Intel takes on Ryzen with Rocket Lake S and the Core i9-11900K

Intel debuted its next-generation 11th-gen “Rocket Lake S” desktop Core chips at CES 2021, boasting that its flagship Core i9-11900K processor offers a 19 percent performance improvement over the prior generation, and with gaming performance that rivals AMD’s most powerful Ryzen chip.

Intel’s Core i9-11900K does take a step back: Intel’s  offered 10 cores and 20 threads. The new i9-11900K wields just 8 cores and 16 threads instead, at turbo speeds up to 5.3 GHz (single core) and a slower 4.8GHz (all cores) than the i9-10900K offered. It’s also a 14-nanometer chip. But there are subtle, significant improvements, too: a new, wider, 8-lane DMI interface between the processor and chipset, and an increased 20 lanes of PCIe 4.0 off the CPU for GPUs