Intel Core i5 11600K + Core i9 11900K Linux Performance Across ~400 Benchmarks

Next up is looking at the performance of the Core i5/i9 Rocket Lake processors in more than 300 benchmarks looking at the real-world CPU/system performance under Ubuntu Linux.

First up was the WireGuard benchmark for this secure VPN tunnel solution. Going from Comet Lake to Rocket Lake was a big help with much better performance albeit even the Core i9 11900K came up short of the fastest Ryzen 5000 series processors.

One of the workloads where Rocket Lake was enough to outperform the Ryzen 5000 series line-up was with the QuantLib benchmark. QuantLib is the open-source library focused on quantitative finance for modeling / trading / risk management. Both Rocket Lake processors in this single-threaded test were able to come out ahead of the current Zen 3 processors.

But on a performance-per-Watt basis for this test, Rocket Lake falls behind Comet Lake. Unfortunately no Zen 3 power comparison points at the CPU package level since the AMD_Energy driver doesn't work currently for Zen 3 desktop (non-EPYC) processors.

Another benchmark where Rocket Lake was performing very well was with Etcpak, the ETC/S3 texture compressor solution. Comet Lake was able to run up with Zen 3 for this texture compression test while Rocket Lake lifted off to deliver much better performance.

Meanwhile across the hundreds of benchmarks it wasn't uncommon to find the Core i9 10900K outperforming the Core i9 11900K in the multi-threaded tests. With the i9-10900K being 10c/20t but the i9-11900K being stuck at 8 cores / 16 threads, in some cases Rocket Lake does fall behind Comet Lake.

For most of the multi-threaded benchmarks, at best the Rocket Lake parts were competing with the Ryzen 5 5600X and Ryzen 7 5800X.