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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ozzuneoj86 - Thursday, April 1, 2021 - link
"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."If a time traveling tech journalist would have told us back in the Bulldozer days that Anandtech would be writing this sentence in 2021 in a nonchalant way (because AMD having better CPUs is the new normal), we wouldn't have believed him.
Hrel - Friday, April 2, 2021 - link
Just in case anyone able to actually affect change reads these comments, I'm not even interested in these because the computer I built in 2014 has a 14nm processor too... albeit with DDR 3 RAM but come on, DDR4 isn't even much of a real world difference outside ultra specific niche scenarios.Intel, this is ridiculous, you're going to have been on the SAME NODE for a DECADE HERE!!!!
Crying out loud 10nm has been around for longer than Intels 14nm, this is nuts!
James5mith - Saturday, April 3, 2021 - link
" More and more NAS and routers are coming with one or more 2.5 GbE ports as standard"No, they most definitely are not. lol
Linustechtips12#6900xt - Monday, April 5, 2021 - link
gotta say, love the arguments on page 9 lolpeevee - Monday, April 5, 2021 - link
"the latest microcode from Intel should help increase performance and cache latency"Do we really want the increase in cache latency? ;) :)
8 Cores is Enough - Wednesday, August 4, 2021 - link
I just bought the 11900k with a z590 Gigabyte Aorous Pro Ax mobo and Samsung 980 pro 500GB ssd. This replaced my 9900k in a z390 Gigabyte Aurous Master with a 970 pro 512GB ssd.They're both 14nm node processors with 8c/16t and both overclocked, 5GHz all cores for 9900k and 5.2GHz all cores with up to 5.5GHz on one core via tiurbo modes on the 11900k.
However, the 11900k outperforms the 9900k in every measure. In video encoding, which I do fairly often, it's twice as fast. In fact, the 11900k can comvert 3 videos at the same time each one as fast as my rtx 2070 super can do 1 video af a time.
On UserBenchmark.com, my 11900k is the current record holder for fastest 11900k tested. It beats all the 10900k's even in the 64 thread server workload metric. It loses to the 5900x and 5950x in this one metric but clobbers them botb in the 1, 2, 4 and 8 core metrics.
I wish I had a 5900x to test on Wondershare Uniconverter. I suspect my 11900k would match it given the 2X improvement over the 9900k, which was about 1/2 as fast as the 3950x in video comversion.
I do a lot of video editing as well. Maybe on this workload an AMD 5900x or 5950x would beat the 11900k. It seems plausible so let's presume this and accept Ryzen 9 is most likely still best for video editing.
But the cliam thaf being stuck on 14nm node means Intel RKL CPUs perform the same as Haswell or that they are even close does not make sense to me based on my experiences so far going from coffee lake refresh to RKL.
The Rocket Lake CPUs are like the muscle cars of 1970. They are inefficient beasts that haul buttocks. They exist as a matter of circumstance and we may never see the likes of them again.
Faster more efficient CPUs will be built but the 11th gen Intel CPUs will be remembered for being the back ported abominations they are: thirsty and fast with the software of 2021 which for the time being still favors single thread processing.
If you play Kerbal Space Program then get an 11900k because that game is all about single thread performance and right now the 11900k beats all other CPUs at that.
Germanium - Thursday, September 2, 2021 - link
My experimentation with my Rocket Lake Core I 11700k on my Asus Z590-A motherboard has shown me that it least on some samples AVX512 can be more efficient & cooler running than AVX2 at the same clock speed.I am running my sample at 4.4GHz both AVX512 & AVX2. When running Hand Brake there is nearly a 10 watt savings when running AVX512 as opposed to AVX2.
Before anyone says Hand Brake does not use AVX512 & that is true out of the box but there is a setting script I found online to activate AVX512 on Hand Brake and it does work. It most be manually entered, no copy & paste available.
With stock voltage settings at 4.2GHz using AVX2 at was drawing over 200 watts. With my settings I am able to run AVX512 at 4.4 GHz with peak wattage in Hand Brake of 185 watts. That was absolute peak wattage. It mostly ran between 170 to 180 watts. AVX2 runs about 10 watts more for slightly less performance at same clock speed.
Germanium - Thursday, September 2, 2021 - link
Forgot to mention that on order to make AVX512 so efficient one must set the AVX Guard Band voltage Offset at or near 0 to bring the power to acceptable levels. Both AVX512 & AVX2 must be lowered. If AVX2 is not lowered at least same amount AVX512 setting will have little or no effect.chane - Thursday, January 13, 2022 - link
I hope my post is considered on topicScenario 1: Without discrete graphics 1080p grade card, using on-chip graphics: Given the same core count (but below 10 cores), base and turbo frequencies and loaded with the same Cinebench and/or Handbrake test loads, would a Rocket lake Xeon w series processor run hotter, cooler or about the same as a Rocket Lake i family series processor with the same TDP spec?
Scenario 2: As above but with 1080p grade discrete graphics card.
Note: The Xeon processor pc will be using 16GB of ECC memory, however much that may impact heat and fan noise.
Please advise.
Thanks.