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Intel's Rocket Lake CPUs are coming in 2021 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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