Please note that this post is tagged as a rumor.
Intel Rocket Lake-S to be available on March 15th
HKEPC has new information on Intel’s upcoming Core series.
According to the article, Intel would launch its 11th Gen Core series codenamed ‘Rocket Lake-S’ on March 15th. Intel has only so far confirmed that the series will be introduced in the first quarter, but the availability was not expected till early April. The new information would apparently suggest that the launch of the new series will happen sooner by at least two weeks.
Intel has already launched 500 series motherboards with full support for Rocket Lake-S CPUs and PCI Gen4 for GPU and fast NVMe storage.
Alder Lake-S on 10n Enhanced SuperFin in December
HKEPC also confirmed that the announcement of the 12h Gen Core series would happen in September, as reported earlier. However, the actual launch would not happen till December.
Additionally, the site confirms that the Alder Lake-S series will be based on 10nm Enhanced SuperFin, instead of ‘just’ 10nm SuperFin architecture. This would mean that the CPU would be more power-efficient than the Tiger Lake series, based on the less-advanced node. It is worth noting that Intel already confirmed that Alder Lake will feature 10nm ESF architecture, back in January.
Golden Cove 20% IPC gain over Willow Cove
The 12th Gen core series are based on Intel Hybrid Technology, which means that the CPU will utilize high-efficiency (small) and high-performance (big) cores, similarly to ARM’s big.LITTLE architecture. According to the report, the big cores (Golden Cove) would offer a 20% IPC gain over Willow Cove (available in Tiger Lake series). It is also mentioned Gracemont would offer similar IPC to Skylake, however, it is not clear if they mean similar efficiency or its increase over the previous series. Overall IPC increase is expected to be around 16 to 18%, presumably over Rocket Lake (based on Willow Cove spin called Cypress Cove).
Intel Alder Lake-S will require new motherboards with an LGA1700 socket. This is necessary as the platform shifts to DDR5 and PCI Gen5 interfaces. The competition from AMD may be slightly delayed till 2022, the site further claims. The AM5 based motherboards would too support the DDR5 memory.
Intel Alder Lake-S CPU (Engineering Sample), Source: VideoCardz
| INTEL Mainstream CPU Series Specs | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| VideoCardz.com | Coffee Lake-S | Comet Lake-S | Rocket Lake-S | Alder Lake-S | Meteor Lake-S |
| Launch | 2018 | 2020 | March 2021 | December 2021 | TBC |
| Fabrication Node | 14nm | 14nm | 14nm | 10nm Enhanced SuperFin | TBC |
| Core µArch | Skylake | Skylake | Cypress Cove | Golden Cove + Gracemont | Redwood Cove + Gracemont |
| Graphics µArch | Gen9.5 | Gen9.5 | Gen12.1 | Gen12.2 | Gen 12.7 |
| Max Core Count | up to 8 cores | up to 10 cores | up to 8 cores | up to 16 (8+8) | TBC |
| Socket | LGA1151 | LGA1200 | LGA1200 | LGA1700 | LGA1700 |
| Memory Support | DDR4 | DDR4 | DDR4 | DDR4/DDR5 | DDR5 |
| PCIe Gen | PCIe 3.0 | PCIe 3.0 | PCIe 4.0 | PCIe 5.0 | PCIe 5.0 |
| Intel Core Series | 8th/9th Gen Core-S | 10th Gen Core-S | 11th Gen Core-S | 12th Gen Core-S (?) | 13th Gen Core-S (?) |
| Motherboard Chipsets | Intel 300 (eg. Z390) | Intel 400 (eg. Z490) | Intel 500 (Z590) | Intel 600 (eg. Z690) (?) | Intel 700 (eg. Z790) (?) |
Source: HKEPC
