After they were announced during this year’s CES, Intel has played coy with its Rocket Lake-S processors. Extra information on the next-generation CPUs from Intel hasn’t been made available. Sure, we know how powerful they’ll be, but their impact on wallets has been completely unknown. That is until a retailer in Belgium put up price listings for Intel’s Rocket Lake-S chips.
Here’s a refresher on what can be expected with Rocket Lake-S processors. These 11th Gen chips are being made with a 14nm mode and will range from basic, educational CPUs to high-end ones for enthusiast gamers. In the flagship Core 19-11900K, Intel is projecting some serious improvements over its last-gen counterpart. The 11th Gen model should come with a 19% improvement in IPC, support for higher RAM speeds, and a whopping 20 lanes of PCIe 4.0.
However, don’t expect higher core and thread counts out of these new processors. Against the 10900K, the 11900K has only 8 cores and 16 threads against the last-gen model’s 10 cores and 20 threads. The 11900K also runs at a lower base clock, but boosts up to 5.3 GHz, although even that has its own caveat. That’s only in single-core processes, which is still extremely impressive. But, when it comes to multi-threaded tasks, the 11900K can only make it to 4.8GHz.
Competitive pricing
While I’d love to tell you that I’m extremely confident in these prices, I can’t say I am. And that’s mainly because they’re coming from a non-US retailer for a product that isn’t out yet. As such, take all the following prices with a grain of salt, as they can change when Intel’s Rocket Lake-S CPUs finally hit North American shelves. To that end, I’ll only be discussing what will be Intel’s most popular offerings, the Core i9 11900K, i7 11700K, and i5 11600K.
Credit: Intel
Starting with the star of Intel’s 11th Gen lineup, the i9 11900K is currently priced at $604 USD, a decent increase over the i9 10900K’s $520 USD price. That trend continues down the board with Intel’s i7 11700K, which comes in at roughly $455 USD. The i7 10700K would run a customer $379 USD off of Newegg at the moment. The same goes for even the lower premium SKU of Intel’s 11th Gen, although the price jump is extremely low. The i5 11600K will run consumers $293 USD while the i5 10600K costs $269 USD, a negligible difference.
Published: Jan 18, 2021 03:00 pm