Intel has officially unveiled the long leaked and rumored specifications of its next-generation, 11th-gen Rocket lake processors. They feature a new core architecture based on the original Ice Lake design (backported to 14nm), support PCIExpress 4.0, DDR4 memory up to 3,2000MHz, include Intel Xe onboard graphics, and support new advanced overclocking features, as well as Resizable BAR.
This should all equate to a nice uptick in overall performance, particularly in single threaded applications and games, which may help the top chips retake the gaming crown from AMD. The drop down in core count for the top-tier model to just eight, however, effectively cedes the multithreaded crown to AMD for quite some time.
Intel has held on tightly to gaming performance as its main success for years now, with AMD nipping at its heels. With the 5000 series, however, AMD finally took the top spot. Rocket Lake is likely to steal it back but at the cost of its overall multi-threaded performance. That's not to say the new chips are bad at multithreaded tasks, though. A near 20-percent uplift in IPC is a huge gain for Intel and shows some serious advances have been made with its new architecture. Indeed, the mid-range chips, which were always Intel's best bang for buck options, should be absolutely killer with all the new features.
More exciting still, is that memory overclocking is now back in its H570 and B560 mid-range chipsets, so you don't need the top motherboard just to get the most from your CPU and RAM anymore.
With Resizable BAR (the agnostic equivalent of AMD's Smart Access Memory) and PCIE 4.0, the best gaming systems in the world may once again be Intel when these chips debut in the coming weeks. If they stay in stock, that is.
