Core i5-11400 and i9-11900K Rocket Lake CPUs Show Up in New Benchmarks

Leaks for Intel's upcoming Core i5-11400 and Core i9-11900K Rocket Lake CPUs are starting to show up, including a few benchmarks. APISAK Tweeted two new benchmarks, one showcasing the i9-11900K running on an RTX 2080 Ti in an Ashes of the Singularity run, and a SiSoftware benchmark result has appeared for the Core i5-11400.

In the Ashes of the Singularity run, the Intel Core i9-11900K, with a base clock of 3.5ghz, scored 6400 points in the benchmark, with an average CPU frame rate of 64 fps. This score seems incredibly low for Intel's next-gen flagship. For perspective, you can find plenty of Core i7-9700K results with the same settings and GPU with nearly double the frame rates. Presumably, this means the 11900K is an engineering sample and isn't running beyond its base clock. But at least we now know that 11900K samples are in the testing phase, implying that Intel's Rocket Lake chips should be getting close to launch.

For the Core i5-11400, we now know this chip rocks six cores and 12 threads, plus a base clock of 2.6GHz and a maximum turbo frequency of 4.4Ghz, not bad for what should be Intel's lowest-end Core i5 model. The benchmark used is SiSoftware's Multi-Media workload, and the 11400 came with a score of 646.07Mpix/s.

Intel's Rocket Lake processors will be built on the upcoming Cypress Cove core architecture, which is simply Intel's 10nm Sunny cove cores backported to the 14nm node. So yes, for one final time (we hope), Intel is sticking with its 14nm process. But, Intel seems to be focusing entirely on IPC performance this time around, with the i9-11900K only having eight cores and 16 threads, a strange occurrence when the Core i9-10900K came with ten cores and 20 threads. 

The Core i5 series still has six cores and hyperthreading which is the same as the 10th gen Core i5s. That said, it remains a mystery if the Rocket Lake Core i7s will retain hyperthreading or not, with the 11900K going back down to eight cores. Either way, perhaps Intel can regain enough per-core performance to make up for the core deficit compared to AMD's Zen 2 and Zen 3 CPUs.