The previous CPU announcement from Intel had already give folks plenty to look forward to. Now with CES 2021 rolling into digital town, things are heating up. Intel has announced four new CPUs across the board this week. The new Rocket Lake-S CPUs were front-and-center, and also including a few other options. So far we got details on five new CPUs coming this year.
The four new CPUs range from entry level chips to aim for the lower-price brackets; to a more performance-oriented option too, there’s even a mobile option with the H product stack. The new 11th gen Intel Core H-series options will be combined with low-power components to target netbooks and smaller form factors. It will be very interesting to see what SIs do with that one.
One of the H-series options even has a more powerful variant. There’s the new Core i7-11375H Special Edition 4-core processor. This 8-thread selection will allow CPUs to turbo up to 5GHz and have support for both Thunderbolt 4 and PCIe 4.0. That’s a ton of power in a small package. Intel is really breaking with the 14nm trap it has been in for a while, although not as hard as some would like. AMD will have to hope that the 5000-series CPUs can make things more competitive, as they no longer have a noticeable price advantage. Along with the powerful H-series CPUs, there are other options that have around 4.4GHz boosts with the Core i5-11300H.
Check out the table below for the details on what to expect from these H CPUs.
| Intel Core i7 11375H SE | Intel Core i7 11370H | Intel Core i5 11300H | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cores | Threads | 4 | 8 | 4 | 8 | 4 | 8 |
| cTDP Up Base clock | 3.3GHz | 3.3GHz | 3.1GHz |
| cTDP Down Base clock | 3GHz | 3GHz | 2.6GHz |
| Max 1-Core Turbo | 5GHz | 4.8GHz | 4.4GHz |
| Max 2-Core Turbo | 4.8GHz | 4.8GHz | 4.4GHz |
| Max 4-Core Turbo | 4.3GHz | 4/3GHz | 4GHz |
| LPDDR4x | 4267MT/s | 4267MT/s | 4267MT/s |
| DDR4 | 3200MT/s | 3200MT/s | 3200MT/s |
| L3 Cache | 12MB | 12MB | 8MB |
| cTDP Up | 35W | 35W | 35W |
| cTDP Down | 28W | 28W | 28W |
Better manufacturing, more power
The Intel announcement also included the new high-end offerings with the Rocket Lake-S 11900K. The new 8-core/16-thread CPU will feature all the bells and whistles. It will also include support for Thunderbolt 4 and Wi-Fi 6/6e. And that’s all with PCIe 4.0 support and PCIe lanes onboard. It’s a real beast of a chip and it’s coming soon. The new chip is launching later in Q1 2021.
Intel claims to have seen a nearly 20% increase in gen-over-gen performance especially in IPC (instructions per cycle) which is very impressive. AMD has been making huge strides, and caught Intel on the back foot in many of these areas.
So what are we in now with Rocket Lake-S, 14nm+++? Intel has been banking on their improvements in minor generational refreshes and continues with the Rocket Lake-S 11900K. The flagship Core i9-11900K will feature support for DDR4-3200 RAM to bridge lacking support compared to AMD. There’s also support for a dual-core 5.3 GHz boost.
You might notice that the core counts are lower than the 10-core/20-thread Core i9-10900K from last gen. Intel promises that things will be faster anyway thanks to IPC improvements.
And Intel is working with manufacturers to create microcode updates for 400 and 500 chipset motherboards. Also, i5 and i7 variants are coming as well, with more details to come. Full pricing and availability for the new processors has not been disclosed.
That’s not all, as the new Alder Lake CPU was also given time to shine. The 12th-gen Alder Lake CPU will follow the 11th gen, although it will be some time. There wasn’t much detail about it though. Alder Lake desktop CPUs also give Intel more and more room to move around AMD.
