If you have a Z490 board, you can take even better advantage of this board as it will be compatible with Intel Rocket Lake processors, i.e. by updating the BIOS
It seems that the theory or rumor that the Intel Rocket Lake will arrive in March 2021, an 11th generation, which will be the last of LGA1200, is gaining ground. In theory, they will follow the 14 nm process, as this is the last family of chips with such lithography. Although this has not been confirmed, we only know that the Z490 plates will be compatible.
Z490 motherboards will be compatible with Intel Rocket Lake-S
The source confirms that these processors will arrive in March 2021 and will be backward compatible with the Z490 cards as they support PCIe 4.0, which Comet Lake-S does not. There was a lot of confusion about the support of this interface with Comet Lake, as it looked like the board manufacturers were following free will.
Manufacturers like ASUS offered PCIe 4.0 on their boards, but Comet Lake-S chips could not work with this interface, so the Z490 boards were “forced” to use PCIe 3.0.
Although the manufacturing process is the same, Intel Rocket Lake is expected to deliver better performance than Zen 3 and Comet Lake-S. On the other hand, the source points out that Intel would delay the 10nm because it handles almost 80% of the x86 CPU market, so it does not have the capacity to fulfill orders in this node.
So Intel’s plan would be to delay the 10nm SuperFin, accelerate the 14nm and take a step forward with Alder Lake. We have to say that the news about Z490 and Intel Rocket Lake compatibility was known or expected, why? Basically, because both generations come with LGA1200 and enthusiastic chipsets are getting more and more exclusive support to install new chips.
At Intel, they want to give a boost to their new chips with an architecture based on Sunny Cove, but different from the one called Cypress Cove. Support for PCIe 4.0 and Intel Xe 12 has been added.
Despite the backward compatibility, we will see the new Intel 500 boards with the release of Intel Rocket Lake:
- Deep Learning Boost and VNNI.
- Support for high-end video decoders.
- Memory controller that natively supports DDR4-3200.
There has been speculation about a significant increase in IPCs, but everything seems to indicate that this will not be the case. We will see chips around 5.0 GHz in the high-performance ranges, as usual. As for the CPI, there has been speculation about a 25% increase, but it will be 11% at most.