Benchmarks emerge for Intel Rocket Lake

With recent news that Intel is launching its 11th Gen Rocket Lake desktop CPUs early next year, it stands to reason we'd see some leaks of benchmark data. That's exactly what's happened with benchmarks emerging from the UserBenchmark database.

Details are limited, admittedly, but they're still rather promising with a particularly nice boost for single-core performance. An unknown eight-core/16-thread Rocket Lake CPU was spotted and compared to Intel's 10th generation Comet Lake-S processor. The CPU has a base clock of 3.4GHz and 4.2GHz boost clock and was running on a Z590 motherboard - the MSI Z590-A PRO-12VO to be specific. Alongside that, it was paired with 32GB of DDR4-2667 RAM.

So, how did it do against a comparable i7-10700K and i9-10900K? Pretty well. It achieved a single-core score of 179 compared to the i9-10900K's 152 and the i7-10700K's 148. That works out at 18 percent and 21 percent faster, respectively, which is certainly good going.

When it comes to two-core performance, those improvements were bigger still. The lead worked out at 26 percent faster compared to the i7 and 22 percent faster than the i9. It's only when it comes to 8-core performance that the benchmarks are more subtle with a 7 percent faster lead on the i7 but 3.6 percent slower performance compared to the i9-10900K. 

It's early days for such benchmarks, of course, so a pinch of salt would be a wise idea. Still, what we do know is that the Rocket Lake CPU architecture is another iteration of Intel's 14nm albeit one that is a hybrid between the Sunny Cove and Willow Cove design. It'll also feature the Xe Gen 12 GPU architecture and will take advantage of PCIe 4.0 and new overclocking features and capabilities and improved AI performance. It's expected that Z590 motherboards will be announced later this year too to complement the new chips. 

Basically, the leaked benchmarks have only just begun. We should see a lot more of Rocket Lake-S very soon.