Intel said this week that it’s closing the book on its 11th-gen Core chips, code-named “Rocket Lake.” The company issued an end-of life notice that covers the entire Rocket Lake chip lineup as well as its supporting chipsets.
Intel said that it will accept orders for the chips up until August 25, shipping them through February 2024, so vendors and retailers will have a while to stock up if desired. The end-of -life notice for the Rocket Lake family as well as the supporting chipsets was noticed by Tom’s Hardware.
In reality, though, the Rocket Lake architecture won’t be particularly missed. As our original review of Rocket Lake pointed out, Intel’s 11th-gen desktop processor was the last vestige of Intel’s 14nm manufacturing process, which at that time had endured seven whole years of Intel designs. Intel’s 11th-gen mobile processors, however, had since migrated to Intel’s 10nm process technology. Intel had migrated the Core i9-11900K to the new Cypress Cove CPU architecture, but had ended up sacrificing some of the CPU cores in the process.
Perhaps its greatest sin, though, was in power consumption. According to our tests, the flagship Rocket Lake chip consumed a whopping 68 percent more power, under load, then the Ryzen 9 5900X, its closest competitor. Though energy prices might not have been then what they are now, that’s still a lot of juice.
In any case, if you’re still desperate for an Intel Core chip from yesteryear, get your orders in soon. If you’re looking for something much more potent, however, be sure to check out our roundups of the best CPUs for gaming. The beastly new Core i9-13900K absolutely trounces the 11900K in every possible way.
Author: Mark Hachman, Senior Editor
As PCWorld's senior editor, Mark focuses on Microsoft news and chip technology, among other beats. He has formerly written for PCMag, BYTE, Slashdot, eWEEK, and ReadWrite.