Today at CES, Intel announced Tiger Lake vPro, Tiger Lake-H35, and new budget chips for education, but it"s also previewing its next-gen desktop chips. Codenamed Rocket Lake-S, the best that Intel has to offer is the Core i9-11900K, and the company is lining it right up against the Ryzen 9 5900X.
In performance comparisons, 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%.
The Core i9-11900K has eight cores and 16 threads with a 4.8GHz base clock speed and 5.3GHz turbo clock speed. It supports faster DDR4-3200 memory and supports 20 CPU PCIe 4.0 lanes, whereas the previous generation supported 16 PCIe lanes. There"s also a new Intel 500 series chipset with integrated USB 3.2 2x2, which is backward compatible with 400 series chipsets. With the Rocket Lake architecture, Intel is promising 19% IPC improvement and 50% better integrated graphics performance.
But that"s not all. While we"re getting the 14nm Rocket Lake-S in the first quarter of this year, Intel also demoed Alder Lake, a desktop family of chips built on its 10nm SuperFin technology. Coming in the second half of this year, Intel is promising a "significant breakthrough" in x86 architecture. The new chips will have high-performance and high-efficiency cores, seemingly using Intel Hybrid Technology like we"ve seen from Lakefield, but on a larger scale. It also confirms a leak from last year.
The idea behind Hybrid Technology is better power management, something that we"ve seen in ARM processors for years. It"s going to be interesting to see how Intel translates these advantages to the desktop market.