Tech

Intel Rocket Lake-S desktop gaming CPUs are here

This week, Intel announced their 11th generation S-series desktop CPUs, code named Rocket Lake-S. These are gaming-oriented processors optimized for high clock rates and performance, coming in 19 SKUs ranging from i5-11400T through 19-11900K.

The new chips, based on Intel’s Cypress Cove architecture, claim up to 19% increase in Instructions per Clock cycle—a very familiar figure, since it’s the same number AMD claimed for gen-on-gen IPC uplift between its Zen 2 and Zen 3 architectures. We’ll do some hands-on benchmarking in the near future to determine how important the “up to” hedge on that claim matters.

In the meantime, we’re cautiously optimistic about the up to 19% IPC and up to 50% iGPU performance Intel is claiming. As usual, the really big numbers Intel shows for the new generation of processors don’t have much to do with general purpose CPU performance—they’re tied pretty directly to finding AVX-512 optimized workloads. But the 19% isn’t tied to AVX-512, and it has not come at the price of reduced clock speeds or higher rated TDP either.

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