We do not stop seeing news in the field of semiconductors, and Intel has just announced the launch of Rocket Lake, its family of 11th generation Core processors that we will know as the S-Series.
The new family will bring improvements in IPC, Intel X2 graphics, up to 20 PCIe 4.0 lanes and a clear objective: to compete with the recently introduced AMD Ryzen 5000 and its promising Zen 3 architecture.
Intel Rocket Lake: Decent improvements, but not overwhelming
Future processors in the Rocket Lake family are expected to appear in the first quarter of 2021 , and they will do so theoretically being compatible with the Socket and motherboards of the current Comet Lake.
These processors will make use of the Cypress Cove microarchitecture that will continue to be supported by 14 nm lithographic processes, unlike Sunny Cove, which as we said months ago is the true ordeal of Intel and its (finally) forceful jump to 10 nm.
Until that happens, Rocket Lake will come with interesting improvements. We will have processors with up to 8 of those Cypress Cove cores and up to 16 threads of execution, a new memory controller with support for DDR4-3200 modules, and up to 20 PCIe 4.0 lanes (probably one x16 and one x4) that can be taken advantage of SSD drives and graphics cards.
In these processors we will also find the new integrated graphics chips with Intel Xe architecture and better support for multimedia encoders (up to 4K60 with 12 bits of color and 4: 4: 4 compression), HDMI 2.0b support (but not HDMI 2.1).
More relevant to some users will undoubtedly be the improvement focused on the field of deep learning thanks to the AVX-512 vector acceleration units and the support of the so-called Vector Neural Network Instructions (VNNI) . There will undoubtedly be more details in the future, but it will be interesting to see what the specific proposals are and how those future processors perform when it comes to competing with AMD’s promising Ryzen 5000.
More information | Intel
