AMD’s Ryzen 5000 processors are really fast. In the GameStar test, the twelve-core Ryzen 9 5900X impressed us with its high gaming performance, which even displaces the Intel Core i9 10900K from the top. AMD therefore currently offers the best overall package for both gaming and applications.
How does Intel intend to counter the new Ryzen processors? The answer is Rocket Lake, more precisely Rocket Lake-S for the desktop. The Twitter channel CapFrameX (@CapFrameX), from the developer of the monitoring tool of the same name, CapFrameX, has shared interesting benchmark results:
🚀Rocket Lake🚀
CB 20 ST score
Rocket Lake 655
R9 5950X 649— CapFrameX (@CapFrameX) November 12, 2020
A Rocket Lake CPU is said to have achieved 655 points in the single thread comparison of Cinebench R20. For comparison, CapFrameX names a Ryzen 9 5950X, which has 649 points.
Comparison with Ryzen and Core-i:
* Information not confirmed.
** Results according to the database of Notebookcheck.
How realistic is the information about Rocket Lake?
The first detailed rumors about the Rocket Lake processors surfaced in mid-October. According to this, architecturally, it should be the biggest innovation since Skylake in 2015, even if the production is still based on a 14 nanometer process.
The most important information about Rocket Lake summarized:
- Maximum of 8 cores and 16 threads
- i9 with up to 5.5 GHz turbo clock, i7 with up to 5.2 GHz
- Cache: L1 increased from 32 KB to 48 KB and L2 from 256 KB to 512 KB
- Support for PCI Express 4.0 (already confirmed by Intel)
In view of the multi-core performance, which is often more relevant for applications, it is not expected that Intel will be able to catch up with AMD. AMD’s lead in terms of core count is simply too great for that.
In the test with high-frequency RAM, the advantages of the Ryzen 9 5900X over the Core i9 10900K only really become apparent.
Competition in gaming performance: The Rocket Lake processors (release in March 2021) should, however, be specially optimized for gaming. The lower the resolution in games, the greater the influence of the CPU on the frame rate. A high single-thread performance is therefore particularly important, which among other things depends largely on a high clock rate.
Viewed in this light, the latest information and the benchmark results from Cinebench R20 seem to fit into the picture.
