Core i9-11900K and Z590, to be released in the first quarter

It is a long time to spend five generations on the same basic microarchitecture. This excitement can be maintained by optimizing process nodes, adding cores, and extracting every frequency drop, but at some point, the basic design becomes a bottleneck, and it’s time to move on. Intel’s enthusiast desktop market has been waiting for generations of updates, and the new 11^day Gen Core Rocket Lake will not migrate to the 14nm process node. At least we are getting a new micro-architecture that is expected to increase IPC by 19% (according to Intel’s recommendation). Intel promised to release the product in the first quarter, raising the lid of its next consumer flagship Core i9-11900K.

We already know that Rocket Lake is the processor to fill the gap, and Intel continues to enable 1

0nm for high-performance desktop use. Rocket Lake is built on Cypress Cove, which is a reimagining of Sunny Cove’s “reporting” to Intel’s 14-nanometer process. The purpose of this is to achieve Sunny Cove’s performance and instruction support on consumer-grade 14nm, such as AVX-512, despite its larger core size and any related power and efficiency changes. Rocket Lake also uses Intel’s new Xe Graphics, which has also been redesigned for 14nm. Due to the 10nm delay, Intel believes that it is suitable to build Rocket Lake, but the plan has not proceeded as originally planned, and now it seems that its productization can be discussed.

Replace Comet Lake (5^day The new generation of Skylake), due to the increase in core size, Intel’s flagship product has been reduced from Comet’s 10 cores to Rocket’s 8 cores, but at the same time it has obtained AVX-512 instructions and a new cache hierarchy (+50%L1- D, + 100% L2), and improve up to 19% instructions per clock. Intel’s detailed information about the upcoming Core i9-11900K is that it will reach the same turbo frequency as the current Core i9-10900K, which means we will see a core at 5.3 GHz and a full-core Turbo at 4.8 GHz. There is no news about the difference in chip size, and no direct news about TDP, but in the footnote, we see that the Intel Rocket Lake Core i9-11900K’s TDP/PL1 is set to 125 W, PL2 Turbo power is limited to 250 WW, acceleration time Is 56 seconds.

The new Core i9-11900K will also use DDR4-3200, allowing Intel to maintain the same level as AMD, and obtain 20 PCIe 4.0 channels from the processor to provide bandwidth for a complete GPU and PCIe 4.0 x4 NVMe storage drives. One of the biggest updates may be the connection to the chipset. Intel doubled the DMI link from x4 to x8, and doubled the bandwidth of devices connected to the chipset (such as drives or networks) to the processor. Intel’s DMI link is usually equivalent to PCIe 3.0, which means the PCIe 3.0 x8 equivalent link here. The chipset also received support for USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 with a connection speed of 20 Gbps.

Another GPU feature, as well as enhanced performance to Xe graphics, support AV1 decoding and always-on Quick Sync Video. With Rocket Lake, Intel can enable integrated graphics and discrete graphics to provide computing functions at the same time, allowing users to enable their discrete graphics for games and integrated graphics for streaming encoding. This will be managed by other software (such as software on a dual-graphics laptop) that can direct specific software to different devices.

In addition to the new processors, motherboard suppliers will also introduce a variety of motherboards based on the 500 series chipset for Rocket Lake. These motherboards will also support the current Comet Lake processors. These new chipsets have a x8 DMI link to the CPU, and unless Comet Lake is installed, only x4. Similarly, Rocket Lake will also work in the 400 series chipset, and Z490 motherboards advertised with PCIe 4.0 support should enable this feature through a BIOS update. There is a small warning: Rocket Lake cannot be used on H410 and B460 motherboards because they use 22nm chipsets. There seems to be some incompatibility here.

Motherboard support
Annan Technology	B460 H410	Z490 Q470 H470	Z590 B560 H510
Comet Lake	Yes	Yes	Yes
Rocket Lake	No	Yes	Yes

In terms of performance, Intel claims that under high or ultra-high settings, various modern games (“Gears of War 5”, “Cyberpunk 2077”, “Watchdog Legion”, “Far Cry New Dawn”) at 1080p resolution The average frame rate is increased by 2% to +9%. Intel also promoted this new processor through AVX-512, which will support DLBoost to accelerate machine learning. Essentially, any content supported by Ice Lake mobile will also be supported by Rocket Lake. Intel said the new Core 11^day The new generation of desktop processors will have new overclocking features and functions, but no details are provided.

In Intel’s speech at CES today, we may hear more performance data.

Although we have received many motherboard announcements from all major manufacturers, and Z590, B560, and H510 motherboard information has been circulated, this week we do not expect to hear more about the Rocket Lake processor itself. Intel has stated that more details about Rocket Lake will be released within this quarter, and according to various reports, the official release date of the product seems to be in late March.

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