A new member of the Rocket Lake family has been spotted on Geekbench, this time an ultra-low powered variant called the Core i9-11900T. With 8 cores and a 35W TDP, this chip is the most power-efficient Rocket Lake SKU to date. But with performance that might surprise you. As these are unverified results, best to take the data with a pinch of salt.

From what we can tell on Geekbench’s spec sheet, the Core i9-11900T features a very low 1.51 GHz base frequency but maintains a surprisingly high 4.9 GHz maximum boost frequency. While 35W may not sound like a lot of power, it seems that Rocket Lake’s cores are power efficient enough to run 1 or maybe 2 cores at a boost frequency typically found on higher wattage SKUs.

Looking at the results, the 11900T managed a score of 1717 points in the single-threaded test and 8349 points in the multi-threaded score. The single-threaded score, in particular, is impressive. For comparison, the 11900T stomps on the — soon to be — previous gen, Core i9-10900K (with a 1402 score) by a whopping 20%. 

Switching over to Intel’s main competitor, AMD, the Ryzen 7 5800X managed to get very close to the 11900T, with the AMD chip being just 2.5% slower and a score of 1674 points.

However, in multi-threaded tests, the 11900T’s 35W TDP really hampers performance. Comparing Intel’s Core i7-10700K from last-gen (not to mention the 10900K); the 10700K managed to be 7% faster than the 11900T. Then compared to the Ryzen 7 5800X, the lead stretches to a 22% difference in performance.

Overall, the Core i9-11900T is an impressive chip, even constrained to just 35W, it can outpace the best Comet Lake-S chips in the single-threaded department and get close to Comet Lake-S’ best 8 core CPU, the 10700K in multi-threaded performance.

This will really help expand the chip’s capabilities for users that require low powered CPUs. Typically with lower wattage chips like this, you expect major performance penalties. But if these performance numbers are true, then the i9-11900T could legitimately make a nice gaming CPU for ultra-compact/portable gaming systems with its excellent single-threaded numbers.

Hopefully, this kind of performance will be the same once the chip goes live and then we can benchmark the chip for ourselves. We still don’t know when the 11900T will be released, usually, Intel delays the launch of its ultra low powered SKUs until well after the launch of its vanilla and overclockable CPUs.