Specs for the Intel Core i7-11700K and Core i9-11900K, the desktop Rocket Lake CPUs first announced at CES, have leaked, and while the Core i7-11700K has already disappointed some, the Core i9-11900K shows Intel's potential to compete with AMD.

First, the good news: the folks at Wccftech shared a huge amount of data across the entire Rocket Lake Core i7 and i9 CPU family, showing that the Core i9-11900K stands out from the pack. In particular, the 5.3GHz single-core Thermal Velocity Boost speed and 4.8GHz 8-core Turbo speed are worth getting excited about.

These speeds from Intel's 14nm process "should put incredible competitive pressure on AMD's Zen 3 lineup," according to its report. [Unfortunately, it's not all good news for Intel. Andreas Schilling of German tech site Hardware Luxx compared the leaked Core i7-11700K Cinebench R20 scores to current Ryzen processors.

As seen below, the Core i7-11700K's 600 score in the single-threaded test falls short of the Ryzen 7 5800X and Ryzen 9 5950X (622 and 633 respectively). And in the multi-threaded version, the Core i7-11700K scored 5749, below not only the 5800X and 5950X, but also the 10th generation Core i9-10900K.

Nevertheless, these early scores and numbers are only a preview, not a verdict; as Usman Pirzada of Wccftech points out, "the final variant could be better than this - but not worse."

However, Pirzada's post notes, "Based on leaked benchmarks, we expect the Core i7 family to perform slightly worse than AMD's Zen 3-based offerings, and in some cases equal."

In other words, Intel will catch up to AMD, but not leapfrog it.