Intel’s Core i7-11700KF, which should be part of the next-gen

Rocket Lake

family of desktop chips scheduled to launch in early 2021, has been spotted in a game benchmark, with the specs seemingly being not that different to the flagship Core i9-11900K – at least not on the face of it.

Assuming it’s genuine (as ever), the Ashes of the Singularity benchmark shows the Core i7-11700KF – theoretically, a version of the 11700K CPU with no integrated graphics (which is what the ‘F’ denotes) – recording a score of 11,300 at 1440p (‘crazy’ preset), paired with an

Nvidia RTX 3080

graphics card.

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Ashes of the Singularity is not a particularly well-regarded benchmark – though it’s often seen as a common source of early hardware leaks such as this – and making comparisons with it is considered pretty shaky ground. So we wouldn’t read much into the actual result, but the 11700KF equals the

Ryzen 5600X

with an identical score.

At any rate, what’s of real interest here is the specs, which show that the Core i7-11700KF is an 8-core (16-thread) chip, just like the purported flagship 11900K, and it’ll have a base clock of 3.6GHz – which is actually higher than the 3.5GHz that speculation pegs the 11900K as having.

If you think that’s an eye-opener, it’s the same story with Comet Lake – the 10700K runs 100MHz faster than the 10900K. However, the Comet Lake flagship offers two more cores, which isn’t the case with Rocket Lake, as both chips here are 8-core.

Power numbers

Base TDP is the same too, at 125W for the 11700KF and 11900K, although as

Wccftech

notes, the ‘PL2’ spec (max power usage when boosting) for the latter flagship is rumored to push up to 250W, whereas the Core i7-10700KF will have a lower ceiling at around 225W to 230W.

Meaning that the 11900K will have more room to up those boost speeds considerably, as clearly Intel will need to differentiate their performance in some clear way. Going by what we’ve heard on the rumor mill, the 11700K might boost to 5GHz, with the

11900K possibly going up to 5.3GHz

(even higher boost speeds than that have

been floated in previous leaks

, too, for the flagship).

This is all just grapevine chatter and theorizing right now, of course, but we hopefully shouldn’t have long to wait before Intel reveals its Rocket Lake desktop CPUs – they are

expected to launch in March

, or perhaps

even sooner if we’re lucky

.

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