Early benchmark results for Intel's Core i7 11700K have been released, showing promising signs of performance gains over current Intel 10th generation processors. Similarly, test numbers for the Core i9 11900K suggest that it is also leading in single-threaded performance, and at least two venerable gaming chips from Intel Rocket Lake may be on the horizon.

The Core i7 11700K results (found by Tum_Apisak) are from Geekbench 4, and you know that this is not the most representative benchmark. However, it does provide a rough picture of the performance of the upcoming Rocket Lake processors. [With a single-core score of 7,857, the Core i7 11700K outperforms the Intel Core i9 10900K by a comfortable margin; the Core i9 10900K is still largely dominant under single-threaded workloads, and single-threaded tests on relatively comparable systems show a 6,. It tends to score over 900.

As a benchmark, Geekbench 4 measures memory performance as part of its CPU tests, so comparable scores are not always available. In particular, in the case of today's Core i7 11700K results, the exact memory speed of the system being benchmarked is not specified. [This is not too much of a surprise given that Intel is touting a double-digit increase in instructions per clock (IPC) by moving from Comet Lake, a derivative of the Skylake architecture, to the Cypress Cove architecture.

Cypress Cove is actually a blend of a 10th generation Intel Ice Lake CPU core (Sunny Cove) and 11th generation Tiger Lake graphics (Intel Xe), a more advanced but still not available on desktops, 10nm process node to the 14nm process node.

A side effect of this transition is a reduction in the number of cores available in Rocket Lake: the Core i9 10900K has 10 cores and 20 threads, while the top-of-the-line Rocket Lake chip, the Core i9 11900K, has 8 cores and 16 threads. core i7 11700K is similar.

Even a fairly substantial IPC improvement cannot overcome the lack of two physical cores on the die, and the Core i7 11700K appears to fall short of the Core i9 10900K in multi-core tests, 42,011 to 49,107. However, the Core i7 10700K with the same threads should be relatively easy to beat.

As for the Core i9 11900K, the chip is reportedly in the hands of Chinese YouTuber ChaoWanKe a little earlier (via Videocardz). The chip also shows signs of a slight lead in single-threaded performance, but again lags a bit behind the more core-saturated Comet Lake and AMD Zen 3 parts.

Intel's new Rocket Lake Core i9 11900K looks to be able to maintain its lead in single-threaded performance against the Ryzen 9 5900X, at least by a small margin. This could bode well for gaming, but we will have to wait for more conclusive data to say for sure.

Intel Rocket Lake processors are expected to arrive in March, at least according to Gigabyte's press release, but more details will be announced at CES 2021. We also saw several Z590 motherboards ahead of the launch, all indicating a launch date in or around Q1.