German retailer MindFactory.de appears to have gotten a head start by offering Intel's unannounced Core i7 11700K CPU almost a month before the new CPU goes on sale. This is assuming that the general rumor that Intel's Rocket Lake CPUs will be available by the end of March is true.

Perhaps the fact that Intel already has them in stock indicates that they are ready a bit sooner than we thought.

The chip in question is not the top-of-the-line Core i9 11900K. No, this is a more modest 8-core, 16-thread Core i7 11700K chip. It is a chip that generally makes economic sense. In fact, the Core i7 10700K and the Core i7 9700K that preceded it were both the choice of gamers of their generation.

Somewhat frustratingly, while the chips appear to be available for purchase, there are no details on the page about the 11th generation processors other than the 5 GHz clock speed found in the product name. This is 100 MHz slower than the existing 5.1 GHz Core i7 10700K.

Fingers crossed that the pricing is also a placeholder: at €469, that means about $569 (£400), which is much higher than the 10700K's current price.

It's early days, to be sure, but interest in what will be Intel's first CPU family to natively support PCIe 4.0 SSDs and GPUs is certainly growing.