The Rocket Lake desktop processors will arrive in less than four weeks. The 10nm Alder Lake desktop will be released in December
Intel has kept offering desktop processors with Skylake architecture for five and a half years. Ironically it looks like now, two new architectures will follow each other in just nine months, both with a 20% increase in IPC: according to current information, the Rocket Lake processors (11th gen Core) will be released in March 30, but 12th generation Alder Lake and the new LGA 1700 platform are set to go on sale in December.
If you are waiting to build or upgrade your PC with Intel’s new desktop “Rocket Lake” processors, then we probably already have a date for you that you can circle in the calendar. The date when they should start selling has now been established by a Hong Kong website HKEPC.
But not only that, this source also revealed when the next generation of Alder Lake could be launched to the PC market, which in turn is essential information for those who are willing to wait a little longer for a more interesting and promising new platform from Intel.
Rocket Lake to come in four weeks
According to HKEPC, the Rocket Lake chips, i.e. the 11th generation Core for desktop such as the i9-11900K or i7-11700K processors, were planned to go on sale as early as March 15. Before, we only knew that it should happen by the end of the quarter. However, this version of launch date has not hold for long. Last week, a change was reported by WCCFtech.
Acording to their sources, Intel has postponed the launch, allegedly to wait for a new microcode update to be pushed to BIOSes by motherbord vendors. Reportedly, Intel now plans to start the actual on-shelves availability of Rocket Lake CPUs on March 30, right before the end of the quarter. Rocket Lake will be available for purchase in less than four weeks.
March 30 should be the physical start of sales. Intel however plans to hold a paper launch event before that, which will take place on March 16. That day, all the data on these processors should be revealed: the SKUs, full specifications and also prices. The only thing stil under NDA will at that point be the actual performance reviews, which are supposed to be published on March 30 together with the hard launch in stores.
Rocket Lake still uses the LGA 1200 socket, but will already support PCI Express 4.0 and also has a new CPU architecture that, according to Intel, will enable 19% higher performance at the same clock speed (IPC), than with Skylake/Comet Lake. In addition, the CPUs contain new integrated graphics.
These processors should work on most motherboards with the Z490 chipset, where in most cases it should also be possible to use PCI Express 4.0 – manufacturers have declared compatibility for such boards in advance, so you can check if PCIe 4.0 is advertised for your model now. However, the H410 and B460 boards are not compatible, which is probably caused by several differences in power supply compared to Comet Lake processors (we wrote about this in detail here).
If you have a Z490 board, you will probably be able to upgrade to Rocket Lake, with a few exceptions (see the link). However, as usual with such intergenerational upgrades, you will first need to update the BIOS to the latest version that supports the new CPUs.
Alder Lake, LGA 1700, DDR5 and PCIe 5.0 will be available in December
Although Rocket Lake will be quite interesting with the new architecture and the PCIe 4.0 support (definitely more than Comet Lake), it may not be such a good time to upgrade to it now, actually. The reason? The next generation of Intel desktop processors called Alder Lake is to follow quite soon afterwards, as 12th generation of Core.
According to HKEPC, Intel will start selling these processors at the very end of this year, in December 2021. Intel is said to unveil or announce them in September, but it will only be a paper release at that time and the actual Alder Lake chips should be available in stores only from December onwards.
Why should its be a better choice to wait for these processor when building a new computer? Alder Lake will be (finally!) produced by a 10nm process, on top of that it will be the 10nm Enhanced SuperFin process, which should perform even better than today’s improved 10nm SuperFin process in Tiger Lake processors. The energy efficiency that has been sore thumb of Intel processors for the last few years, as the 14nm process in use falls more and more behind compared to the 7nm technology competition uses, should be improved at last. According to HKEPC, the Enhanced SuperFin nodeshould even have 15% better energy efficiency compared to the 10nm SuperFin node, so progress could be very good when compared to 14nm chips (although it will depend on Intel not resorting to inefficiently high voltages in pursuit of higher performance).
At the same time, Alder Lake will have a new CPU core architecture again. So ironically, two new desktop CPU architectures will come out right in a row after the previous five and a half years of being stuck with the Skylake core. Alder Lake has Golden Cove cores, which have significantly higher IPC – this is said to be at least 20% better than what the Willow Cove (Tiger Lake) and Cypress Cove (in Rocket Lake processors) cores now provide. So Alder Lake should further improve single-threaded performance to record levels.
The desktop Alder Lake will be complicated by the fact that it will contain up to eight of these powerful cores (which will also be able to use HT, so each will provide two threads), but they will be supplemented by eight small Atom cores with the Gracemont architecture. So it will be a hybrid design like big.LITTLE ARM chips.
The small cores should not be a negligible bonus to performance, as they are supposed to have quite good performance themselves, reportedly comparable to the Skylake architecture. But we don’t know if that is true for just the IPC or for overall performance (to match absolute performance of Skylake, Gracemont would need a lot higher IPC, as it might have lower clocks). The small cores will not support HT and also lack AVX-512, due to which this extension will probably have to be turned off for the large cores, too, unfortunately.
Although this big.LITTLE architecture looks bizarre in the desktop, it could pave way to achieving better multi-threaded performance within the same TDP envelope than what a hypothetical alternative with only 10–12 large cores could reach. That is, at least for tasks where the absence of AVX-512 won’t result in a big drop in performance.
A new, more promising platform
But there is one more reason to wait for the Alder Lake. At the same time, these processors will introduce a new platform that will support new DDR5 memory, and will also support PCI Express 5.0 (which will be important for fast NVMe SSDs enabling them to reach speeds of up to roughly 14.0 GB/s). According to previous hearsay, this platform could last not for the usual two, but for three generations, even.
So if you can wait until December, you will be able to buy the “first DDR5 platform” instead of the “last DDR4 platform” (so that memory you buy will be useful for further upgrades too). However, it is still three-quarters of a year away and it is not clear how well the big.LITTLE architecture will fare in practice. If you prefer the competing AMD processors, that platform will offer “Raphael” processors (Ryzen 6000 or 7000?) made on a 5 nm process against the Alder Lake processors. These Ryzen CPUs should also introducea new hopefully long-lived AM5 socket (and DDR5 and PCI Express 5.0) and last but not least, they should be powered by a new Zen 4 core with higher IPC.
But according to HKEPC, these processors from AMD will reportedly come to the market later than Alder Lake, probably only in the course of 2022. The date of May 5 would be quite a nice one for a lauch if you look at all those fives (it’s a pity that AMD won’t skip Zen 4, as rumors had in the past), but naturally it’s hard to guess when will AMD be really ready. So those interested in Zen 4 Ryzens with DDR5 will be waiting a longer for them.
Translated, original text by:
Jan Olšan, editor for Cnews.cz
