At CES 2021, Intel allegedly announced its 11th Gen Core Rocket Lake-S series during the CES 2021 press briefing. Official announcement slides have been leaked as well, which shows almost 14% IPC Boost with 11th Gen CPU lineup. According to Intel the 8C/16T Core i9-11900K reclaims the gaming performance crown from AMD's Ryzen 9 5900X at 1080p, albeit even by a small margin. Intel ran these tests with an EVGA RTX 3080 XC3 graphics card, and the company claims the lead ranges from 2% to 8%. AMD's new Zen 3-based Ryzen 9 5900X actually has more cores but it appears that Intel's IPC performance is shining through, even on a refined 14nm process Node. Intel clocked its new Core i9-11900K processor at all the way up to 5.3GHz which is a pretty high clock speed for a CPU, thus helping it beat AMD's Ryzen CPU in the end.

Rocket Lake will deliver desktop users up to eight cores and sixteen threads on the high-end, which means two cores and four threads less than the current Comet Lake processor lineup. But the reduction in core count could also mean that Intel plans to rely on increased single-threaded performance, thus boosting overall system performance through single-threaded gains. Single-threaded performance will help Intel to compete more in the CPU market segment, even if AMD can deliver higher core count SKUs. Not all applications or tasks are highly multi-threaded in nature, which makes the single-threaded performance all the more important. Intel claims that Rocket Lake's IPC and frequency improvements offset the removal of the two cores, implying the chip will offer the same performance as the previous gen ten-core 10900K CPU. Rocket Lake 11th Gen core series CPUs are expected to hit retail shelves by the end of March 2021. The RKL lineup will share the same LGA 1200 socket and motherboard compatibility as the current 10th Gen Comet Lake processors, thus providing an upgrade path even for those rocking the flagship Core i9-10900K Comet lake CPU.