6-core / 12-thread Rocket Lake-S CPU early benchmarks reveal disappointing performance gains over Comet Lake-S

The Comet Lake-S CPUs are barely cutting it against AMD’s Ryzen 3000 CPUs, and the red team will most likely get a significant advantage with the upcoming Ryzen 4000 models. We already know that Intel’s answer to the Zen 3 desktop CPUs will be the Rocket Lake-S processors expected to launch by the end of 2020 with a new microarchitecture that adopts the Willow Cove cores from the Tiger Lake mobility CPUs. The disappointing part is that the upcoming Rocket Lake desktop chips will once again be manufactured on the super-refined 14 nm node, so there will not be significant power efficiency improvements and the performance might also see minimal gains. If that is not disappointing enough, we now get a glimpse of some possible performance figures thanks to a set of 3DMark scores spotted by reliable leakers TUM_APISAK and _rogame.

The engineering sample spotted in the 3DMark database comes with 6 cores and 12 threads clocked at 3.5 GHz. Even though the database entry reports 4.1 GHz boost clocks, _rogame explains that there are some results that show 4.2 GHz boost clocks, but he only included pictures for the best results. Judging only by base and boost clocks, this chip appears to be a successor to the freshly released Comet Lake-S i5-10400 CPU that boosts up to 4.3 GHz.

Due to that 100 MHz difference, the Rocket Lake model managed to score only 11,887 points in the physics test compared to the 12,828 points scored by the i5-10400, but it got a marginally better graphics score of 1,900 points over 1,822, via the performance boost from the Xe iGPU. Sure, this is an engineering sample and we could see better performance on the final versions. However, we were expecting to already see performance gains, since the Rocket Lake chips are rumored to get significantly increased power limits.

At least we can take solace in the fact that the upcoming Rocket Lake-S CPUs are still compatible with the LGA 1200 socket and we’ll finally be able to access those PCIe 4.0 lanes that are inactive on some of the new Z490 motherboards. The Xe iGPUs should also be quite a bit faster, while Intel is promising to add Thunderbolt 4 and USB 3.2 20G support, as well.