The leaked results from Intel’s upcoming Rocket Lake CPU suggested that the new core could be more competitive with AMD’s Ryzen 5000 series than what we saw with the 10th generation family. The new Geekbench 5 leaks, taken with the usual sodium chloride spoon, continue to point in that direction.
The new results show that Intel’s Core i7-11700K outperforms Ryzen 7 5800X by about 9 percent in both single-threaded and multi-threaded code. This is not necessarily unexpected. Although Rocket Lake is still a 14nm CPU, it represents Intel’s first new desktop CPU architecture since 2015. It is based on the Cypress Cove CPU core, which is a rear port of the 10nm Sunny Cove CPU core that Intel launched in 2019.
A quick introduction: Whiskey Lake is Intel’s previous 14nm mobile platform. Comet Lake is Intel’s previous desktop platform, with support for up to 10 CPU cores. Rocket Lake reduced the core count to eight again and (supposedly) reduced the core clock slightly, as we will discuss.
The stated clock speeds for the CPU imply that Intel backported all of its IPC gains and only sacrificed a modest amount of clock to do so. WCCFTech reports that, based on the GeekBench 5 results, Core i7-11700K is 1.34x faster on ST and 1.26x faster on MT compared to Core i7-10700K. This is somewhat surprising compared to what we saw happening on the cell phone a few years ago.
Image by WCCFTech
When Intel transitioned from Whiskey Lake (14nm mobile) to Ice Lake (10nm mobile), the history of CPU performance was generally a wash. Although Ice Lake / Sunny Cove CPUs were faster than the older Skylake CPU family in certain tests, the gains were not uniform. Intel predicted only a net gain of ~ 3.5 percent. GeekBench, however, tends to show bigger gaps.
According to the GB5 database, GeekBench 5 ST can run 1.09x faster on Ice Lake compared to Whiskey Lake. Multithreaded performance is up to 1.19x higher.
The implication here is that GeekBench 5 can exaggerate the performance difference between CPUs like Core i7-8665U and Core i7-1065G7 – and therefore can also exaggerate the degree of real improvement between Core i7-10700K and Core i7-11700K.
Higher clocks may be responsible for some of the improvements, but as we noted at the beginning of this story, Rocket Lake CPUs officially have a slightly lower frequency than their Comet Lake counterparts: The Core i7-10700K is an 8C / 16T, 3.8 GHz / 5.1 GHz CPU, while the Core i7-11700K is (rumored) an 8C / 16T, 3.6 GHz / 5.0 GHz CPU. It is possible that Rocket Lake will keep turbo for a longer period than Comet Lake – and if that is true, that would explain part of the difference in performance between the two CPU families.
As for the 9 percent gain over AMD in ST and MT, it is not entirely unexpected and may not be a good indicator of performance in the real world based on how the GB5 appears to respond to Sunny Cove. The fact that GB5 can work particularly well on a given architecture is the reason why we ran several tests in the first place.
If we consider the performance improvement at face value, that would give Intel some space to sell the Core i7-11700K for a higher price than the 5800X. Historically, this is Intel’s preferred move, but the company may choose to shake things up this time.
A 9 percent performance improvement is sufficient to declare a clear victory over AMD at the eight-core level, but it will not isolate 11th Generation CPUs from AMD’s ability to bring in more cores to support per socket. The Core i7-11700K scores 1,810 and 11,304 compared to 1,697 / 13,963 for the Ryzen 9 5900X. Intel wins the ST by about 1.06x against the 5900X and loses multi-threading by 1.23x.
Intel will, of course, launch a Core i9-11900K, and we can expect that chip to modestly increase its ST advance while reducing its MT loss, but an additional 4-8 percent performance will not drastically change the equation. Of course, this assumes that an application is effectively scaled to 12 cores in the first place.
The big question will be whether Intel can regain leadership in gaming performance. This is a critical consumer market that AMD probably stole from Intel for the first time in more than a decade, and Intel will be very interested in recovering it. Again, as always, treat leaked or initial results with care.
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