Intel’s next-gen Rocket Lake CPUs could be here sooner than you think

500-series motherboards for Intel’s next-gen Rocket Lake processors could be revealed early in January 2021 – and there’s a possibility that the 11th-gen desktop CPUs themselves might emerge not too long after that in February.

The latest speculation holds that Intel Z590, B560 and H510 motherboards could be revealed on January 11 – and might even go on sale then. As spotted by @9550pro on Twitter, this is according to a report from a Chinese tech site, Weixin, not a source we are familiar with – so take this with a bigger than usual helping of condiments.

intel 500-series motherboards released on January 11?https://t.co/oNnOtbj3a2 pic.twitter.com/luemtT81slDecember 16, 2020

That date is only just over a few weeks away, so theoretically we could see these motherboards very soon. As to whether they’ll go on sale before Rocket Lake CPUs, that seems unlikely – and this will surely be an unveiling, if indeed this rumor comes to fruition. Although you never know…

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The really interesting bit here is the possibility highlighted that Rocket Lake processors might actually be out in late February, which is slightly earlier than the rumor mill has previously insisted – with a March launch being the most common chatter on the grapevine of late (although even this report also states it could be early March).

Intel’s counterpunch

Still, it’s a glimmer of hope that we could be seeing 11th-gen models from Intel the month after next, and certainly the sooner these are out to defend against AMD’s excellent new Ryzen 5000 desktop chips, the better for Intel. We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again – Intel can’t afford to hang around with these CPUs (or suffer the apparent delay that Comet Lake did earlier this year).

What’s certainly feasible is that both 500-series motherboards and Rocket Lake processors are unveiled in January, so we could know a lot more about the latter chips at that point – and then they may go on sale in late February or March.

The latest buzz about the flagship Core i9-11900K points to this 8-core processor being able to boost up to 5.3GHz, which isn’t quite as high as previous rumors suggested (earlier speculation hinted at reaching 5.4GHz or even 5.5GHz).