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Intel's Rocket Lake CPUs are coming in 2021 with PCIe 4 support

While Arm DevSummit is happening and AMD is about to announce Zen 3, Intel announced that its Rocket Lake desktop CPUs are on track for the first quarter of next year, with PCIe 4 support.

Right now, Arm's DevSummit is taking place, and AMD is about to announce its Zen 3 architecture tomorrow, so you might not be surprised to hear that Intel has something to announce as well. The company confirmed that its 11th-generation 'Rocket Lake' desktop CPUs will be arriving in the first quarter of 2021.

It also confirmed that the new S-series processors will finally have support for PCIe 4, which has double the bandwidth of PCIe 3, as it was a significant shortcoming for Comet Lake S against AMD's Ryzen chips. That's all that Intel confirmed, although we can reasonably expect native support for Thunderbolt 4, like we've already seen in the 11th-generation mobile processors.

One other thing that we know is that Rocket Lake S processors will use the LGA 1200 socket that debuted with Comet Lake S, so if you're upgrading from 10th-gen, you won't have to get an all-new motherboard. LGA 1200 won't stick around forever though. LGA 115x was supported from sixth-gen through ninth-gen; don't expect the same from LGA 1200.

The biggest question mark will be if Rocket Lake will still be based on a 14nm process, which Intel has been using for years in its desktop chips. The company finally produced some 10nm chips for ultrabooks with the 10th-gen lineup, but the bulk of 10th-gen was still 14nm.

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