MSI says Intel Rocket Lake-S CPUs will be available late March

An MSI representative in South Korea recently shared some Intel Rocket Lake CPU and motherboard launch information that perhaps wasn't supposed to be public. Yesterday Twitter tech enthusiast @harukaze5719 shared a translation from the Korean Danawa tech forum confirming the launch of RKL-S is going to be "at the end of March". The 'MSI Official Account' entry has since been edited to remove any mention of specific dates – instead leaning on the far vaguer 'this year'.

Back in October last year Intel confirmed Rocket Lake-S would be coming in Q1 2021 in a blog post on Medium. Intel's VP and GM of Client Computing Group Desktop, Workstations and Gaming, John Bonini, penned this introduction and used to confirm RKL-S would "provide support for PCIe 4.0," and be "another fantastic processor for gaming". Other features we know about are that the 14nm+++ RKL-S are that it will feature; back ported Willow Cove cores, support integrated Xe graphics, offer up to 20 lanes of PCIe 4.0, and launch alongside Intel 500 series chipset LGA 1200 motherboards with USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 (20G), Thunderbolt 4, and fast wired/wireless networking support.

Above you can see the statement from the MSI Official Account before it was edited. As you can see the key statement is that "Intel 11^th generation CPUs are scheduled to be released at the end of March." MSI also revealed that it has plans in place to release BIOS updates for its Intel 10^th gen supporting motherboards (H410, B460, and Z490 chipset) in the runup to the processor launch. It looks like it will be addressing the needs of the premium board purchasers first – starting with BIOS updates on its Z490 motherboards.

Intel and partners like MSI will likely have some 500-Series LGA-1200 motherboards ready sometime around late March too – providing drop-in support for Intel's latest desktop processors.

If you are looking for more recent RKL-S leaks and spills, TechPowerUp recently shared some Intel Core i9-11900K CPU-Z benchmark scores. The leaked scores – add pinch of salt – showed that the RKL-S CPU was "19 per cent ahead of the i9-10900K and 3 per cent ahead of the AMD Ryzen 9 5950X in single-threaded performance," which is encouraging to see.

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why am I totally underwhelmed by this piece of non news?

3dcandy
why am I totally underwhelmed by this piece of non news?

Probably for the same reason as me…it's more of the same from intel and it's still likely going to be better to have AMD Ryzen 5000, especially if you need more than 8 cores like me :)

LSG501
Probably for the same reason as me…it's more of the same from intel and it's still likely going to be better to have AMD Ryzen 5000, especially if you need more than 8 cores like me :)

Yup, exactly.

For me, it's a desperate architectural backport that although with reasonably better IPC, it's still going to get dragged down by the now overwhelmingly hot 14nm+++ process at high frequencies. It'll be nice that Intel is finally doing PCIe 4.0 but it's just guff being bolted on at this point.

We'll see what it's really like come release but I'm going to continue to trust nothing Intel says because they've been provably untrustworthy with their statements and “metrics”.

I liked Steve from Gamers Nexus (paraphrased, can't find which vid he said this in, likely the disappointment PC 2020) saying “they'll be clawing their way back into doing benchmarks because that's the way this works”.

Tabbykatze
We'll see what it's really like come release but I'm going to continue to trust nothing Intel says because they've been provably untrustworthy with their statements and “metrics”.

I'm always curious as to whether their ‘metrics’ are comparing the new chips with the old chips after they've had all their security patches etc and had their performance reduced a little from release…. 10% uptick versus a 2/3 year old cpu (they always seem to pick an ‘old’ cpu) isn't that impressive when that 2/3 year old cpu has lost say 5% due to security patches lol.

LSG501
I'm always curious as to whether their ‘metrics’ are comparing the new chips with the old chips after they've had all their security patches etc and had their performance reduced a little from release…. 10% uptick versus a 2/3 year old cpu (they always seem to pick an ‘old’ cpu) isn't that impressive when that 2/3 year old cpu has lost say 5% due to security patches lol.

Almost willing to bet money that they don't considering reviewers seem to be restricted into them not being allowed to test with mitigations on. I'm pretty sure I remember one or two reviewers being told in the review briefing that they couldn't run them with mitigations enabled.

Considering the biggest mitigation is “disable SMT”, that's pretty harmful to performance!

MSI says Intel Rocket Lake-S CPUs will be available late March

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