Intel Core i9-11900 smiles for the benchmark camera, tested on Z490

Intel is currently cooking up its new Rocket Lake family of CPUs for 2021, with the new Core i9-11900 spotted in a new benchmark run in engineering sample (ES) form.

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The new Intel Core i9-11900 processor was tested inside of an MSI Z490I motherboard, meaning the new 11th Gen Core CPUs will work on the current-gen 400-series motherboards. There will be 500-series motherboards launched, but you shouldn't need them to use the new Rocket Lake CPUs.

The chip has 8 cores and 16 threads with a base CPU clock of 1.8GHz, 1-core boost of 4.4GHz and all-core boost of 3.8GHz. This is much lower than the Core i9-11900K which offers the same 8C/16T but at a much higher base CPU clock of 3.5GHz, 1-core boost of 5.3GHz and all-core boost of 4.8GHz.

Intel has a big difference between the clock speeds while maintaining the same core count and 16MB cache, but has a radically different TDP between the chips. The Core i9-11900 has a 65W TDP while the Core i9-11900K has a 125W TDP and will venture somewhere up into the 250W range while the Core i9-11900 will sit at around 120-125W under full load stress.

What's interesting here is that the Core i9-11900 scored 582 points in some early single-core benchmarks, and 5262 points in multi-core tests. The Core i9-10900K at 5.3GHz has an average score of 584 for single-core performance which means the Core i9-11900 is offering some great IPC improvements here.

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Rocket Lake desktop CPU features:

• Increased Performance with new Cypress Cove core architecture
• Up to 8 cores and 16 threads (Double Digit IPC Gains Over Skylake)
• New Xe graphics architecture (Up To 50% higher Performance Than Gen9)
• Increased DDR4 3200 MHz Memory Support
• CPU PCIe 4.0 Lanes (Available on Z490 & Z590 Motherboards)
• Enhanced Display (Integrated HDMI 2.0b, DP1.4a, HBR3)
• Added x4 CPU PCIe Lanes = 20 Total CPU PCIe 4.0 Lanes
• Enhanced Media (12 bit AV1/HVEC, E2E compression)
• CPU Attached Storage or Intel Optane Memory
• New Overclocking Features and Capabilities
• USB Audio offload
• Integrated CNVi & Wireless-AX
• Integrated USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 (20G)
• 2.5Gb Ethernet Discrete LAN
• Discrete Intel Thunderbolt 4 (USB4 Compliant)