The intel i7-11700K could perform similarly to the current flagships, or if Intel refines it ahead of release, it could perform better. In general, we don’t condone evaluating processors ahead of the embargo, as it’s not fair on other publications, but when it’s for vengeance, it’s pretty funny. In fact, what some of these numbers indicate, especially the power draw and temperature tests, is that his engineering sample is only partially showing what the final CPU will offer.
Intel closed a store in Romania four years ago. They’ve continued to sell their processors there without a local office, but their media support has been woeful, says lab501, a local tech publication. Of the 21 intel chips reviewed by lab501 after they were left in the lurch, 5 came from the UK office of Intel (all coming after the analysis ban was lifted), 12 came from their industry friends, one they bought themselves, and 3 more came from unknown sources in the industry.
Those three chips, 8700K, 8600K, and 10980XE, have caused Intel some trouble. When lab501 stopped receiving research samples from intel, the review embargoes stopped being beholden to them. Once their industry friends provided the chips they tested, they appreciated the embargo for the sake of their friends. But when the chips arrived without approval from Intel, they released their reviews ahead of time, much to the intel’s chagrin.
Now, before the processor could be publicly disclosed, lab501 tested a 11700K engineering sample. Admittedly, Intel doesn’t have anything left to say. It is commonly known that the processor will have 8 cores and 16 threads, will use a Cypress Cove architecture and will have an approximately 5 GHz boost clock. But there has been fiery controversy around the efficiency of the processor.
On the one side, it has the same core/thread configuration and identical clocks as the previous 10700K. On the other hand, it could have an advantage over its predecessor with an IPC (instruction per clock), but that could come at the cost of power efficiency. It was noticed in lab501’s research that, on average, everything balanced out approximately as you would expect.
A precursor to the test results: engineering samples and final release samples differ physically in several ways, so these results are not final output indicative. Future microcode revisions and BIOS updates will also alter performance.
The 11700K performed better than its predecessor, but worse than the 10-core 10900K, in synthetic multi-core testing. It typically outperformed all previous Intel processors in synthetic single-core testing to nearly equal the newest AMD processors.
It performed similarly in games to other flagship processors, such as the 10900K and 5950X. Its performance was somewhat different from those of other processors-often, it had unusually high or low minimum framerates, and it struggled unexpectedly in some games. Perhaps because this is again, an engineering sample explained. Overall, it wasn’t better or worse, though.
To sum up, the 11700K could perform similarly to the current flagships, or if Intel refines it ahead of release, it could perform better… Not an exciting conclusion, I’ll admit, but what were you expecting?