FEBRUARY 2021 PCWorld 25Intel believes that the Core i9-11900K will give AMD’s Ryzen a run for its money. At press time, the
configuration of the system Intel used in preparing this test wasn’t available.
confirmed that the interface now doubles the
available lanes from four to eight. The Direct
Media Interface connects the CPU and north
bridge of the chipset to the PCH or south
bridge. Intel’s Skylake processor, equipped
with DMI 3.0, was the first to include a total of
four lanes. Guttridge confirmed that Rocket
Lake S provides eight lanes, doubling the
bandwidth, which means that Intel has kept
the link speed constant.
In terms of gaming performance, Intel
claims that Rocket Lake-S should improve
performance by about 7 percent on IO
Interactive’s unreleased Hitman 3, running on
top of the game’s built-in benchmark. Intel also
claimed that the Core i9-11900K slightly
outperformed the AMD Ryzen 5900X on
several top-tier games, from Total War: Three
Kingdoms to Cyberpunk 2077 to Watch Dogs:
Legion to Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla, all running
at 1080p and High settings or above.
However, Intel didn’t publish the
configurations of its gaming tests by press time.
Because the Core i9-11900K is more of an
introduction, rather than a launch, we don’t
have the usual “speeds and feeds” matrix
describing the base clock speeds and turbo
clock speeds are at various levels, and so on.
We also don’t know how many EUs are part of
the 11900K, either.
Guttridge did explain some more of the
decisions Intel made on choosing the Rocket
Lake S features that Intel had previously
revealed. Customers had asked for faster