Intel Rocket Lake CPU details leak – A Comet Lake Refresh is coming?

Intel has big plans for its next-generation of Core processors, desktop-grade processors which will deliver the company’s first true architectural leap since Skylake. This new series of processors is due to offer users increased performance per clock and what could be a transformative leap in single-threaded performance. 

Videocardz has leaked a slide which details Intel’s upcoming Rocket Lake processors, revealing not just the company’s planned Rocket Lake core/thread counts but also the company’s plans to release a “Comet Lake-S Refresh” for i3 and below processors. If this slide is legitimate, Rocket Lake is an architecture that’s only for high-end users. 

Several older rumour sources have already claimed that Rocket Lake will deliver desktop users up to eight cores and sixteen threads, which is two cores and four-threads fewer than today’s Comet Lake processors. To counter this reduction in core count, Intel will be relying on increased single-threaded performance to deliver a generational leap in system performance, boosting overall system performance through single-threaded performance gains. 

Intel’s Skylake series of desktop processors released in 2015, with Kaby Lake, Coffee Lake, Coffee Lake-R (Refresh) and now Comet Lake series processors utilising the same baseline CPU architecture. With Rocket Lake, Intel has the opportunity to showcase the power of an entirely new CPU architecture, and after five years of waiting, the CPU market needs to see a huge performance leap. 

Strangely, Intel’s i7-grade Rocket Lake processors have been listed as offering eight cores and twelve threads. This means one of three things; that Intel will start using uneven Hyperthreading configurations, that the CPU as only six cores (the slide has a typo), or the processor will feature eight cores and sixteen threads (like the i9) and differentiate itself from the i9 lineup with lower clock speeds or other downgrades. 

With the processor being listed with “16M” of what appears to be cache, it is probable that Intel plans to over uneven hyperthreading, which is a first for the company. Right now, a similar feature is available with Comet Lake, though consumers have little reason to disable hyperthreading on any their Comet Lake CPU cores.  

Another factor that’s worth noting is that the slide below details vPro series processors, which could have different configurations to non-vPro processors, though this is unlikely.