Intel's upcoming Rocket Lake S CPUs should prove hotly competitive with AMD's Ryzen 5000-series CPUs, taking back the gaming performance crown whilst retaining strong multi-threaded performance at the top end. Some Geekbench scores for the top of the line Intel Core i7 11700K and Core i9 11900K suggest that they could exceed the Ryzen 9 5950X by around 11 percent in single core tasks, whilst retaining a similar performance to the 10900K in multi-threaded tests (despite having two cores less than that older CPU).
The Core i9 11900K will be an eight core, 16 thread CPU, and is based on a backported Ice Lake architecture called Willow Cove, that has been recrafted on the 14nm process. This means that it can't have as many cores as the 10th-series Comet Lake processors. That architecture brings some great efficiency improvements and there isn't any loss in clock speed either, with the 11900K able to hit 5.3GHz just like the 10900K. That has resulted in a strong single core improvement.
Where the 10900K manages around 1,400 points in GeekBench, the 11900K ups that considerably to 1,892 points, as per VideoCardz. In contrast, the Ryzen 9 5950X, the most powerful of AMD's Ryzen 5000 CPUs, manages just 1,682 points, falling far behind.
Where it catches up though, is in the multi-threaded testing. There the eight core 11900K only manages to match the 10900K with a score of 10,934, whereas the 5950X makes full use of its double core count for a massive 16,726 points.
This likely means that the 11900K will be able to retake the gaming crown in games that don't leverage more than eight cores (most of them) if it can maintain a high clock speed across all cores. In anything that makes use of the additional cores at AMD's disposal, though, the Ryzen 5000 CPUs should dominate.