Intel Details Rocket Lake S Processors, Linux Benchmarks To Come

The Core i5 11600K we are also testing as a 6 core / 12 thread processor with 3.9GHz base clock and turbo boost up to 4.9GHz or 4.6GHz all-core. The Core i5 11600K also carries a 125 Watt TDP, unlocked, UHD Graphics 750, and should retail for around $262.

While Rocket Lake S can work in select Intel 400 series chipset motherboards with a BIOS update, the Intel 500 series offers a lot more connectivity and more. There are also overclocking improvements albeit Intel's real-time tuning/overclocking features remain only available under Windows with no Linux announcements planned at this time. Throughout Intel's press briefing they were citing mostly gaming benchmarks. Of course, all under Windows. We'll have our Linux benchmarks when the review embargo lifts.

Going all the way back to May 2020 is when Intel first sent out their Rocket Lake Linux graphics driver patches built atop their existing Gen12 support. For about one year now we have seen Intel's open-source engineers getting the kernel and related components ready for Rocket Lake. Thus if you are running a modern Linux distribution, you should be in good shape for RKL-S support. Of course, when the review embargo lifts we can comment more on the Linux support and performance. But in any case as seen by all of the Linux Rocket Lake patches over the past year, you can expect Intel's stellar open-source support and timely hardware enablement to be in good shape once again for modern Linux distributions.