The Full Nerd ep. 172: Core i9-11900K review, Intel’s future, Nvidia adds ReBAR

In this episode of The Full Nerd, Gordon Ung, Brad Chacos, and Adam Patrick Murray dive deep into Intel’s new 11th-gen “Rocket Lake” Core processors and the company’s plans for the future.

The headline of Gordon’s Core i9-11900K review sums it up nicely: Intel’s 14nm farewell tour can’t end soon enough. Rocket Lake chips marry the company’s 10nm Ice Lake architecture to the 14nm process that Intel has stuck with for over half a decade. This slightly unnatural union results in the loss of two cores, leaving the 11900K with just 8 compared to its 10900K predecessor’s 10. This makes the 11th-gen chip’s performance a bit of a mixed bag versus AMD’s rival Ryzen 5000 processors, and even Intel’s own last-gen flagship, despite various speed and feature improvements.

Brad and Gordon debate whether the Core i9-11900K is worth the $540 Intel is asking for the processor, each bringing distinctive viewpoints to the table.

After that lengthy exchange, we quickly detail Intel’s future manufacturing plans—“tick-tock” is coming back and Intel will make x86 chips for other companies. Cure Keanu Reeves: Whoa. Finally, Brad talks about Nvidia adding the performance-boosting Resizable BAR feature to all GeForce RTX 30-series GPUs, and the tangled mess of hardware and software you’ll need to enable it.

You can witness it all in the video embedded above. You can also watch The Full Nerd episode 172 on YouTube (subscribe to the channel while you’re there!). Alternatively, you can listen to it on Spotify if you prefer the audio alone. 

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