Intel previews 11th Gen Core i9-11900K, its flagship Rocket Lake-S CPU

Intel's flagship Rocket Lake-S desktop processor was previewed at CES 2021.

What you need to know

• Intel previewed its 11th Gen Core i9-1100K at CES 2021.
• The new Core i9 is the flagship processor of Intel's 11th Gen Rocket Lake-S desktop processors.
• The Core i9-11900K will ship in Q1 2021 but doesn't have an exact release date at this time.

Intel previewed its 11th Gen Rocket Lake-S desktop processors this week at CES 2021 (via The Verge). Intel didn't share pricing details but previewed the specs of the high-end processor. The new Core i9 will ship in Q1 2021, but Intel hasn't shared an exact release date.

The flagship processor of the new lineup is the Core i9-11900K, which brings up to 19 percent higher instructions per cycle (IPS) and up to 50 percent better integrated graphics. The new Core i9 also brings better AI performance.

Intel didn't show off all of its new 11th Gen Rocket Lake-S chips, but the preview of the new Core i9 provides some insights about the upcoming processors. The Core i9-11900K is an eight-core, 16-thread chipset with boosted clock speeds of 5.3 GHz. Those clock speeds should deliver a significant boost over preceding processors.

The Core i9-11900K supports up to DDR4-3200 and has 20 total PCIe 4.0 lanes. It works with Intel's new 500 series chipset but is also backwards compatible with Intel 400 series chipsets.

Notably, the upcoming Rocket Lake-S processors are still 14nm chips. Many have been eager to see 10nm chips from Intel, but we won't see that here. While the new processors aren't 10nm, they have Intel's Cypress Cove cores. These cores have improvements from Intel's 10nm core designs, which brings support for Intel Xe integrated graphics and faster processing speeds.