If you"re in the market for a new Intel CPU but you"re holding out for 11th-generation, it"s no secret that you won"t have to wait long. The company has already said that Rocket Lake-S is coming in the first half of this year.
But the family of desktop CPUs is coming earlier than that, apparently. A retailer already accidentally started listing the products, which led to Intel begrudgingly giving up the release date. The Rocket Lake-S family of CPUs is going to be released on March 30. The news comes via Andreas Schilling from hardwareLuxx:
We now have an official sales date:
— Andreas Schilling (@aschilling) March 2, 2021
"The sales embargo for 11th Gen Desktop processors (Rocket Lake S) is March 30, 2021 at 6 a.m. PT / 9 a.m. ET."
Back at CES this year, Intel actually showed off its Rocket Lake-S family, specifically the Core i9-11900K, which has eight cores, 16 threads, and a 4.8GHz clock speed with a 5.3GHz turbo speed. It also supports faster DDR4-3200 memory and up to 20 PCIe 4.0 lanes. It uses the same LGA 1200 socket as Comet Lake-S did, but it needs a newer chipset, or a firmware update on some of the older ones.
Intel said that the Core i9-11900K beats the Ryzen 9 5900X in Total War: Three Kingdoms (DX11, 1080p high) by 8%, Gears of War 5 (1080p ultra) by 5%, Metro Exodus (1080p high) by 5%, Cyberpunk 2077 (1080p high) by 4%, Watchdogs: Legion (1080p ultra) by 4%, Farcry: New Dawn (1080p ultra) by 3%, and Assassin"s Creed: Valhalla (1080p very high) by 2%. We"ll have to wait until the end of the month to find out more.