24 PCWorld FEBRUARY 2021NEWS INTEL TAKES ON RYZEN WITH ROCKET LAKE S
ten to eight cores?“ Guttridge said. “The
answer to that question really goes back to...
our focus was on maximizing real world
performance, which is a combination of
frequency and IPC [instructions per clock]. So
as we looked at the microarchitecture, we
ported the 10nm design for both the CPU and
the graphics back to the 14nm manufacturing
node. As the 10nm design has smaller
transistors and
the 14nm is a bit
larger set, the
maximum core
count we could
fit on Rocket
Lake was eight.”
The other
factor
influencing
Intel’s choice
was that moving
to 14nm allowedthe company to take
advantage of the SuperFIN
transistor that Intel added to
Tiger Lake (go.pcworld.com/
sfin). Last year, Ruth Brain, an
Intel fellow specializing in
technology development and
interconnects, said the sum
total of all of the intranode
improvements made in the
14nm generations would be
equaled by the one intranode
performance increase from Ice Lake to Tiger
Lake, via SuperFIN.
“That trade off we got was that 19 percent
IPC gain...and the 50 percent graphics
improvement,” Guttridge said. “So again, the
focus here was on maximizing performance
for the end users in the real world.”
Intel didn’t specify whether Rocket Lake S
formally includes DMI 4.0, though GuttridgeThis is as much as we know of the details of the Core i9-11900K.Moving to 14nm allowed Intel to take advantage of Tiger Lake’s SuperFIN transistor.