In a nod to the rise of remote work, remote school, and the increased popularity of PC gaming, Intel on Monday announced four new processor families that will power everything from massive desktop gaming rigs to inexpensive Chromebooks. Among the new chips are 27 business-focused models, 12 for premium gaming laptops, and eight to power a new class of desktop PCs. With their arrival, Intel’s long-delayed transition to a 10-nanometer (10nm) chip-fabrication process inches closer to completion, a key step as the company seeks to compete with AMD’s Ryzen processors and Apple’s new in-house silicon, the M1 chip.
New for the Desktop: Meet ‘Rocket Lake’
The new 11th Generation processors for high-end desktop PCs (HEDTs), codenamed “Rocket Lake,” are a long time in the making. They represent Intel’s first brand-new desktop-chip architecture in five years, a period that has seen AMD’s Ryzen processors edge out many of Intel’s existing offerings in terms of both price and performance. (Rocket Lake, however, remains on 14nm process technology, using architectural design elements from other chip lines that have already moved to 10nm.)Rocket Lake could tip the balance back in Intel’s direction, at least temporarily, when it comes to gaming frame rates. The flagship of the new CPU family is the Core i9-11900K, which brings faster memory support and higher maximum clock speeds than the preceding 10th Generation (“Comet Lake”) CPUs offer. The new Core i9 uses DDR4-3200 memory and has a single-core turbo speed of 5.3GHz. The Core i9-11900K was the only Rocket Lake chip model officially announced today.
During a demonstration ahead of Monday’s unveiling, Intel showed off a desktop PC with a Core i9-11900K, 32GB of RAM, and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 running a beta version of the upcoming game Hitman 3 at a screen resolution of 1080p. It hit an average frame rate of around 130 frames per second (fps). That’s a 7% improvement over what the 10th Generation Core i9-10900K can offer, Intel says.
Based on the company’s internal testing, Intel also claims that the Core i9-11900K offers similar improvements over its chief competitor, the AMD Ryzen 9 5900X. On titles like Far Cry: New Dawn and Cyberpunk 2077 at a 1080p resolution, the Core i9 outperforms its Ryzen counterpart by anywhere from 2% to 8%, depending on the title.
The new Rocket Lake architecture isn’t superior to Comet Lake in every respect. While the Core i9-10900K has 10 cores and 20 threads, the Core i9-11900K steps down to eight cores and 16 threads. Intel said it focused on increasing the number of instructions per clock (IPC) and maximizing processor frequency at the expense of fitting more cores to the CPU.
Intel plans to begin selling boxed versions of the Core i9-11900K and other 11th Generation Rocket Lake processors by the end of March. Although they’ll be compatible with existing motherboards that support the 400-series chipset, PC builders looking to buy one will likely want to opt for a new Z590 motherboard designed for Rocket Lake processors and the 500-series chipset.
The Z590 chipset adds USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 support and enables up to 20 PCI Express Gen 4 lanes that are directly connected to the CPU. We expect several motherboard manufacturers to announce their Z590 offerings at CES.
‘Tiger Lake’ Redux: The 11th Generation Core H Series CPUs for Laptops
Laptop gamers also have new Intel silicon to look forward to, in the form of new 11th Generation chips destined for gaming rigs, in the company’s H series. H-series processors are typically found in higher-end, larger laptops, as opposed to the U-series Core CPUs that dominate mainstream and slimline models. Intel expects more than 40 laptops bearing these chips to launch in the first half of the year.
The company offered a sneak peak at three of the members of the new 11th Generation H35 family on Monday. The Core i7-11375H Special Edition CPU is the highlight. It’s a quad-core chip with Intel’s Turbo Boost Max 3.0, which can increase the frequency of a single core to 5GHz. Single-core performance is important to ensuring many demanding AAA games run smoothly.
Turbo Boost Max 3.0 was originally introduced on desktop CPUs from the 6th Generation family, including the Core i7 Extreme Edition. As for the other two H-series chips? The Core i7-11370H has nearly all of the same specifications of the new Special Edition processor, but its single-core boost is limited to 4.8GHz. Intel also unveiled the Core i5-11300H, with a maximum single-core boost of 4.4GHz, and teased more H-series Tiger Lake chips coming later this year, including a Core i9 with eight cores, 16 threads, and PCI Express Gen 4.0 support.
11th Generation vPro, Pentium Silver (‘Jasper Lake’) Also Decloak
Laptops aimed at large enterprise IT customers will also now be able to use 11th Generation CPUs, thanks to four new vPro-enabled models that Intel also unveiled today. Each one has four cores and enables support for Wi-Fi 6E and Thunderbolt 4.
The new vPro chips promise 20% better overall performance than the 10th Generation ones they replace. Intel’s internal testing also shows a 35% improvement in performance while users are videoconferencing and using another app at the same time.
The company expects 60 new laptop models with 11th Generation vPro to go on sale this year. Many of them will come with Intel’s “Evo” certification, a marketing effort already in use on consumer laptops to identify premium models with what Intel considers to be long battery life and proficient computing performance.
Some of the new laptop designs will come with Intel’s “Clover Falls” presence-detection technology. While early-generation presence-detecting laptops like the Dell Latitude 7400 2-in-1 could detect when a human is nearby and wake up from sleep mode, Clover Falls can also detect a user’s attentiveness. When you look away, it can automatically dim the screen to increase privacy and battery life.
The final kinds of laptops to receive 11th Generation chips are inexpensive Chromebooks and Windows laptops meant for schools. The new Pentium Silver and Celeron processors Intel unveiled today offer either 6 watts or 10 watts of power consumption, compared with the 15 watts or more of most 11th Generation Core CPUs. The Pentium Silver and Celeron CPUs use the new “Jasper Lake” processor architecture, a 10nm production process similar to Tiger Lake’s. They’ll bring a 35% performance improvement over their predecessors, Intel claims.
No Mention of DG2 or Apple M1
Intel says that its new 11th Generation H-series and K-series CPUs are more powerful than their existing AMD Ryzen competitors in many scenarios, from single-core performance while gaming to heavy multitasking on business laptops. But AMD is also expected to unveil new chips at its own CES press conference Tuesday, so many of Intel’s performance claims could be quickly outdated. Meanwhile, Intel offered no performance comparisons between its new processors and the Apple M1 chip, which made waves late last year as an extraordinarily capable first effort from Apple’s in-house silicon designers. An Intel spokesperson said that the company believes the wider compatibility of its products with Windows and Linux outweigh some of the performance benefits of the M1 chip.
Intel also offered no details on its efforts to design a discrete desktop graphics processor, codenamed DG2. Nvidia is expected to unveil new graphics processors at CES on Tuesday, and Intel said it would soon have more details on how 11th Generation chips work together with those upcoming Nvidia GPUs.
