Intel Reveals 11th Generation Rocket Lake CPUs, Out In 2021

On the eve of AMD revealing its next-generation Zen 3 CPUs, Intel has officially announced its new desktop CPUs that will be coming to market in early 2021.

The 11th generation chips, dubbed Rocket Lake, aren't being revealed in detail just yet, with Intel saying more specifications on the new CPUs will be coming soon. In the announcement the company does, however, point to its success with its current generation of CPUs, despite still being built on a 14nm process for desktop chips.

It's unclear if Intel is finally moving to 10nm for desktop with Rocket Lake and what this might entail for the company's single-core performance dominance, but the announcement does confirm that the new CPUs will finally add support for PCIe 4.0. This means you'll be able to run new PCIe 4.0 expansion cards and SSDs on Intel boards soon, after AMD added support for it with its current generation Ryzen 3000 CPUs.

AMD is announcing its new Zen 3 CPUs during a livestream tomorrow, with desktop versions of the Ryzen 4000 series expected to be revealed. AMD has come back in the CPU market in a big way, with a focus on affordable multi-core processors that are exceptional for content creation and only slightly behind Intel on single-core performance for games.