Intel Rocket Lake-S Engineering Sample Makes Very Early Appearance

Intel's Comet Lake-S chips have yet to make their debut, but meanwhile, an engineering sample of a Rocket Lake CPU is already poking its head out of the water, thanks to a leak is spotted by hardware leaker @_Rogame. 

There's not a lot of information there. However, the datasheet points to the chip in question having eight CPU cores with Hyper-Threading. Despite Comet Lake-S coming with a maximum of 10 cores, rumored Rocket Lake-S specs point to a maximum of eight cores. However, it's expected that Rocket Lake-S will at last bring an architecture change to Intel's line of desktop CPUs. With the yet-to-be released Comet Lake-S CPUs Intel will continue using the same basic blueprints employed since 6th Generation Skylake from 2015.

The clock speeds for this Rocket Lake-S chip spotted this week are listed a 1.8 GHz for both the base and boost clocks, but they're far too low to be representative of the final product. 

However, the real question is whether Rocket Lake-S will be making the jump from 14nm to 10nm. At this point, we simply don't know. It wouldn't be surprising to see an architecture change while the process node remains 14nm, with Intel returning to a tick-tock product cycle. But both the architecture and process node are in desperate need of an update, as Intel has really wrung every last bit of juice out of the 14nm process.

This isn't the first leak to come out regarding Rocket Lake-S. Previously, there have been Rocket Lake-S leaks pointing to Xe integrated graphics, PCIe 4.0, Thunderbolt 4 and more.