Despite support for Intel's 11th generation CPUs being rolled out on a host of new and old motherboards, it appears that the new Intel Rocket Lake desktop processors will not be released as soon as we had hoped.

This little gem, spotted by harukaze5719 on Twitter, exposes a machine translation of a post by the official MSI-CS Innovation Customer Center.

MSI then updated their reply and added some wavy details to the disclosure.

Several new motherboard control circuits are getting ready to be announced at CES 2021, including the Z590, B560, and H510, all set to support the new 11th generation CPUs. The rumored Core i9 11900K will use the LGA 1200 socket first used in the 400 series motherboards released for the Comet Lake chips, and Gigabyte confirmed that the older Z490 motherboards will support Rocket Lake CPUs when it was able to confirm that PCIe 4.0 support on 400 series motherboards was legitimate.

When PCIe 4.0 support was initially announced, it seemed to make no sense for the current generation of Comet Lake processors, which are limited to PCIe 3.0. In fact, everything was leading up to this year's Rocket Lake CPUs, but despite initial hopes of an early 2021 launch, it appears we will have to wait a bit longer to get our hands on Intel's 11th generation chips.

The new Cypress Cove architecture in Rocket Lake represents a bit of an update from the previous generation Comet Lake-S platform. And it goes beyond just PCIe Express 4.0 support. It is a backport of the Sunny Cove design used in the 10nm Ice Lake mobile CPUs, retooled for the aging 14nm process and combined with the same Xe GPU core as Tiger Lake.

This is likely why Intel shifted from Comet Lake's high standard of 10 cores to a 14nm core 8-core, 16-thread design. However, the new Cypress Cove architecture is meant to result in record CPU-Z single-core performance of over 700 points. Integrated Xe graphics are also expected to produce about 50% better performance than Intel's 9th generation CPUs, and excessive DDR4-3200 memory speeds are expected.

For more detailed information, check out the Intel Rocket Lake specs here. But if you want the highlights, all of this makes the Core i9 11900K a really compelling chip, one to keep an eye on even if AMD's Threadripper is hanging around.

Still, it's still a bit of a wait, so don't tear up your old CPU just yet in anticipation.