MSI claims that Intel's 11th Generation Rocket Lake processors will launch in March | OC3D News (overclock3d.net)
 
Over on their South Korean Danwana forums, MSI has confirmed that Intel plans to release their 11th Generation "Rocket Lake" processors in "late March" and that MSI planned to add 11th Gen CPU support to all H410, B460 and Z490 motherboards. This information came via @harukaze5719 on Twitter, with Videocardz validating the report by asking for the news' source. The image below is a machine translation of what was said by MSI representatives, confirming Rocket Lake's release date. 

Intel's Rocket Lake architecture utilises a new core architecture called Cypress Cove, which is designed to boost Intel's single-threaded performance. With Rocket Lake, Intel hopes to retake single-threaded performance leadership, countering AMD's Ryzen 5000 series. That said, AMD will still have a core count advantage with their latest Ryzen processors, offering up to sixteen cores on their mainstream AM4 socket while Intel is expected to only offer up to eight cores with Rocket Lake. 

While Rocket Lake processors will be supported on today's 400-series LGA 1200 motherboards with the right BIOS updates, Intel will likely launch newer 500-series LGA-1200 motherboards in the near future to deliver drop-in support for their latest processors. 
 
Personally I don't understand this launch except as a possible last ditch attempt by Intel to beat AMD. Of course a few months later AMD will release new CPUs and motherboards. 
 

  

rjohnson11
 
Personally I don't understand this launch except as a possible last ditch attempt by Intel to beat AMD. Of course a few months later AMD will release new CPUs and motherboards. 

Intel CPUs still have their place. AMD has really been dropping the ball by not offering APUs. Ryzen is great performance, but has no integrated graphics. What if I'm building a server and not a gaming rig? AMD's APUs were great a few years ago, but now they're nowhere to be found. The 3200G and last-gen APUs aren't supported in the newest B550/A520 boards, only the 4000 series APUs, which from what I've seen are not sold at retail in the US. You have to either buy a pre-built PC that uses them, or import them from Asia.


These newest Intel CPUs will feature the new Intel Xe graphics, and I'm interested to see how well those perform. and I don't mean in gaming tasks, I mean in tasks like video transcoding using Intel Quick Sync. Hardware encoding is another area where AMD is lacking, or at least their offerings are just not as supported. Plex, Open Broadcaster Software, etc support both Intel QuickSync and Nvidia NVENC encoding, and nothing from the AMD side.
 
I have always been a huge fan of AMD CPUs, and when I was younger I always bought ATI Radeon cards, but these days I feel like an Intel/Nvidia rig is just so much more useful than an all-AMD build that I can't bring myself to build one, especially with the scarce availability and high prices of the latest AMD offerings.