A fresh round of Rocket Lake benchmarks (via Tum_Apisak (opens in new tab)) 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.
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
| Processor | Processor Multi-Media | Processor 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/s | 7.55 GB/s | 28.32 kOPTS | 21.79 GFLOPS | 325.18 Mpix/s | 4.04 kPT |
| Ryzen 3 3300X | 474.62 Mpix/s | 13.59 GB/s | 42.92 kOPTS | 28.08 GFLOPS | 274.02 Mpix/s | 5.32 kPT |
| Core i5-9600K | 473.90 Mpix/s | 10.85 GB/s | 44.52 kOPTS | 30.50 GFLOPS | 354.65 Mpix/s | 4.16 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.
