As a sign of just how close Intel's 11th and 12th Gen chips may be to launch—and to one another—both the upcoming Intel Rocket Lake and Alder Lake chips have today been pictured in the silicon flesh.
Intel's 11th Gen Rocket Lake processors are set to launch in Q1, 2020, and Intel is promising to do away with the formula it's been working with for the past five chip generations with its next-gen processors. The most major change will be the 14nm backport of the 10nm Sunny Cove core architecture from its Ice Lake chips, and the Intel Xe graphics from Tiger Lake.
Despite these rather large changes, the same LGA 1200 socket is sticking around. That can be seen in the rather generic images posted over on Bilibili by user Yuuki_AnS (via WCCFTech) claiming to be that of Intel's upcoming 11th Gen processors.
Of course, it could just as easily be one of many similar processors Intel has launched over the past few years. But it makes sense, right? With a release date not all that far away now, and Intel already confirming many of Rocket Lake's specs, it's about time we actually saw what these chips looked like—even if they don't look that much different to the last.
Intel has also promised a new 500-series chipset accompanying its next-gen CPUs, so motherboard manufacturers will be keen to get the chips in-house for testing as soon as possible.
Hopefully we'll have a better idea of how they perform in games soon, too. Intel is promising a significant IPC increase with the 11th Gen on desktop, and that bodes well for gaming performance.
They say good things come in pairs, and today's Rocket Lake leak is accompanied by another. Videocardz has managed to get its hands on an image of what is said to be Intel Alder Lake, the 12th Gen hybrid architecture on the way from Intel later in 2021.
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It's immediately clear from the pictures posted over on the site that Alder Lake is a significant departure from previous desktop CPU architectures and processor lineups. Alder Lake is built around both high-performance Golden Cove cores and low-power Gracemont cores, which Intel is confident this pairing will help it deliver greater performance per watt and higher desktop performance.
That big ol' chip also necessitates a new socket. The larger footprint of Alder Lake has been rumoured for the better part of a year, and even pictured not that long ago, alongside the reported socket pin configuration: LGA 1700.
There's not much more to be gleaned from the leaked pictures, beyond what we already know in that both Rocket Lake and Alder Lake are shipping out for testing right now. Nevertheless, it's exciting to see what Intel's got cooking up behind-the-scenes to take on AMD Ryzen 5000.
