Intel’s new desktop processors are good, but only at very high frequencies

Intel Rocket Lake processors are due to hit the market this quarter, so there are more and more leaks involving them. Today, the flagship Core i9-11900K and Core i7-11700K have appeared on the web. Recall that in the new generation of Intel CPUs there will be no 10-core models, so Core i9 and Core i7 will probably differ only in frequencies.

So, the flagship scored 1892 and 10,934 points in Geekbench in single-threaded and multi-threaded modes, respectively, and the Core i7-11700K – 1551 and 8849 points, that is, the difference is very noticeable. But it is easily explained: the first CPU runs at up to 5.3 GHz, and the second only up to 4.4 GHz. Because of this, the second, for example, noticeably loses to the Ryzen 7 5800X with the same number of cores, but the Core i9-11900K still turns out to be faster than the competitor, although the difference is small in multi-threaded mode.

As you can see from the table, at its very high frequencies, the new Intel flagship shows a very decent single-threaded performance, but if you lower the frequencies, everything is not so interesting. For example, the six-core Ryzen 5 5600X turns out to be faster than the eight-core Core i7-11700K in single-threaded mode and lags behind by less than 10% in multi-threaded mode.