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Intel’s new Z490 motherboards for its recently announced 10th generation Comet Lake-S desktop processors will support the next generation of CPUs, known as Rocket Lake-S.
As Tom’s hardware discovered, in the Gigabyte Aorus live stream, the motherboard maker revealed that Z490 will support Intel’s 11th generation Rocket Lake processors.
Of course, it’s not a big surprise that 11th-generation chips continue to be compatible with Z490 products, given that if Intel were to switch back so quickly, within the span of a single generation, it wouldn’t be a crowd. Nice move That said, the 500 series motherboards may still come with Rocket Lake when it probably arrives in early 2021 (we’ll discuss that later in a moment).
In any case, this Gigabyte information sheds light on the situation in which Comet Lake processors don’t support PCIe 4.0, but Z490 motherboards do (more or less). That’s an important consideration because Rocket Lake should It comes with PCIe 4.0, so in the future these motherboards will (probably) be able to take advantage of that.
In other words, hardware manufacturers have included PCIe 4.0 drivers, clock generator, etc. with their Z490 products, so that they can be enabled in the future through BIOS updates when Rocket Lake processors are available.
Although it is certainly a bit confusing situation to see that your new Z490 motherboard is PCIe 4.0 ready, but Comet Lake sticks to PCIe 3.0. And to add to the possible confusion, while the future PCIe 4.0 support will appear, the exact implementation may differ from a Z490 motherboard (as Tom points out, only a few motherboards can extend PCIe 4.0 support to an M.2 slot, and others may only support direct PCIe lanes, or maybe not at all.)
Fork in the road?
Another possibility is that we have a situation where we get a mixed and inflexible image of support with the Z490 motherboards, and Intel could launch 500 series models also with Rocket Lake, delivering full PCIe 4.0 support with these.
This is all speculation at the moment, of course, and Intel has not officially said anything about how PCIe 4.0 will play out in line with its new Z490 chipset, or indeed future offerings.
Rocket Lake offers a whole new architecture, though it will still be a 14nm product (again) like Comet Lake, and we’ve already seen a leaked online benchmark for an 11th-gen 8-core processor, which might indicate that these CPU will come sooner rather than later.
Rocket Lake processors will most likely launch in Q1 or Q2 of 2021, although there is a possibility that Intel will have to push hard if Ryzen 4000 processors, expected later this year, really push (and that’s just bet).
