German retailer MindFactory.de seems to have jumped the gun by offering Intel's unreleased Core i7 11700K almost a month before the new CPU is due to go on sale. That's assuming that the general rumours are true that Intel's Rocket Lake CPUs are expected to be available by the end of March.
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Maybe the fact that Intel already has stock out there could indicate that it's ready to go a bit sooner than we all thought.
The chip in question isn't the top of the line Core i9 11900K, which gets some natty packaging into the deal. No this is the slightly more modest 8-core, 16-thread Core i7 11700K chip. You know, the one that generally makes some sense financially. In fact, the Core i7 10700K and the Core i7 9700K that came before it were both the pick of the bunch for gamers for that generation, and we'd guess that it would be the same here.
Somewhat frustratingly, although you can apparently buy the chip, there are no details about the 11th-gen processor on the page other than the 5GHz clock speed that can be found in the product name. That's 100MHz slower than the existing 5.1GHz Core i7 10700K, although that's maybe just a placeholder at this point.
Fingers crossed the pricing is also a placeholder, because that though does seem a bit high as well. At €469 you're looking at around $569 (£400), which is much more than the current price of the 10700K, which costs $380 and can be picked up for way less than that right now if you shop around (it's down to $334 on Newegg for instance).
It's early days for sure, but interest is certainly growing in what will be Intel's first CPU family to natively support PCIe 4.0 SSDs and GPUs.
