Intel 11th-generation Rocket Lake-S gaming CPUs did not impress us

Enlarge / Our test rig is a little more unlovely than usual, due to Asus' decision to entomb the CPU socket in surrounding high-rise heatsinks, with the system's RAM closing in just as tightly from the bottom. (credit: Jim Salter)

Today marks the start of retail availability for Intel's 2021 gaming CPU lineup, codenamed Rocket Lake-S. Rocket Lake-S is still stuck on Intel's venerable 14 nm process-we've long since lost count of how many pluses to tack onto the end-with features backported from newer 10 nm designs.

Clock speed on Rocket Lake-S remains high, but thread counts have decreased on the high end. Overall, most benchmarks show Rocket Lake-S underperforming last year's Comet Lake-let alone its real competition, coming from AMD Ryzen CPUs.

Our hands-on test results did not seem to match up with Intel's marketing claims of up to 19 percent gen-on-gen IPC (Instructions Per Clock cycle) improvement over its 10th-generation parts.

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