Next Tuesday, Intel will introduce Rocket Lake processors, or 11th generation Core CPUs for desktop computers. Since 2015, the processor designer has been stuck with the Skylake architecture for six years. While Intel tried to speed up the problematic 10nm process, rival AMD saw a crazy revival of Zen architecture, causing Intel to lose its long-established desktop performance crown. Now that Intel has finally brought a new architecture to the desktop in 2021, we’re looking at how things can go wrong and how Intel wants to prevent that in the future.
Ticks en tocks
Before the chaos that erupted after 2015, Intel had stuck to the annual rhythm of processor launches. This scheme was known as the tick-tock principle, where A. Ticks Commissioning of a new production process and Tock Introducing a new architecture. Every year a new generation of chips was introduced, which was alternately marked or tok. In practice, the strict twelve-month interval has been skewed more than once, but in general, the tick-tock model has been the basis of Intel’s processor offering for many years.
