March 2, 2021 Intel has given the official release date for the Rocket Lake-S processors
After the release of AMD’s Zen 3 CPUs in October last year, it’s time for Intel to take some ground back with its 11th generation Rocket Lake-S CPUs, which now have a precise release date.
Penned by John Bonini, who bears the lengthy title as Intel’s vice president and general manager of client computing group desktop, workstations, and gaming, a Medium post drives home just how passionate the company is about its gamer audience, before teasing that “Rocket Lake is coming.” If you need a refresher, Rocket Lake is the codename of Intel’s anticipated next-generation lineup, which is expected to be yet another 14nm chip, but this time based on Willow Cove architecture and possibly introducing 20% IPC gains over the current Comet Lake CPUs.
This will mark Intel’s first PCIe 4.0-compatible processor, while AMD has supported it with Zen 2 CPUs and a range of motherboards for quite some time. And yet, PCIe 6.0 is on track to be finalised at the end of 2021 – granted, it’s primarily aimed at servers, but it shows that PCIe 4.0’s days are already numbered.
We previously knew the Rocket Lake chips would be coming sometime in late March, but a statement given by Intel to Andreas Schilling, editor of German hardware site Hardwareluxx, gives us the true release date of the chips. It’ll be on March 30, specifically at 6AM PT – that’s 2PM for our UK viewers.
We now have an official sales date:
"The sales embargo for 11th Gen Desktop processors (Rocket Lake S) is March 30, 2021 at 6 a.m. PT / 9 a.m. ET."
— Andreas Schilling (@aschilling) March 2, 2021
The March 2021 launch is a little earlier than usual, considering that Intel released its 10th gen Comet Lake processors on May 27. At least part, if not all of the reasoning, likely lies with whispers that AMD’s Zen 3 has provided a substantial generational leap with its PCIe 4.0 support, and Intel certainly doesn’t want to leave its rival uncontested.