The super high performance of Intel's upcoming Rocket Lake S processors might be in really short bursts, as a sustained burn-in test of the top-of-the-line Core i9-11900KF shows it hitting close to 100 degrees even on a 360mm AIO cooler and pulling over 250w of power.
The next-generation Rocket Lake CPUs will be Intel's last on its aged 14nm process node, though they will leverage a backported architecture previously used in 10nm Ice Lake chips to generate the additional instructions per clock (IPC) necessary to give AMD a run for its money, at least in gaming. The top-tier Core i9 11900KF will feature eight cores and 16 threads, with a base clock of 3.5GHz. It will have an all-core boost of 4.8GHz, and a single core boost maximum of 5.3GHz. How well it will hold these boost clocks remains to be seen however, as despite only having a boost algorithm that maintains them for 56 seconds, Chiphell users (via VideoCardz) found that the CPU could hit almost 100 degrees even when cooled by a 360mm AIO water cooler.
That's hot enough to trigger throttling and could be a real problem for sustained load performance with these new generation. It's worth highlighting that burn in tests like the one used in this instance (AIDA64) are way harder on a CPU than average loads, but for intensive CPU tasks, the 11900KF may fall down if it's forced to work hard for long. Especially considering its very highest frequencies depend on low temperatures using Intel's Velocity Boost Algorithm to get there.
In practice, Rocket Lake may not boost as high as its spec sheet suggests, unless you have seriously powerful cooling.
