After two impressive reveals, AMD appears to have put itself into a commanding position both in the GPU market, and particularly the CPU market. With the reception to its Ryzen 5000 Series seeing many people seriously questioning whether Intel's upcoming 11th Generation Rocket Lake processors will be able to compete. However, the latest leak suggests that Intel may have gained more ground than expected.

The UserBenchmark information was discovered and shared on Twitter by TUM_APISAK, revealing a benchmark for an 8-core Intel Rocket Lake processor running with a maximum boost clock of 4.2 GHz. As the CPUs are still in development, this will be an early engineering sample, which may explain why the clock speeds are significantly below any of the final 10th Generation CPUs.

However, despite running at a slower boost clock the CPU in question scored brilliantly when compared to Intel's current top processors. In single-core tests it was 21% faster than the high-end i7-10700K, and 19% faster than the i9-10900K, the gaming champion until the Ryzen 5000 launches on November 5. In 8-core tests the new CPU was 7% faster than the i7-10700K, and 3.6% slower than the i9-10900K. Being an 8-core CPU, the benchmarked processor is almost certainly the updated version of one of the comparison CPUs, either an i7-11700K or i9-11900K, more likely the latter given the huge performance, though these names are not confirmed.

Given that the i7-10700K and i9-10900K have boost clocks of 5.1 GHz and 5.3 GHz respectively, the benchmarks suggest that Intel has made some surprisingly high gains in the number of instructions Rocket Lake can process per cycle. If the performance shown is repeated with the same clock speeds as the current i9-10900K it would equal a multi-core performance improvement of almost 20%. All of which suggests that despite being stuck with an older 14 nm fabrication process, Rocket Lake will have the performance to quickly regain the gaming performance crown from AMD.

Although the leaked information shows a strong performance increase, Intel's Rocket Lake is still unlikely to be able to get close to the AMD Ryzen 5000 Series in multi-core performance. The company will almost certainly need to focus its message on single-core gaming performance, the key advantage it has held against Ryzen, and one that appears to be maintained based on the leaks. The big multi-core improvements are expected to appear with the 12th Generation Alder Lake processors in late 2021, which will move to a more efficient 10 nm process.

The big question remaining in terms of performance is how significantly AMD's Smart Access Memory feature will boost PC builds which combine Ryzen 5000 and RX 6000 graphics cards, and whether the gains will be enough to sway gamers waiting for Rocket Lake.

Intel Rocket Lake CPUs are due to be launched in early 2021.