INTEL CORE I9-11900K - A disappointing finale for 14nm

Intel’s position as the leading chip manufacturer had relied on a clearly defined tick-tock model, where every microarchitecture change (tock) was followed by a die shrink of the process technology (tick). This has worked for them reliably all the way from 65nm to 14nm. Then came 10nm, and Intel just could not find a way to scale its 10nm node effectively – forcing them to go back to 14nm while focusing on architectural upgrades so as to be able to deliver performance gains with every new launch (since the 5th Gen Broadwell way back in 2014)

- Aaron Yip

AT A GLANCE

BASE CLOCK 3.5GHz

BOOST CLOCK 5.3GHz

CORES 8 (16 Threads)

TDP 125 W

This brings us to their latest flagship processor, the head of its 11th Gen Rocket Lake and also the last to be based on the 14nm design – the Core i9-11900K desktop processor that’s targeted at PC enthusiasts and gamers. While `the 11th Gen Rocket Lake is still built on 14nm, it uses the Cypress Cove microarchitecture that is actually a version of the 10nm Sunny Cove microarchitecture (aka Ice Lake) backported to Intel’s 14nm process node. It’s as unique as Intel processors come, no thanks to constraints from yield problems with the Ice Lake design. Because of this, the Core i9-11900K has fewer cores than its predecessor as Intel had to strike off two cores – there’s just not enough room on the die to accommodate all of the fatter Cypress Cove cores. This means that the i9-11900K has eight cores and 16 threads, versus the 10 cores and 20 threads i9-10900K that we got last year.

But there are notable upgrades that the new processor brings to the table – such as more powerful integrated graphics. The i911900K comes with an Iris Xe UHD Graphics 750 silicon, which, like the Sunny Cove cores, had to be ported from 10nm to fit the 14nm node. In theory, the Iris Xe offers double the improvements over the antiquated UHD Graphics 630.