New rumors suggest that Intel is targeting March 2021 for their 11th Gen Rocket Lake-S series processors. Intel Rocket Lake-S which is supposedly the last consumer desktop 14nm Core processors from Intel was previously due to launch in December 2020 or January 2021. But delays have seemingly pushed back the unveiling of the Intel Rocket Lake-S 11th Gen desktop CPUs to March of 2021.
There were also many rumors of Rocket Lake previously targeting CES 2021 as the launch window, but now it seems that week 10 of 2021 or 2nd week of March is now the actual launch date. The 11th Gen Rocket Lake-S platform features the completely revamped Willow Cove cores while retaining support for LGA1200 sockets compatible with existing 400-series motherboards.
Rocket Lake-S desktop processors will be based on the 14nm process and will feature new will cores. New features include PCIe gen 4.0 support and new Intel Xe Graphics. A 5.0 GHz boost clock combined with a major new architecture should offer the best possible combination for a performance upgrade for Intel customers. A leaked rocket lake benchmark showed an 8 Core 16 thread chip hitting 5 GHz boost clock.
The new uplifted Willow Cove cores are going to result in massive IPC uplifts and considering this is based on the 14nm process, it will be able to sustain the high clock speeds as well. The 11th Gen Rocket Lake-S processors will also feature 12bit AV1, HEVC, and E2E compression along with the new Xe graphics architecture. A complete info graph of the Rocket Lake-S was also posted by Videocardz.
Image Credit: Videocardz
Intel is also planning to launch a new 500-series motherboards with Rocket Lake-S, such as Z590 or B560. Motherboard makers had 500-chipset specs for a now, but there has recently been a change to that as well. Intel is allegedly adding memory overclocking support to the B560 series, currently an exclusive feature to the Zx70/x90 series.
11th Gen Rocket Lake-S processors will also support Discrete Intel Thunderbolt 4 (USB4 compliant). Intel’s Rocket Lake-S will lock horns with the AMD Ryzen 5000 Zen 3 processors which are releasing soon.
