An alleged Intel marketing slide highlighting the gaming performance advances of the company's upcoming Core i9-11900K "Rocket Lake" processor was leaked to the web. The slide compares the i9-11900K to the previous generation i9-10900K "Comet Lake-S," showing that despite two fewer CPU cores, the new chip is able to post double-digit percent gaming performance gains. At 1080p resolution, which is relevant to CPU testing as it highlights bottlenecks at the CPU-level, the i9-11900K is claimed to gain over 13% in frame-rates with "Total War: Three Kingdoms," and a significant 14% with Microsoft Flight Simulator. "Gears 5" shows a 9% performance gain, while GRID 2019 is 8% faster.

The Core i9-11900K owes its gaming performance gains to the IPC increase (single-thread performance increase) from the new "Cypress Cove" CPU cores. The "Rocket Lake-S" silicon features up to 8 "Cypress Cove" cores, which are believed to be a back-port of the "Willow Cove" core to the 14 nm silicon fabrication node, albeit with modifications, such as lower L2 cache sizes. Intel is looking to restore PC gaming performance leadership with the 11th Gen Core desktop processor series. The chips are expected to launch later this month.