Intel has decided to speed up the process of bringing its new Core i9-11900K processor to market. It is now officially known that the chip will go on sale in the next couple of months. The company presented the whole Rocket Lake-S family at CES 2021, but paid most attention to the senior representative of that family.
No wonder - this is really a top-end chip at the moment. It is aimed primarily at gamers and users who need high-performance systems. According to Intel representatives, the processors provide a 19% increase in IPC (the number of instructions executed per clock cycle) compared to Comet Lake.
The Core i9-11900K has 8 cores with 16 threads support . The chip operates at up to 4.8 GHz under full multi-threaded load. It is reported that the maximum frequency is 5.3 GHz, such a high speed of operation is possible thanks to Thermal Velocity Boost technology, but only in single-threaded mode.
| Zen 3 Ryzen 5000 Series Processors | Cores / Threads | Base / Boost Freq. | TDP |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ryzen 9 5900X | 12/24 | 3.7 / 4.8 | 105W |
| Intel Core i9-11900K | 8/16 | ? / 5.3 | 150W? |
| Core i9-10900K / F | 10/20 | 3.7 / 5.3 | 125W |
| Ryzen 7 5800X | 8/16 | 3.8 / 4.7 | 105W |
| Core i9-10850K | 10/20 | 3.6 / 5.2 | 95W |
| Core i7-10700K / F | 8/16 | 3.8 / 5.1 | 125W |
The processors, among other things, received support for DDR4-3200 and 20 PCIe 4.0 lanes, which are used to connect a graphics adapter and SSD. With DDR4-3200 memory, the chip works in dual channel mode.
Chips of the Intel Rocket Lake-S family are released on an optimized 14nm technology, having received the design of the LGA1200. The company stated that they can be installed on boards with not only 500 but also 400 series chipsets. True, not all models are supported, but nevertheless.
Systems with the Z490, Q470, and H470 chipsets will receive the UEFI updates necessary for the chip to work correctly. But the B460 and H410 boards will not be updated, so they will only be compatible with previous generations of chips.
The company has already announced that the 8C / 16T Core i9-11900K is the new "king" of the gaming world among chips. It outperforms the AMD Ryzen 9 5900X at 1080p and Ultra graphics quality settings. When tested with EVGA RTX 3080 XC3 graphics adapters, the chip shows performance gains over its competitor from 2% to 8%. On average, it turns out 4%, which is not so much, but still pleasant for the user.
But this is at default rates. The processor traditionally has a high ceiling for overclocking, so in this case the gain can be even more significant. What the processor is actually capable of will become known after the start of sales, when ordinary users and experts can test them.
When comparing the performance of systems based on the Core i9-11900K and the company's second chip, Core i9-10900K, it turned out that the advantage of the new product is about 7%. Testing was carried out using the built-in Hitman III benchmark.
The chip also has other advantages, including integrated Intel Xe graphics and compatibility with Intel Deep Learning Boost technology. In terms of integrated graphics, it is 50% more powerful than the integrated graphics of Comet Lake. Well, compatibility with Intel Deep Learning Boost is provided by support for the AVX-512 instruction set.
After Intel Rocket Lake-S and motherboards based on 500 series chipsets, the company is going to release 10nm Alder Lake processors. They combine kernels on two different microarchitectures.
