Consumer Electronics Show 2021 brought along with it many spectacles and baffling products in the market. Intel also unveiled its most anticipated and upcoming 11th generation Rocket Lake-S processor during the event. Though Intel only spoke about the Core i9-11900K, we have seen leaked price lists confirming the names of other Rocket Lake-S CPUs as well.
While the complete specifications of the Rocket Lake-S family are still under wraps, we are now getting to know that Intel’s 11th generation desktop chips will sport UHD Graphics 7xx series GPUs. This information comes via known leaker @KOMAHCI_ENSAKA on Twitter, who seems to have discovered driver entries for four UHD Graphics GPUs.
Rocket Lake-S is based on the 14 nm Cypress Cove architecture, which is a combination of Ice Lake CPU cores and a Tiger Lake Xe iGPU.
We’ve known for some time that Rocket Lake-S will not only top-out at eight cores and 16 threads in the Core i9-11900K but also will feature only 32 execution units (EUs) of Intel Xe graphics.
According to leaker Komachi, the 32 EUs part will be called the UHD Graphics 750 and the 24 EUs variant will be known as UHD Graphics 730. But it’s not even confirmed that there would be an SKU with less than 24 EUs.
Benefits of UHD Graphics
Early benchmark results indicate that the 32 EU UHD Graphics 730 should perform about 10% faster compared to a 32 EU-Ice Lake. The presence of 32 EUs in Rocket Lake-S will not be a problem for most of the buyers, as most of the buyers invest in a discrete GPU solution. Besides, with Intel going back to using SVID VRMs and large CPU cores, the lower EU count is probably justified.
Intel has disabled some shading units on the UHD Graphics 730 to reach the product’s target shader count.
It features 192 shading units, 48 texture mapping units, and 24 ROPs. The GPU is operating at a frequency of 300 MHz, which can be boosted up to 900 MHz.
Its power draw is rated at 15 W maximum. UHD Graphics 730 is connected to the rest of the system using a PCI-Express 3.0 x1 interface.
Having just 32 EUs in Rocket Lake-S may not be really a concern for potential buyers as a large majority of the target demographic would anyways invest in a discrete GPU solution. Besides, with Intel going back to using SVID VRMs and large CPU cores, the lower EU count is probably justified.
Intel is slowly losing its desktop-CPU market share to its rival AMD. It remains to be seen as to how the new CPU from intel will perform in the market.
