Intel Rocket Lake leak shows an 8-core CPU that could rival AMD’s Ryzen 5800X

Intel’s Rocket Lake flagship – presumably this is the top-end chip, because it’s an 8-core model – has been spotted in a leaked benchmark which shows that it’s on an equal footing with AMD’s Ryzen 5800X (which also has 8-cores).

Ever-present Twitter leaker Tum_Apisak dug up the Geekbench 5 result, which shows an 8-core Rocket Lake processor (11th-gen chips will top out at 8-cores) inside an HP Omen desktop PC (which the PC maker is presumably using in testing – assuming this result is genuine, of course, and not some kind of fabrication).

So, pinches of salt to hand as noted, the score of 1,645 in single-core is very close to the Ryzen 5800X which hits around 1,660 as Wccftech observes. There’s a bit more of a gap when it comes to multi-core, with the Rocket Lake silicon recording a result of 9,783, compared to more like 10,400 for the 5800X (so Intel is about 6% shy here).

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However, the Rocket Lake CPU is shown as having a 3.4GHz base clock in the benchmark result, and 5GHz boost – the latter will surely be higher when it comes to the final spec of the processor (we’ve previously heard rumors of potential boost clocks of up to 5.5GHz, in fact).

In other words, performance should be a bit better with the final product as you would expect, bearing all the usual caveats in mind – this is just a leak, and only a single benchmark for that matter.

Compared to Intel’s current Comet Lake line-up, and the 8-core 10700K, this Rocket Lake chip is 21% and 9% faster respectively in single-core and multi-core here.

Promising glimpse

It’s a promising enough glimpse of Intel’s next-gen 8-core CPU, and we’ve also heard on the grapevine that gaming performance in particular will be a strength (and on-board cache will be ramped up – this leak shows the Rocket Lake processor with 4MB of L2 cache, and 16MB of L3).

Rocket Lake is set to arrive early in 2021, with speculation pointing to a March debut, and the sighting of a chip in an HP test machine is hopefully another small indication that Intel is on track with its launch schedule (remember that Comet Lake slipped a fair bit – and Intel can’t afford that with AMD’s Ryzen 5000 processors already on the scene right now).

Rocket Lake chips will be backwards compatible with Z490 motherboards, and will come with support for PCIe 4.0.

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