Intel has recently published a «product change notification» which indicates that it has been started «an interrupt program» for its Rocket Lake CPU line, its 11th generation Intel Core. That program started on February 6th, so the end of life clock is already ticking.
The Rocket Lake generation launched in March 2021 and was Intel's latest 14nm product. Intel replaced it with Alder Lake just seven seven months later as they finally moved to Intel 7 (formerly known as 10nm) for their desktop CPUs.
Rocket Lake ends its short, short life
Intel's guidelines indicate that the retirement program has already begun. But CPUs won't go away immediately. Companies still have until August 25 to submit their final orders to Intel. That includes boxed, DIY, and bulk orders that will not be non-refundable. The last shipping date for any Rocket Lake CPU is February 24, 2024. Intel will also stop manufacturing the 400 and 500 series chipsets in the same period, according to Tom's Hardware.
Rocket Lake marked the company's first pre-owned architecture in a long time. It differed from Skylake, Kaby Lake, Coffee Lake, Whiskey Lake, and Comet Lake in that it used Cypress Cove architecture, but it was based on the 10nm Ice Lake mobile architecture with Sunny Cove, which was moved to 14nm for Rocket Lake. This allowed Intel to achieve the higher clock frequencies it needed to compete with AMD.
Despite its high clock speeds, AMD was already on 7nm nodes via TSMC and had a 12 core 24 thread CPU on the Ryzen 9 5900X. The Core i9-11900K's high clock speeds and single-threaded performance allowed it to compete with AMD in games. But in multithreaded tests it could not compete with the Ryzen 9.
When Rocket Lake arrived, AMD firmly controlled the enthusiast user market. Their Alder and Raptor Lake architectures have been able to change the landscape. Intel wants to move from Intel 7 to Intel 4 for Meteor Lake, scheduled for 2023. With all this, Rocket Lake was a very minor part of Intel's history, which was quickly overtaken by AMD's high-end CPUs, and by Alder. Lake in just over half a year.
