As spotted by Leakbench, Intel’s unreleased Core i7-11700K has been ripped through the Geekbench 5 benchmark tool, and the alleged performance gains over last-gen parts are nothing to scoff at. 

Single-core, the chip jots down a score of 1807 points, with a crypto score of 5423 points. Multi-core, it notes down 10,673 points. For comparison, currently, in our test suite, the AMD Ryzen 9 5950X tops the Geekbench 5 Single-core charts with a score of 1713 points, making Intel’s Rocket Lake chip about 5.5% faster in single-threaded applications.

But, the catch to note with these scores is that Geekbench 5 uses AVX-512, which makes Intel’s scores slightly inflated as only Rocket Lake supports it. Consequently, just because Intel’s chip performs 5.5% faster in GeekBench 5, that does not mean it will perform faster than AMD’s Zen 3 chips in real-world, single-threaded applications as there are no applications that use this yet — and this is likely to remain so for quite some time to come. 

In multithreaded loads, AMD naturally takes a significant lead with our testing noting down a score of 14,471 points for the 16-core 5950X compared to the 10,673 pts in this leaked benchmark for the i7-11700K — but again, the AVX discrepancy means that the real world performance delta between the two will be bigger.

Because of this AVX-512 discrepancy, it also remains to be seen whether Rocket Lake will catch up with AMD’s chips for IPC in real-world use cases.

The Intel Core i7-11700K is expected to feature 8 cores and 16 threads on a base frequency of 3.6 GHz and boosting to 4.8 GHz. But, still being a 14nm CPU, despite the new architecture, power consumption is expected to be up there, with a 125 PL1 profile and 250W PL2 rating. 

Official word is that Rocket Lake will come out in Q1 2021, though we don’t yet know exactly when.