Intel's next-generation Rocket Lake desktop CPUs will go on sale on March 30 after an early March debut. The new CPUs will be Intel's 11th generation line of processors, and will offer up to eight cores, with an expanded IPC offering potentially top-of-the-line gaming performance.
Rocket Lake is the last in a long line of Intel's 14nm process node chips. Leveraging a backported Ice Lake mobile architecture, the CPU line will be constricted to just eight cores in the top 11900K model, but will still offer 16 threads and the single threaded performance improvement should keep it in line or exceeding the top of the line alternatives. It will likely steal back the gaming performance crown so recently stolen by AMD's Ryzen 5000 series processors, which have still yet to materialize in significant volume.
The new line will be made of comparably named processors to the existing generation: 11900K, 11900, 11700K, 11700, 11600K, and 11400, among others, including F variants of the more popular processors. Prices may be lower than previous generations, making the Rocket Lake chips even more competitive with AMD's best, which remains hard to get and therefore expensive.
Clock speeds are expected to be slightly higher throughout the entry-level and mid-range options, with top tier processors hitting comparable clock speeds to the previous generation. This should all come at a higher overall TDP, however, so cooling may be a massive factor if you want to push these chips any further than their rated spec, especially with how close to the wire Nvidia has already pushed its 14nm process.
