward-compatible with Intel 400-series motherboards, but new 500-series offerings are also likely to be available to house the new chips.

Zhiye Liu
News Editor and Memory Reviewer

Zhiye Liu is a news editor and memory reviewer at Tom’s Hardware. Although he loves everything that’s hardware, he has a soft spot for CPUs, GPUs, and RAM.

  • Darkbreeze
    Intel: Forget about incremental gains, let's just go backwards instead. They won't be expecting THAT.
    Reply
  • neojack
    probably a mobile chip
    Reply
  • spongiemaster
    neojack said:
    probably a mobile chip
    There is no mobile Rocket Lake. Rocket Lake is more or less Ice Lake backported to 14nm for the desktop. It wouldn't make any sense to bring that to mobile when Tiger Lake H is just about to be released which is the 10nm successor to Ice Lake. Unless Intel's plan really is to go backwards.
    Reply
  • tlmiller76
    spongiemaster said:
    There is no mobile Rocket Lake. Rocket Lake is more or less Ice Lake backported to 14nm for the desktop. It wouldn't make any sense to bring that to mobile when Tiger Lake H is just about to be released which is the 10nm successor to Ice Lake. Unless Intel's plan really is to go backwards.
    Bah, logged in for nothing, was going to say essentially that.
    Reply
  • TerryLaze
    Lower results than the i5-9600 so it's pretty obvious that it's running at much lower clocks than the final version will.
    Unless this is an T variant or something like that.
    Reply
  • watzupken
    I feel something is not right with the numbers. While R3 3300X is fast, but it is no Zen 3 which soundly beat Comet Lake in almost every test except for those AVX 512 ones. Its either the processor is stuck at its low base clock, or could be throttling.
    Reply
  • jimmysmitty
    watzupken said:
    I feel something is not right with the numbers. While R3 3300X is fast, but it is no Zen 3 which soundly beat Comet Lake in almost every test except for those AVX 512 ones. Its either the processor is stuck at its low base clock, or could be throttling.

    My guess would be low clock speeds and this is an early ES sample. The odds that Intel would ever release a CPU that performs worse than their own previous gen in every metric are pretty much nill to none.

    But that is how rumors go. We will never truly know performance until the official launch of the product and third parties can put it through its paces.
    Reply
  • GetSmart
    Here is another result https://ranker.sisoftware.co.uk/show_system.php?q=cea598ab92a191a39bbddae7cafbddaf92a385ecd1e1c7af92a284fcc1f1d7b2d7eadafc8fb28a&l=en :vip:

    Much higher score at 755.73 MPix/s 🔍
    Reply