During a time of elevated competitor exercise, Intel has determined to reveal a few of the excessive degree particulars surrounding its subsequent technology client processor, often known as Rocket Lake or Intel’s 11th Gen Core. The new processor household is due out there within the first quarter of 2021, and is predicted to share a socket and motherboard compatibility with the present 10th Gen Comet Lake processors, offering an improve path even for these with a Core i9-10900Ok, Intel’s highest performing desktop processor thus far. New 500-series motherboards are additionally anticipated to be accessible.
The new Rocket Lake-S silicon or SoC goes to be often known as ‘Cypress Cove’. Intel confuses itself within the press launch in comparison with the PDF presentation, because the press launch dictates that this isn’t the core – it particularly states that the core microarchitecture is Ice Lake (Sunny Cove). However the presentation PDF says Cypress Cove is the core. In this occasion, to be clear, Sunny Cove and Cypress Cove are set to be virtually equivalent, nonetheless Sunny Cove is on 10nm and Cypress Cove is the back-ported variant on 14nm.
Paired with these cores would be the Tiger Lake graphics structure, often known as Xe-LP, which can be being backported from 10nm to 14nm for this product. The mixed 14nm illustration of Ice Lake cores and Xe-LP graphics is what’s going to be often known as Rocket Lake, (no less than considered one of) the SoC(s) of the 11th Gen Core household.
With the brand new processors, Intel is focusing on a uncooked instruction-per-clock uplift within the double digit vary, which might be much like the uplift we noticed transferring from Comet Lake to Intel’s Ice Lake cell processors. Because of the node distinction, the precise IPC change is more likely to be decrease than what we’ve seen earlier than, however 10%+ remains to be extremely respectable, particularly if Intel can be capable of keep the excessive frequency it has achieved with the present technology of Comet Lake.
One of the advantages of transferring to a back-ported Sunny Cove core would be the inclusion of the AVX-512 vector acceleration unit in Cypress Cove. This allows Intel to allow its library of Deep Learning Boost applied sciences for AI and ML acceleration, together with assist for Vector Neural Network Instructions (VNNI), lastly bringing AVX-512 to the desktop platform.
However, to combine and match the precise mixture of core depend, graphics, and AVX-512 for die dimension/yield/value, it seems that Rocket Lake-S will solely supply a most of eight cores in its largest configuration. Within the press launch PDF, Intel said that the present silicon as examined is rated for 125 W TDP, with a high turbo enhance of 250 W, which matches what we see on the Core i9-10900Ok already. There’s no escaping the performance-per-watt traits of the method node, which signifies that Intel may discover hitting these excessive frequencies a bit of simpler with fewer cores to cope with. Intel can be selling new overclocking instruments with Rocket Lake, nonetheless didn’t go into particulars.
Another characteristic that Intel has disclosed with Rocket Lake is the transfer to PCIe Gen 4.Zero on the processor, with as much as 20 lanes accessible. These are more likely to be break up into one x16 for graphics and one x4 for storage on most motherboards, and this aligns with what we’ve seen on the newest technology of Intel Z490 motherboards, a few of which have already promoted assist for PCIe 4.0 ‘on future Intel processors’. This means Rocket Lake. Intel additionally mentions that the reminiscence controller now helps as much as DDR4-3200, nonetheless the projected efficiency numbers had been performed with DDR4-2933 reminiscence.
On the graphics aspect, transferring to the Xe-LP graphics structure goes to be an enormous uplift in graphics efficiency, with Intel suggesting a 50% enchancment over present Comet Lake…
