Gigabyte joins MSI in confirming Intel’s next-gen Rocket Lake CPUs are arriving in March
Intel may as properly come out and formally announce that it is eleventh Gen Core processors based mostly on Rocket Lake are headed to desktops in March, as a result of a few its key {hardware} companions have already let the cat out of the bag. At this level, you possibly can go forward and circle your calendar.
The primary semi-confirmation got here from an MSI buyer assist rep just a few days in the past, who indicated Rocket Lake would arrive by the top of the primary quarter, which mainly quantities to the top of March. They later up to date the publish claiming suggesting that was purely based mostly on circulating rumours.
Buyer assist reps generally get these items fallacious, however that doesn’t look like the case right here. That is as a result of Gigabyte has adopted go well with in an official press launch asserting that its Z490 motherboards will “perfectly support” Intel’s next-gen CPUs.
“All Z490 motherboards featuring PCIe 4.0 hardware design can support the 11th Gen. Intel Core processors perfectly by update to the latest F20 BIOS, and provide the extreme bandwidth and performance for PCIe 4.0 graphics cards and SSDs,” Gigabyte writes.
Then within the second paragraph, Gigabyte plainly states that “the latest 11th Gen Intel Core processors will be launched on March 2021.”
So there you could have it—barring a final minute delay, Intel will roll out Rocket Lake to the desktop (designated with an S, as in Rocket Lake-S) in just a little over two months from now. The launch can be accompanied by a brand new 500-series chipset (presumably Z590), however since Rocket Lake will use the identical LGA 1200 socket because the 400-series, there can be a little bit of backwards compatibility.
Based on Intel, Rocket Lake is poised to ship a double digit acquire in IPC (directions per clock) efficiency. Although it’s yet one more iteration of Intel’s 14-nanometer node, it’s nonetheless a serious new structure, with some goodies in tow. Specifically, Rocket Lake will lastly introduce PCI Specific 4.0 assist (as much as 20 lanes) to the desktop, a characteristic that AMD has already embraced with its X570 and B550 platforms for Ryzen.
This may largely profit customers who wish to set up a speedy PCIe 4.0 SSD, the most recent of which boast switch speeds of round 7,000MB/s. As for GPUs, The PCIe bus has not been a lot of a bottleneck for graphics playing cards .
Talking of graphics, one other characteristic of Rocket Lake is the pairing of Intel’s Xe GPU cores, simply as Intel has achieved on its cell Tiger Lake lineup. You are still going to desire a discrete GPU for severe gaming, however as we’ve got seen in laptops, it’s doable to play trendy video games on Xe graphics. Although you are unlikely to get as many Xe GPU cores on the desktop as you do in cell trim.
The larger query, nonetheless, is how will Rocket Lake CPUs stack up towards AMD’s Ryzen 5000 collection. That may depend upon whether or not or not Rocket Lake does in reality ship the sorts of IPC beneficial properties Intel is promising. Pricing and availability may even issue into the equation, and hopefully by March, PC {hardware} shortages can be a factor of the previous.