First professional review of Intel's Rocket Lake (11700K) is out.. and it's a disaster

[illegalwater]

Performance gains range from mediocre to non-existent, and in the worst cases it's actually slower than Skylake, overall it's still slower vs the 5800X despite consuming significantly more power.

Interestingly it also has higher core-to-core latency and a worse performing L3 cache compared to Skylake.

Quote

The official launch date for these processors, and full reviews, is March 30^th. We are currently under NDA with Intel for the information that has been provided by Intel, and will publish that information in due course. However, as noted in a number of press outlets, some units have already been sold at retail before that sales date. Units obtained by that method are not under NDA by definition, and we obtained the Core i7-11700K for this review at retail, and as such we are not under NDA for any information we have obtained through using this processor.

Before publishing this review, we gave Intel advance notice to respond to us having a full review ahead of the formal release. Our email seemingly generated some excitement inside (and to our surprise, outside) Intel, but we received a response from Intel stating that they had no comment to offer.

It's impressively bad, I'm at a loss for words.

Source

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16535/intel-core-i7-11700k-review-blasting-off-with-rocket-lake

[Moonzy]

Wasn't there a similar story posted

 

I remember reading that the RAM timing or something isn't quite right on these chips, might be the reason for the disappointing results?

[Levent]

4 minutes ago, Moonzy said:

Wasn't there a similar story posted

 

I remember reading that the VRAM timing or something isn't quite right on these chips, might be the reason for the disappointing results?

Que? I am leaning towards architectural issues. 

[TrigrH]

No further comment necessary. 

[Nathat23]

4 minutes ago, TrigrH said:

No further comment necessary. 

Looks like the rocket here is the power consumption

[Kilrah]

Well, rockets do get quite hot...

[Moonzy]

15 minutes ago, Levent said:

Que? I am leaning towards architectural issues. 

Ah it was a members review

Though this is the non-K

[spartaman64]

i saw some rumors that the 11900k hits 98C with a 360mm AIO 

[Random_Person1234]

I think this generation was supposed to just be a stop gap for Alder Lake. Even then, this chip is still really bad compared to Zen 3.

[WereCat]

Intel: We are no longer offering an Overclocking warranty... this CPU is DOA.

 

Honestly, if this is how it's intended to work and there are no weird quirks or issues in the BIOS... AMD FX just pulled out an UNO card.

[Middcore]

This conclusion is in its own way brutal.

 

Quote

Our results clearly show that Intel’s performance, while substantial, still trails its main competitor, AMD. In a core-for-core comparison, Intel is slightly slower and a lot more inefficient. The smart money would be to get the AMD processor. However, due to high demand and prioritizing commercial and enterprise contracts, the only parts readily available on retail shelves right now are from Intel. Any user looking to buy or build a PC today has to dodge, duck, dip, dive and dodge their way to find one for sale, and also hope that it is not at a vastly inflated price. The less stressful solution would be to buy Intel, and use Intel’s latest platform in Rocket Lake.

It's very close to saying that if it weren't for shortages there would be no reason to buy this at all.

[CarlBar]

Having followed the link and looked through a good chunk of the benchmarks results there. The OP is overstating how bad it is. Yes the power efficiency is horrible, but that aside it looks to deliver exactly what everyone expected, high single to low double digit percentage uplifts in IPC on the same number of cores compared to previous intel offerings. Is it still painfully bad compared to AMD? Largely yes, but my gut reaction without pulling up old reviews is that it's nowhere near as bad as the lead Intel had over AMD during Zen 1 and Zen+. So overall solid if priced competitively, but i doubt it is, (i don't recall what the official prices where and i was focused on benchmarks whilst skimming through the article). Still i think one this reaches 10nm we can expect some solid products as the power use comes down and the core count goes up.

[IkeaGnome]

35 minutes ago, TrigrH said:

No further comment necessary. 

One that's even better... With margin of error.... The 10700k competes with...the 5600x..

[AlphaLemming]

I guess AMD won't have to cut their prices with the nonexistent competition unless Intel cuts their prices by a lot.

[SFFDesigns]

Looks like the architecture doesn't really do well at all when back ported to 14nm. Must be really annoying to be an Intel engineer who can only do so much with the 14nm process, I can just imagine how hamstrung they must feel. 

 

This is a disappointing result, really a shame

[Helpful Tech Witch]

this is sad.

and i exicted to see how intel would respond.

 

just imagine this with the 11700k@140w

[WhitetailAni]

This reminds me of FX.

Lots of heat for not an amazing a lot of performance.

 

How the tables have turned.

[FeIIex]

Now I wonder how the i9 will fare, oof.

[Fasterthannothing]

Yikes I'm glad I just went ahead and bought the i9 when it went on sale for $250 last week. This is a complete joke the only thing that will save Intel now is make them dirt cheap (doubtful) and no stock from AMD (not as much of a problem anymore). Basically they are screwed. 

[williamcll]

What if they sell these for half the price of the 5800X

[Random_Person1234]

7 minutes ago, williamcll said:

What if they sell these for half the price of the 5800X

Let's be honest, Intel would never sell a K series i7 for $225.

[sora.sky]

Intel seems to be bullish on Alder Lake coming later this year/early next year. This has me concerned. 

 

Their insistence on bringing over big.LITTLE has me even more concerned with stability and scheduling issues on the OS side. I hope they make SKUs with only big cores or the ability to disable the little cores. 

[leadeater]

6 hours ago, Moonzy said:

Ah it was a members review

I doubt there will actually be much to gain, slight issues aside or not. Once the microcode goes GA retail and accompanying bios things are pretty much as is with Intel. ES and QS samples can sometimes present with high performance in certain tests but have certain errors that get picked up and fixed which result in performance regression, accuracy over speed etc. That's why ES/QS chips on ebay are so appealing but also slightly risky, this is more a Xeon buyers market but yea could end up with something that's not fully happy with say ESXi when CPU transitions power states or something dumb like that. 

 

What we're seeing is what we're getting basically, and it appears that the architectural changes are the result of some of the not so great results. Cache latencies have changed between layers and sizes, good for some things not so good for others.

 

Quote

Looking closer at the estimated structural latencies between the two cores designs on a clock cycle access time basis, we’re seeing similar changes that Intel in the past had disclosed about the Sunny Cove microarchitecture. The L1D regresses from 4 cycles to 5 cycles with its 50% capacity increase to 48KB, the L2 regresses 1 cycle from 12 to 13 cycles as it doubles in capacity, while the L3 surprisingly enough sees a larger estimated 7.5 cycle regression.

Bigger isn't always better, as bigger is slower.

[D13H4RD]

I read through the entire review. If that leaked pricing of $485.99 (good god, I really hope it's a bit lower) ends up being true, and what we're seeing here extends to the 11600K and 11900K, yeah, I would skip this generation entirely.

 

Sure, we knew that RKL-S would be the "stopgap" generation, but from the results, it really looks like the best option for people who really want/need a new CPU right now (especially if they are changing/upgrading platforms or building a new system entirely) and don't want/can't have Ryzen 5000 for whatever reason, then 10th-gen Comet Lake-S at their discounted prices are just too good of a deal to pass up unless you explicitly need AVX-512 or PCIe 4.0 on an Intel platform.

 

The rest of us might just want to wait and see how Alder Lake stacks up. Man, I hope it's good...

[Random_Person1234]

https://www.amazon.com/AMD-Ryzen-5800X-16-Thread-Processor/dp/B0815XFSGK/

The 11700K is even worse considering that the 5800X has been in stock for a few days straight.