A technical publication on Facebook (ITCooker) has filtered the first tests of an Intel PCIe 4.0 bus. The platform being tested is the next Intel Rocket Lake-S, which is expected to be released in 2021.
Intel Rocket Lake-S is tested with the FireCuda PCIe 4.0 SSD
PCIe 4.0 SSDs will offer a significant increase in storage performance and will probably be required for games in the future. The analysis was conducted with the Seagate FireCuda PCIe 4.0 drive and an 11th generation CPU together with a Z490 motherboard.
The leak appears to have come from Taiwan, and they claim to have had access to a “next-generation” CPU that they tested on a Z490 motherboard. Considering that the only next-generation CPU running a Z490 is Rocket Lake, it is not hard to guess which chips they used.
The provided screenshots show that CPU-Z is not able to read the patterns correctly, which means that they probably used the first technical patterns. Because Rocket Lake-S fits perfectly into the LGA 1200 socket, customers with Z490 motherboards will have a clear upgrade path when they hit the stores in 2021.
The CrystalDiskMark shown had a preparation speed of 5 GB/s and a write speed of 4.2 GB/s (sequential), which is only possible on a PCIe 4.0 bus.
An upscaling clock of 5.0 GHz in combination with a new architecture should offer the best possible combination for an interesting performance increase compared to the current generation of Intel core chips. Rocket Lake will have the difficult task of competing with the AMD Ryzen 5000 series, which will be launched in November with significant IPC performance improvements. We will keep you up to date.