Intel Core i7-11700K was slower and more power hungry AMD Ryzen 7 5800X in the first full tests
Resource Lab501 has published a full-scale preliminary performance test of the upcoming Intel Core i7-11700K desktop 8-core processor from the Rocket Lake-S family. Benchmarks were conducted on a fresh engineering sample that is unlikely to differ much from the retail model – the CPU compared to existing Intel Core and AMD Ryzen solutions.
The chip is claimed to have a base frequency of 3.6 GHz, and in Turbo mode, it can go up to 5 GHz on one and 4.6 GHz on all eight cores. The CPU will even have the same amount of cache, so the key change is clock speed. This processor will have a TDP power consumption limit of 225-250W (PL2) or 125W (PL1).
Intel Core i7-11700K will offer the same core configuration as the flagship Core i9-11900K but will differ slightly lower clock speeds and a more affordable price. The CPU will use the 14nm process technology and the new Cypress Cove core architecture, which provides double-digit percentage growth in the number of instructions executed per clock (IPC).
It will be interesting to see how Rocket Lake processors can overclock since the small difference between the Core i9-11900K and Core i7-11700K chips can, in theory, be overcome with simple overclocking. In terms of pricing, the Core i7 will be cheaper than the Core i9, but the official price for both eight-core Rocket Lake-S has not been announced.
The test platform for the Intel Rocket Lake Core i7-11700K consisted of a Z590 motherboard with 16GB DDR4-3200 MHz (CL14) memory and an RTX 2080 Ti graphics card. In almost all synthetic tests, the processor became worse than its main competitor, AMD Ryzen 7 5800X. This can be seen in the graphs below:
The same situation was observed in terms of gaming performance: the Intel Core i7-11700K slightly outperformed the AMD Ryzen 7 5800X in several games but even lost to the AMD Ryzen 5 5600X in others. The source said that Intel Rocket Lake’s average superiority over its competitors in the face of Vermeer based on AMD Zen 3 is about 1-2%.
In terms of power consumption, the Intel Core i7-11700K system draws 286W, 64W more than the configuration with the AMD Ryzen 7 5800X and 76W higher than the system with the Core i7-10700K. It seems that power consumption is still an issue, mainly related to the 14nm process technology: AMD has long since switched to an improved 7nm process technology that Intel cannot match in terms of efficiency. Simultaneously, the Intel processor runs at about 71 ° C, while the Ryzen 7 5800X is at about 89 ° C.
However, it is worth recalling that we are talking about an engineering sample Intel Core i7-11700K. The main problem with it is that currently, motherboards do not know how to enable power limits properly and do not support Turbo frequencies for all cores for a long time. Perhaps, in the end, we will see an additional increase in performance compared to the given indicators, but it is unlikely that it will be more than 5%. At the same time, AMD will remain in an excellent position, having a large margin for the possibility of confronting Intel by reducing prices for the existing CPU family.
