Eight-Core i7-11700K Beats 10-Core i9-10900K in Latest Benchmark

Intel's Rocket Lake-S processors have been rumored to debut at CES 2021, later this month. While we wait to see if there is any truth to the rumor, the Core i7-11700K (via Tum_Apisak) has appeared flexing its muscles in Geekbench 4.

The Core i7-11700K wields eight Cypress Cove cores and also has Hyper-Threading to its advantage. The octa-core processor reportedly has a 3.6 GHz base clock. However, its boost clock was just a few megahertz shy of hitting 5 GHz in the Geekbench 4 benchmark. On the cache side, the Core i7-11700K exposed up to 4MB of L2 cache and 16MB of L3 cache.

Unlike Comet Lake-S, Rocket Lake-S will not offer SKUs up to 10 cores. Instead, the Core i9-11900K, which looks to be this generation's flagship part, will max out at eight cores, similar to previous flagships before the Comet Lake-S days. While this may seem like a downgrade for many, remember that Rocket Lake-S exploits Intel's Cypress Cove microarchitecture, which the chipmaker has touted instructions per cycle (IPC) gains up to double digits. The validity of Intel's claims remains to be verified, but we've already seen the Core i7-11700KF outpacing the Core i9-10900K in Ashes of the Singularity (AoTS). 

Today's Core i7-10700K Geekbench submission will help provide more insight into whether the Core i7-11700KF's victory over the Core i9-10900K was a fluke or not.

Since the introduction of Geekbench 5, Primate Labs Inc. no longer keeps the average processor metrics for Geekbench 4. AnandTech, our sibling site, still keeps Geekbench 4 records of the latest processors and will serve as our point of reference for comparison. It's also important to stress that Geekbench 4 adores fast memory, but it's unknown what memory the Core i7-11700K was paired with this CPU.

In the Geekbench 4 submission, the Core i7-11700K obtained single-core score of 7,857 points. The Ryzen 9 5950X and Core i9-10900K scores 7,158 points and 6,438 points, respectively. This makes the Core i7-11700K up to 9.8% faster than the Ryzen 9 5950X and up to 22% faster than the Core i9-10900K in single-core performance in Geekbench 4.

On the multi-core test, the Core i7-11700K put up a score of 42,011 points. The Ryzen 9 5950X (59,164 points) with its 16 cores and 32 threads is logically out of the Core i7-11700K's league. Nevertheless, the Core i9-10900K scores 41,663 points in the multi-core section, hinting that the Core i7-11700K's multi-core performance is likely in the same wheelhouse as the Core i9-10900K, despite a two-core disadvantage with the latter.