If you’re looking to buy or upgrade a new desktop, it may be worth waiting until next year 2021. AMD has just announced their AMD Ryzen 5000, technically their most powerful CPU yet. Recently, Intel has confirmed that its 11th generation, “Rocket Lake” CPUs will be launching in the first quarter of 2021. The update, of course, comes with other parts as well. The Z490 motherboard for example, and support for PCIe 4.0.
Intel’s Rocket Lake is expected to be built upon the same Skylake architecture as the previous five generation of 14nm. That, or it is built upon Intel’s Cove microarchitecture designs. Technically Rocket Lake will be more powerful just based on the fact that you have PCIe 4.0 support over PCIe 3.0. In this update as well, Intel technically matched the new AMD Ryzen chips with PCIe 4.0 support.
There are no mentions on whether or not there are more PCIe lanes supported compared to the previous generation CPU though. The ASRock Z490 Aqua, built for next generation Intel processors, is built with a PCle 4.0 storage M.2 slot. Using the PCIe 4.0 slot on the board will render the PCIe 3.0 slots useless, or unusable.
Mind you, these things are said before AMD’s big announcement of the AMD Ryzen 5000 series. At this point, no one knew or could expect the kind of progress AMD has made in their new CPUs. As we have discovered, it is a monumental swing of momentum in AMD’s favour, just based on AMD’s announcement.
Intel has been making pre-emptive move with updating the Skylake architecture and introducing Tiger Lake. Up until last week, Intel still holds the title of ‘most powerful gaming processor’ available in the market. In some sense, we can expect Rocket Lake to take that title back at least. With the likelihood of Intel not moving away from 14nm processes though, it might be a long shot. All we can do, is wait and see.
