Intel Rocket Lake (14nm) Review: Core i9-11900K, Core i7-11700K, and Core i5-11600K
by Dr. Ian Cutress on March 30, 2021 10:03 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- Intel
- LGA1200
- 11th Gen
- Rocket Lake
- Z590
- B560
- Core i9-11900K
Conclusion
For anyone buying a new system today, the market is a little bleak. Anyone wanting a new GPU has to actively pay attention to stock levels, or drive to a local store for when a delivery arrives. The casual buyers then either look to pre-built systems (which are also flying off the shelves), or just hang on to what they have for another year.
But there is another way. I find that users fall in to two camps.
The first camp is the ‘upgrade everything at once’ attitude. These users sell their old systems and buy, mostly, all anew. Depending on budget and savings, this is probably a good/average system, and it means you get a good run of what’s available at that time. It’s a multi-year upgrade cycle where you might get something good for that generation, and hopefully everything is balanced.
The other camp is the ‘upgrade one piece at a time’. This means that if it’s time to upgrade a storage drive, or a memory kit, or a GPU, or a CPU, you get the best you can afford at that time. So you might end up with an older CPU but a top end GPU, good storage, good power supply, and then next time around, it’s all about CPU and motherboard upgrades. This attitude has the potential for more bottlenecks, but it means you often get the best of a generation, and each piece holds its resale value more.
In a time where we have limited GPUs available, I can very much see users going all out on the CPU/memory side of the equation, perhaps spending a bit extra on the CPU, while they wait for the graphics market to come back into play. After all, who really wants to pay $1300 for an RTX 3070 right now?
Performance and Analysis
In our Core i7-11700K review, our conclusions there are very much broadly applicable here. Intel’s Rocket Lake as a backported processor design has worked, but has critical issues with efficiency and peak power draw. Compared to the previous generation, clock-for-clock performance gains for math workloads are 16-22% or 6-18% for other workloads, however the loss of two cores really does restrict how much of a halo product it can be in light of what AMD is offering.
Rocket Lake makes good in offering PCIe 4.0, and enabling new features like Gear ratios for the memory controller, as well as pushing for more support for 2.5 gigabit Ethernet, however it becomes a tough sell. At the time we reviewed the Core i7-11700K, we didn’t know the pricing, and it was looking like AMD’s stock levels were pretty bad, subsequently making Intel the default choice. Since then, Intel's pricing hasn't turned out too bad for its performance compared to AMD (except for the Core i9), however AMD’s stock is a lot more bountiful.
For anyone looking at the financials for Intel, the new processor is 25% bigger than before, but not being sold for as big a margin as you might expect. In some discussions in the industry, it looks like retailers are getting roughly 20%/80% stock for Core i9 to Core i7, indicating that Intel is going to be very focused on that Core i7 market around $400-$450. In that space, AMD and Intel both have well-performing products, however AMD gets an overall small lead and is much more efficient.
However, with the GPU market being so terrible, users could jump an extra $100 and get 50% more AMD cores. When AMD is in stock, Intel’s Rocket Lake is more about the platform than the processor. If I said that that the Rocket Lake LGA1200 platform had no upgrade potential, for users buying in today, an obvious response might be that neither does AM4, and you’d be correct. However, for any user buying a Core i7-11700K on an LGA1200 today, compared to a Ryzen 7 5800X customer on AM4, the latter still has the opportunity to go to 16 cores if needed. Rocket Lake comes across with a lot of dead-ends in that regard, especially as the next generation is meant to be on a new socket, and with supposedly new memory.
Rocket Lake: Failed Experiment, or Good Attempt?
For Intel, Rocket Lake is a dual purpose design. On the one hand, it provides Intel with something to put into its desktop processor roadmap while the manufacturing side of the business is still getting sorted. On the other hand it gives Intel a good marker in the sand for what it means to backport a processor.
Rocket Lake, in the context of backporting, has been a ‘good attempt’ – good enough to at least launch into the market. It does offer performance gains in several key areas, and does bring AVX-512 to the consumer market, albeit at the expense of power. However in a lot of use cases that people are enabling today, which aren’t AVX-512 enabled, there’s more performance to be had with older processors, or the competition. Rocket Lake also gets you PCIe 4.0, however users might feel that is a small add-in when AMD has PCIe 4.0, lower power, and better general performance for the same price.
Intel’s future is going to be full of processor cores built for multiple process nodes. What makes Rocket Lake different is that when the core was designed for 10nm, it was solely designed for 10nm, and no thought was ever given to a 14nm version. The results in this review show that this sort of backporting doesn’t really work, not to the same level of die size, performance, and profit margin needed to move forward. It was a laudable experiment, but in the future, Intel will need to co-design with multiple process nodes in mind.
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Beaver M. - Wednesday, March 31, 2021 - link
Acting like GN and HUB gives them lots of AMD fanboy clicks/views.Beaver M. - Wednesday, March 31, 2021 - link
I guess living in isolation for a year makes people more and more antisocial and aggressive. And that then in turn sells well.Qasar - Wednesday, March 31, 2021 - link
so they are amd fanboys cause they told the truth ? more like you are the intel fanboy trying to defend this dud of a cpu. come on, most reviews say they same thing, just some are more harsh, and rightfully soOxford Guy - Wednesday, March 31, 2021 - link
Tech fans are continually disappointed by the lack of adequate competition in a multitude of tech markets (e.g. GPUs, CPUs, search, leading-edge lithography machines/foundries, etc. etc.)We saw, way back in the 80s, what happens when competition is shut down. The Japanese seized the DRAM market by dumping, forcing American DRAM makers out of the market — then promptly raising prices drastically.
We went from seeing revolutionary products like the Apple Lisa being replaced by years of toy-grade machines at very high prices. The Lisa shipped with 1 MB of RAM and the first Mac with just 128K. The Apple IIGS shipped with just 256K, many years after the Lisa. We can thank more than Apple's love of fat margins. We can thank inadequate competition.
We have seen that play out, time and time again. Now, it's so bad that it's worse than the bread lines of the USSR. At least if one waited in one of those one might end up with some bread. These days, you have two choices: a line to get a very overpriced product (like the latest iPhone) or you can skip waiting in line because they're nothing to buy (GPUs).
Oxford Guy - Wednesday, March 31, 2021 - link
(The Amiga 1000 only shipped with 256K of RAM, too, as I recall. It was a problem throughout the industry, not something due merely to Apple's margins.)GeoffreyA - Saturday, April 3, 2021 - link
I agree with your anti-corporation sentiment, but there's little we can do, except sigh. A worldwide boycotting of their products will work wonders but that'll never happen. As long as these rotters are out to make money---Intel, AMD, Google, the rest---it'll go on like this. Who knows, perhaps there's some vital link to entropy in all this, and why everything always goes awry on earth.Oxford Guy - Wednesday, March 31, 2021 - link
'One of the few tech sites that remained professional and didn't use click baity titles or disrespect intel.'This article uses bad spin to try to make Intel's product look better than it is.
Just one example:
‘Intel has stated that in the future it will have cores designed for multiple process nodes at the same time, and so given Rocket Lake’s efficiency at the high frequencies, doesn’t this mean the experiment has failed? I say no, because it teaches Intel a lot in how it designs its silicon’
The spin also includes the testing, using a really loud high-CFM CPU cooler in the Intel and a different quieter one on the AMD.
It's a pile of spin, like the glorified press release stuff trying to turn CEO Pat into some sort of superhero. That stuff sounds like it was written for investors.
FirstStrike - Wednesday, March 31, 2021 - link
Ian, you are missing SpecInt and SpectFp suiteOrkiton - Wednesday, March 31, 2021 - link
I'm not either Intel or AMD "fanboy" though some sympathy to AMD due to unfair, anti-competitive Intel practices in the past and AMD merit to emerge from their ashes. That said, best wishes to both in the name of progress, innovation and better value to us, the consumers.Oxford Guy - Wednesday, March 31, 2021 - link
The rated TDP is 125 W, although we saw 160 W during a regular load, 225 W peaks with an AVX2 rendering load, and 292 W peak power with an AVX-512 compute load.‘Intel’s claimed TDP’ rather than ‘that rated’. The latter implies an independent rating standard/body.
If both processors were found at these prices, then the comparison is a good one – the Ryzen 7 5800X in our testing scored +8% in CPU tests and +1% in gaming tests (1080p Max). The Ryzen is very much the more power-efficient processor, however the Intel has integrated graphics (an argument that disappears with KF at $374).
Again, no specifics about the power consumption difference.
On high-end gaming both processor performed the same, the AMD processor was ahead an average of 8% on CPU workloads, and the AMD processor came across as a lot more efficient and easy to cool, while the Intel processor scored a big lead in AVX-512 workloads.
Again, no specifics about the power consumption difference.
AGAIN, testing AMD with a weaker cooler, even though the CPU will go faster with the loud fast cooling you’re using on Intel.
Makes it APPLES to APPLES.