UNPACKING INTEL’S ROCKET LAKE & BEYOND
After gazing into broad wells, we’ve scoured the skies, poked at the kabies (whatever those are), drunk plenty of coffee – in two flavours – then returned to our celestial beginnings with comets. And then there were rockets. If that’s as clear as mud, we’re talking about the past seven generations of Intel desktop processors, all of which have one thing in common: They’re manufactured using a variant of Intel’s 14nm process technology.
Granted, today’s 11th-gen CPUs, aka Rocket Lake, have about as much in common with the 14nm lithography of Broadwell and Skylake as the latest SpaceX vehicles have in common with the space shuttle, but that’s a long time for a company that used to pride itself on alternating between new architectures and die shrinks every year. So, we’re peeling back the heat spreader and digging into the underlying architecture to find out what makes Rocket Lake tick. Or is it tock?
Intel isn’t done yet, either, and much as Broadwell for desktops was quickly kicked under the rug to make way for Skylake in 2015, there are promising future CPUs coming down the Intel pipeline. We’ll discuss what we know of Alder Lake and the upcoming 12th-gen CPUs, and even look at what lies ahead. So, latch your helmet, strap in, and let’s shoot for the moon. JARRED WALTON
Backporting Rocket Lake
To understand Rocket Lake, we need to go back to Ice Lake, Intel’s 10th-gen mobile-only processors officially launched in late 2019. After an aborted launch of the first-generation 10nm Cannon Lake CPUs in 2018 (no, we don’t really count the Core i3-8121U), Intel went back to the drawing board to refine its already-two-years-delayed 10nm process. The result was a reasonably potent architecture, tied to a 10nm
