Intel’s 11th-Gen Rocket Lake Desktop CPU Supports PCIE 4.0 Confirms New Leaked Benchmark

Intel is showing some progress in regard to the adoption of PCIe 4.0. The upcoming Intel Rocket Lake-S desktop-grade CPUs will have native support for the PCIe Gen 4.0 indicates a new leaked benchmark. Support for the next generation of PCI Express will effectively double the bandwidth available for communication between the various hardware components inside the computer. However, there appear to be a few differences in the way AMD and Intel have approached PCIe 4.0 implementation.

Intel’s 11th Generation of CPUs will be the first to support the PCIe Gen 4.0 standard. The same was confirmed in a leaked SiSoftware benchmark result that revealed a Rocket Lake-S desktop-grade Intel CPU running with a PCIe Gen 4 NVMe SSD. Incidentally, the Intel Rocket Lake lineup is reportedly the last generation of processors to be manufactured on the archaic 14nm Fabrication Node.

Intel Finally Catches Up To AMD With Regards To Supporting PCIe 4.0:

Intel Rocket Lake CPUs is the 11^th Generation of Intel CPUs which will be packing a brand-new core architecture but they will be based on a 14nm process node. Intel is expected to launch these CPUs by the end of this year, but it is likely that they could be released early next year during CES 2021. These CPUs will be slotted inside LGA 1200 socket which is currently featured on the Z490 motherboards. Several Intel motherboard partners recently confirmed the support for Intel’s Comet Lake-S CPUs with a simple BIOS update.

Intel RocketLake S UDIMM 4L ERB

PCIe SSD (1TB, PCIe4x4/NVMe, SED) (NTFS, 4kB)https://t.co/WeWTisoi4m

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— APISAK (@TUM_APISAK) July 29, 2020

A newly leaked SiSoftware benchmark that contains the latest Rocket Lake Desktop CPU entry reveals, alongside several other interesting details, the ability to work with hardware that is PCIe 4.0 certified. The benchmark result revealed an unidentified Intel Rocket Lake Desktop CPU working with an unnamed PCI-Express 4.0 NVMe SSD with 1 TB of capacity and running in PCIe 4×4 mode. The device was able to reach a bandwidth of up to 1.2 GB/s and I/O speeds of 45,000 IOPS.

This effectively confirms that Rocket Lake-S Desktop CPUs will be the first platform on Intel’s side to offer PCIe Gen 4.0 support. It is, however, important to note that Intel is over a year late. AMD’s ZEN 2 Ryzen CPUs have been able to support PCIe Gen 4.0 since last year on the X570 platform. PCIe gen 4.0 has been rather limited in Intel’s products. The support began only with 10^th-Gen Core “Ice Lake-U” and “Ice Lake-Y” mobile processors.

It is not clear which Intel Rocket Lake-S CPU was working with a PCIe 4.0 hardware. However, the database lists it packs a 32 EU Gen 12 ‘Xe’ GPU. Simple math indicates this means the unidentified Xe GPU packs 256 Cores. The GPU is clocked at 1150 MHz. This appears to be a Standard Clock and is quite close to the 1300 MHz clocks observed on the Tiger Lake CPUs for laptops with integrated graphics.

Intel’s Implementation Of PCIe 4.0 On Z490 Is Different From AMD’s Method On X570?

The Intel Rocket Lake desktop CPUs will optimally work with the Intel 500-series chipset platform revealed a leaked roadmap. However, the 500-series chipset itself will still be PCI-Express gen 3.0 based, putting out only gen 3.0 downstream PCIe lanes.

On the other hand, the AMD X570 chipset puts out gen 4.0 downstream general-purpose lanes and uses a PCI-Express 4.0 x4 pipe to the CPU. Experts argue that the x8 implementation by Intel on the 500-series chipset is essentially of the same bandwidth as the x4 PCIe 4.0 lanes on AMD’s X570 chipset. This indicates Intel is still only reaching parity with AMD, and that too a year late.