Intel Rocket Lake-S would arrive in February with support for PCIe 4.0

A few months ago, Intel launched the Comet Lake-S processors that are going through a lot without pain or glory. These new processors have their days numbered, as they will be replaced by the RL-S processors. According to a recent rumor, these new Intel Rocket Lake processors will hit the market in February 2021. It should be noted that Rocket Lake was still based on 14nm lithography, in a very advanced version.

Rocket Lake-S will be a pretty strange family and the last to be based on monolithic cores, predictably. The Core i9 will have 8 cores and 16 threads, according to existing information. The strange case is in the Core i7, which will have 8 cores and 12 threads, while the Core i5 will have 6 cores and 12 threads.

Intel Rocket Lake-S could arrive during the month of February

These new Rocket Lake-S have more peculiarities. They change their microarchitecture, leaving Skylake aside to be based on Cypress Cove. This architecture is based on a 10nm design imported into the 14nm manufacturing process. According to Intel, these new processors with this improved architecture should offer 10% more IPC compared to Skylake.

As we said, Cypress Cove is a version of Willow Cove (10nm SuperFIN) under the 14nm manufacturing process. Due to space, power and temperature issues, Intel has had to implement a maximum of 8 cores. Perhaps the most relevant thing about Rocket Lake is that they will be the first desktop to support Intel Xe graphics.

It will not be the only relevant novelty of Rocket Lake and it is that they will offer backward compatibility with the Intel 400 Series chipset. Another novelty of Rocket Lake is that they will finally support PCIe 4.0, something that Tiger Lake already offers for laptops. No great additional news is expected, since the jump to DDR5 would not occur until 2022, when 10nm desktop processors would arrive.

Source: MD