Intel reveals Rocket Lake's secrets in a Reddit AMA

From PC World: Intel’s 11th-gen Rocket Lake chip was green-lit well before AMD’s Zen 2 and Zen 3 architectures rocked our worlds, company officials acknowledged.

In an AMA posted Tuesday on the Intel subreddit, Scott Rouse, Intel’s platform engineer for Rocket Lake, attending with other Intel officials, revealed that Rocket Lake was given the go-ahead in early 2019. Its two-year journey to the launchpad on March 30th is actually break-neck speed for a new CPU (which might take years longer normally). Still, the world that Rocket Lake woke up to in 2021 probably wasn’t what Intel anticipated in 2019, when the company created the chip by marrying its yet-to-be-released 10th-gen, 10nm Ice Lake x86 cores with its already-aging 14nm manufacturing process.

The match wasn’t made in heaven. While our review of Intel’s flagship Core i9-11900K was kinder than most, others have strongly questioned whether the 8-core CPU should even have been made, given the step back in cores from the previous generation’s 10-core flagship. While we feel that’s an overly harsh opinion, it’s nevertheless interesting to learn that Rocket Lake’s approval came basically before AMD introduced its Zen 2- and Zen 3-based Ryzen CPUs.

View: Full Article