Intel Rolls Out 10nm Pentium/Celeron CPUs, Previews Rocket Lake

Intel's virtual CES press conference took place today. Here are the highlights from 10nm Pentium Silver and Celeron processors to a preview of Rocket Lake and forthcoming 11th Gen Core H processors.

Intel at the event talked up 10nm processors for low-end devices with their new Pentium Silver and Celeron processors. The entry-level hardware will be catering to the educational market and talks "up to to 144% better Chromebook performance" or "create your STEM project up to 78% faster."

For business customers, Intel is introducing 11th Gen Intel Core vPro with hardware-based security measures added.

Meanwhile Intel 11th Gen Core H processors are coming to market in various designs for desktop class performance in the mobile space. The new H-series Tiger Lake (H35) will feature up to 5GHz single threaded performance at 35 Watts, DDR4/LPDDR4x, WiFi 6 / 6E, Thunderbolt 4, PCIe Gen 4, and Resizable BAR support. Over 10th Gen H, Intel talks up to ~15% better single-threaded performance, greater than 40% multi-threaded CPU performance improvement. The Tiger Lake H35 is still a 4 core / 8 thread design. With Intel's Resizable BAR support they talked up that they partnered closely with NVIDIA for their support, which has become popular since AMD introduced it as "Smart Access Memory" with their Radeon RX 6000 series graphics cards in conjunction with Zen 3 systems. For H35, Intel is only comparing the single-threaded performance against AMD's current 4800HS/4900H offerings and not multi-threaded where AMD is still carrying a hefty lead on core/thread counts.

Intel is also teasing Rocket Lake S that is coming to market this year. For Rocket Lake S they are reporting up to a 19% IPC improvement, up to 50% better integrated graphics support (thanks to finaly moving past Gen9 for desktop graphics, onto Gen12!), and Intel Deep Learning Boost support. Rocket Lake S is still on track for shipping in Q1.

Intel previewed the Core i9 11900K, which will be 8 cores / 16 threads with a 4.8GHz all-core turbo frequency and 5.3GHz single-core turbo frequency. The i9-11900K will support DDR4-3200, support Intel UHD Graphics Gen12 with AV1 decode, new overclocking capabilities, 20 lanes of PCI Express 4.0, and come with the new Intel 500 series chipsets while being backwards compatible with existing 400 series chipsets.

Intel's Core i9 11900K preview has it performing 2~8% faster than the Ryzen 9 5900X for gaming.

Intel at its CES 2021 keynote also demonstrated Alder lake that will be coming to market in H2'2021 and is their "most power-scalable SoC" with its combination of big and small cores.