While there are some significant power improvements, the older process means that Intel can only fit eight cores on its flagship Core i9-11900K.

To put that in perspective that looks really bad compared to the 12-core AMD Ryzen 9 5900X or even the last-gen 10-core i9-10900K.

Still Intel claims the new chips have massive improvements to efficiency that should keep the Rocket Lake-S parts competitive -- especially in gaming.

Rocket Lake-S CPUs launch March 30. The $539 Core i9-11900K has 8 cores and 16 threads with a single-core Thermal Velocity boost of 5.3GHz and 4.8GHz all-core boost. The slightly more affordable $399 i7-11700K boosts up to 5GHz, and the i5-11600K is $262 with 6 cores at a 4.9GHz boost.

While the lack of cores is going to hurt Rocket Lake-S CPUs in multi-threaded applications, Intel claims that its 19 percent improvement to instructions per clock (IPC) will make up much of the difference.

The UHD graphics processor in the CPUs deliver 50 per cent better performance than last generation.

These high-clocked parts with improved performance should keep up and even exceed AMD's Zen 3 chips in certain games, like Microsoft's Flight Simulator - at least if you believe Chipzilla.