HKEPC is reporting that 11th-gen Intel Rocket Lake CPUs will be released on March 15th next month. Intel’s Rocket Lake-S CPU line-up’s launch has not yet been officially confirmed. That will make the formal launch 2 months removed from the official release of the Intel Z590 chipset and motherboards supporting it. Rocket Lake-S will bring-in some performance enhancements as well as support for PCI-Express Gen4 which should open up further improvement on the storage-side especially with Gen4 SSDs more prevalent.
The Intel Z590 chipset is already in the market and is now being sold by their motherboard partners.
In other Intel news, Alder Lake-S, Intel’s upcoming CPU following Rocket Lake and is expected to arrive later this year, is reported to be using Intel’s Enhanced 10nm SuperFin process for the Alder Lake-S CPUs. Current 10nm Tiger Lake processors are built on Intel’s 10nm SuperFin process while enhanced is the simplified version of Intel’s 10nm SuperFin+ process. This brings with it some process improvements that will lead to improved CPU capabilities like frequencies, amongst others.
Alder Lake is one of Intel’s most-anticipated design chances in decades with the processors utilizing the big.LITTLE concept of CPU configuration. This gives the CPU a combination of cores much like on smartphones with Intel expected to give the Alder Lake chip a combination of Gracemont on the small side and Golden Cove on the big cores. Golden Cove is expected to bump up IPC performance to around 20% over Willow Cove found on Tiger Lake. There are rumors that PCIe Gen5 and DDR5 will arrive together with Intel’s Alder Lake-S.
Pictured is the LGA1700 engineering sample of an Alder Lake-S CPU.
The LGA1200 Rocket Lake-S will use LGA1200 and will be compatible with Z490 and H470 boards with a BIOS update. Some motherboard vendors will use H470 boards and market them as B460 v2 boards (features vary) to complete their lineup.