Intel touts faster PCIe 4.0 storage performance on its upcoming Rocket Lake-S against Ryzen

Ryan Shrout, who is the Chief Performance Strategist at Intel, has posted on Twitter a performance comparison between Intel's upcoming Rocket Lake-S flagship desktop part, the Core i9-11900K, and AMD's 16-core Zen 3-based counterpart, the Ryzen 9 5950X.

Intel says that its internal comparison test shows the Core i9-11900K platform is 11% faster than the 5950X in PCMark 10's Quick System Drive Benchmark. According to the UL Benchmarks website, "The Quick System Drive Benchmark is a shorter test with a smaller set of less demanding real-world traces that is designed for smaller system drives that are unable to run the Full System Drive benchmark." So, it is possible that the test might be favoring Intel's higher turbo boost clock in short bursts.

The testing was conducted on Samsung's 980 PRO PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD. Intel will be debuting fourth-gen PCIe support on the CPU side with its upcoming Rocket Lake lineup and is hinting that it has managed to one-up AMD in this department despite being late to the party.

To ensure that it was a direct CPU comparison, a PCIe x16 riser card was used to attach the 980 PRO SSDs on both the Intel and AMD systems, although the model of the riser card hasn't been disclosed.

More details about the test can be found here.

Back at CES this year, Intel said that its Core i9-11900K is a faster gaming CPU than AMD's 12 core Ryzen 9 5900X, and today Ryan Shrout has followed it up with a PCIe 4.0 storage benchmark. Essentially, Intel appears to be trying to drive home the point that its upcoming Rocket Lake-S lineup is no fluff and is a genuine competitor to AMD's Ryzen, even capable of outdoing it.