Rumor mill: New retail packaging for Intel's 11th-gen Rocket Lake CPUs has been spotted in the wild and stands out from previous iterations. The hard plastic boxes have an odd shape that will stand out on shelves, which Intel likely hopes will increase hype around a generation of chips they need to be successful.

Intel Rocket Lake CPUs are slated to launch next month. A new leak from VideoCardz has revealed the packing we can expect to come with the top-of-the-line Core i9 chips. Based on the leaked images, the new packaging is made entirely, or at least largely, of hard plastic with opaque deep Intel blue on the front and back faces and translucent baby blue windows on the sides. The box looks like four trapezoids stacked front-to-back to give a look that should stand out from the pack.

Intel's 10th gen packaging featured a small acrylic window and harkened back to the rectangular box design of 8th gen and earlier. This new box is more in line with the stand-out-in-a-crowd attitude that fed the design of the i9-9900k two years ago.

According to the leak, apparently the i9-11900KF will be given the usual cube-shaped treatment, so the hard plastic box that will invariably serve as wall-hangings for many tech youtubers will be restricted to only the most enthusiast buyers.

Rocket Lake will be yet another release on the 14nm process node, backported from the new Sunny Cove architecture, which means it will see a number of improvements and up to 5.3GHz peak boost. That said, the core counts on these cards look to trail behind AMD's current offering and Intel will need Rocket Lake to be a success as they work to fix their process node issues.

This new packaging will either celebrate a speedy new chip or try to gin up some interest (remember the Marvel-themed Intel packaging?) in a company under duress.