Rocket Lake i7-11700 helps Intel secure the single-core performance crown for now as it crushes the i7-10700K and overtakes the AMD Ryzen 7 5800X at 4.88 GHz on Geekbench

The Geekbench single-core result of the Intel Core i7-11700, as spotted by APISAK, has pretty much cemented the top-end SKUs of the Rocket Lake family as the single-core performance champions for the time being. The Rocket Lake chip managed clock rates of 2.50 GHz to 4.88 GHz (4.89 GHz during OpenCL testing) and was tested with an Asus ROG Maximus XIII Hero board and 16 GB RAM. The 8-core, 16-thread i7-11700 pulled off a single-core score of 1,718 points and multi-core score of 9,442 points.

Checking those theoretically maximum results against the average results Geekbench has listed for the i7-10700 reveals how far ahead the Rocket Lake part is: +35.81% (single) and 20.13% (multi). Moving to the unlocked Intel Core i7-10700K and comparing with our own test results leaves the i7-11700 with impressive +24.85% (single) and +13.73% (multi) gains (Geekbench records similar average results to ours here). The generational improvements are credible, but when it comes to comparing the Intel chip with the rival AMD Ryzen 7 5800X it boils down to that old question: Is single-core performance more important than multi-core performance?

The i7-11700 can just squeeze past the Ryzen 7 5800X in single-core processing with a pretty small +3.18% advantage against our test results for the AMD part. But when it comes to multi-core workloads, as usual Team Red is way ahead, with the Ryzen 7 5800X trouncing the Intel Core i7-11700 by +10.60% (Geekbench average) and even 20.25% (Notebookcheck). Price is obviously a factor as is power consumption, leaving desktop builders with a difficult decision to make. But it can at least be argued that the flagship Rocket Lake-S parts from Intel have secured the single-core performance crown for a bit longer.

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