Intel at CES: Atom Jasper Lake, Tiger Lake-H35 and Core i9-11900K

11th gen Core for desktop a.k.a. “Rocket Lake“. i9-11900K, the coming king of gaming PCs?

Intel is likely at the point where it got out of the worst of the “never-ending 14nm process” period now: the company has unveiled three families of 10nm mobile processors at CES 2021, some clocked up to 5 GHz. And in addition to this, Rocket Lake processors for desktop. Those are still 14nm products (the last ones), but they finally bring a new – and potentially very good – architecture. All these CPUs will be released in Q1 2021.

Now let’s finally talk the last 14nm processor to be released by Intel (or hopefully the last). Ironically, these could could actually be some of the most interesting ones. Rocket Lake, or the 11th generation Core for desktop, has not yet been released, but Intel has previewed it and revealed most of the details about the fastest SKU: Core i9-11900K. These processors should also be released this quarter, probably in March.

Finally a new desktop architecture

Rocket Lake is a line of processors for the LGA 1200 socket, expected to offer six or eight cores – there will be no deca-cores. The processor uses the architecture from 10nm Ice Lake and/or Tiger Lake processors, modified to be manufactured on a 14nm process – the resulting core is called Cypress Cove and is equipped with 512KB L2 cache (so the architecture might be closer to Ice Lake. According to Intel, its IPC – i.e. performance at a given clock – is 19% higher than that of Skylake, which promises very good single-threaded performance as well as performance in games. The core also brings support of AVX-512, VNNI and DL Boost instructions into mainstream desktops, for the first time.

The integrated graphics does come from Tiger Lake processors though – it’s Iris Xe, but only with 32 EU (256 shaders). However, support for AV1 video playback is retained. The news is that this GPU will always be active, even if you install a dedicated graphics card alongside. This keeps Intel’s Quick Sync multimedia acceleration available for PCs with a dedicated GPU. On the software side this should be handled similarly to how GPU switching works in notebooks.

Intel has not yet revealed all models and parameters and focused only on the most powerful version of the Core i9-11900K. However, below you can see a table of models leaked from unofficial sources (the numbers that are more likely to be true have been marked in bold).

The Core i9-11900K will be an octa-core with 16 threads and 16MB L3 cache, with 125W TDP. The PL2 power draw in boost should be up to 250 W and the standard time for which this will be sustainable will in turn be the same as for Comet Lake – 56 seconds (but motherboards will again be able to override this duration to “infinite”). The processor will have an all-core boost of up to 4.8 GHz – only 100 MHz lower than the Core i9-10900K in the Comet Lake generation. But the single-core boost will be the same – 5.3 GHz. Both frequencies are with Thermal Velocity Boost applied, so they are dependent on temperature being low enough, so when the chip heats up above a certain limit, the frequency will probably decrease. The same is already the case with the i9-10900K.

Intel has managed to port a core with a 19% higher IPC to a 14nm process without losing any clock speed – this shows that the clock potential of 14nm technology is really top notch after the years of tweaking it has seen. But the area of the chip and energy efficiency is, naturally, a big burden compared to more modern technologies, so it is still absolutely necessary to move on from 14nm.

Intel has shown benchmarks according to which the Core i9-11900K should beat the Ryzen 9 5900X (a 12-core Zen 3) by 2–8% in 1080p gaming. Of course, these are official results that need to be taken with a grain of salt, as they can be cherry-picking. But Intel has the advantage of monolithic silicon with lower memory latency on their side, so it is not unexpected for them to gain the upper hand in gaming performance. In any case, real performance will only be clear once there are independent reviews.

Official benchmarks of Core i9-11900K at CES 2021

During the presentation, Intel also showed a demo in Metro Exodus, where the i9-11900K achieved about 6.2% higher average FPS compared to the Ryzen 9 5900X: 156.54 FPS against 147.43 FPS.

Official benchmarks of Core i9-11900K at CES 2021

New motherboards and compatibility just with H470 and Z490?

Rocket Lake processors now support PCI Express 4.0 – they also provide PCIe 4.0 ×16 for a graphics card, as well as PCIe 4.0 ×4 for SSDs. Official DDR4-3200 support is added, too. This will work on 500-series chipset boards, but after upgrading the BIOS, it will also be possible to use PCI Express 4.0 on motherboard with Z490 chipset as long as they were designed for this in advance.

The new 500-series chipsets have already been officially released and such motherboards should start appearing in the coming days and weeks. Their advantage is that they support SuperSpeed USB 20Gbps (USB 3.2 Gen 2×2). With the exception of H510 that is, H510 is limited to just base 5.0Gb/s USB 3.0 ports. As a novelty, the B560 and H570 chipsets will now support XMP profiles and DDR4 overclocking, so they will be much better for gaming computers, as faster memory (along with overclock CPUs through increasing their PL2 and TDP) will partially replace the capability to full overclock Intel CPUs, which remails exclusive to Z590.

Another big change is in the connection of the chipset to the processor. It is confirmed that Intel has increased throughput between chipset and Rocket Lake CPUs. Instead of DMI with four lanes (which is equivalent to PCIe 3.0 ×4), Rocket Lake connects to the 500-series chipsets over eight lanes, equivalent to PCIe 3.0 ×8. Thus, bandwidth increased from 4 GB/s to 8 GB/s (in real life it is less due to overheads).

8-core Rocket Lake chip

Rocket Lake to not work on boards with H410 and B460 chipsets

But this seems to be a source of some incompatibility. According to Intel, Rocket Lake processors will eventually only work on older Z490 and H470 chipsets for those who will be upgrading from Comet Lake – because these chipsets have newer 14nm silicon. However, H410 and B460 chipsets use a different, older 22nm silicon and, according to official information, are simply not compatible. So on LGA 1200 boards using H410 or b460 it will likely not be possible to use Rocket Lake CPUs.

We’ll see if motherboard manufacturers manage to work around this limitation somehow, but if you’re planning to buy a computer based on the LGA 1200 platform now and you’re not going to buy a 500-series board, keep this issue in mind. The new B510 and B560 chipsets should not have this problem.

First preview of Alder Lake

Intel also showed an ES sample of the Alder Lake processor in action – these will be Intel’s first desktop processors with 10nm chips, alreadyusing DDR5 memory and new LGA 1700 platform. The processor was not visible, but Intel showed an operating computer running with it. The processor was cooled by a stock cooler which suggests it was a 65W CPU (but this does not rule out it can reach higher power draw during boost).

Demo of Alder Lake processor at CES 2021

The Alder Lake processors and LGA 1700 platform are expected to be available later this year, so the Rocket Lake, to be released in March, might be be replaced relatively quickly: Intel has once again confirmed that it plans to release Alder Lake in the second half of this year. The CPU core used in Alder Lake is again supposed to bring a significantly higher IPC, so we can expect an improvement in single-threaded and gaming performance even beyond what Rocket Lake is bringing to table.

English translation and edit by Lukáš Terényi

  •  
  •  
  •  
Flattr this!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *