Intel's Rocket Lake S desktop CPU lineup set to release in March 2021, giving AMD's Ryzen 5000 series months of free reign

Spanish tech outlet HDTecnologia confirmed they have access to exclusive information on Intel's Rocket Lake S launch time. According to their report, Rocket Lake S will only hit the market by the end of March. The new CPU lineup will be accompanied by a range of motherboard chipsets, including the Z590, H570, B560, and H10. 

If these timeframes pan out, Intel could be conceding upwards of five months to AMD's Ryzen 5000 Zen 3-based CPU lineup. Leaked performance benchmarks indicate that Zen 3 makes major strides in terms of IPC and single-threaded performance, meaning AMD could potentially take a lead in gaming for the first time in over a decade.

Rocket Lake S is also expected to bring major performance improvements to the table. Rocket Lake leverages Intel's next-generation Willow Cove cores, backported to the 14nm process. This should translate to meaningful gains over Comet Lake, which  at its heart, is a respin of a respin of the now ancient Skylake architecture. 

It'll be interesting to see how Rocket Lake S fares against Ryzen 5000. However, for the next couple months at least, it appears as though Intel will have to compete with AMD using last year's Comet Lake S parts.