Intel Drops PCIe 4.0 support for Comet Lake

Gideon

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Wow that is rough when they even struggle with a new PCI standard.

https://www.thefpsreview.com/2020/0...omet-lake-s-processors-and-z490-motherboards/

Intel’s upcoming Z490 (Socket 1200) motherboards were designed with PCIe 4.0 support in mind, but despite having the necessary components to do so, they won’t be flaunting those speeds. Sources claim that Intel had trouble implementing PCIe 4.0 into the Comet Lake chipset due to unacceptable amounts of jitter, so retail Z490 motherboards will perform no better than PCIe 3.0.
 
Not that it would matter to 99.999999% of people in the wild.

Ya but the Intel marketing plan has always been bigger numbers are better. The end. From the P4 on.

So sure most people aren't buying pcie4 ssds today... or in need of the extra bandwidth on their GPUs. Still smaller number bad. :)
 
I can't imagine board manufacturers are very happy about having to redesign their boards or have increased costs for a feature that doesn't work and they can't advertise, this is going to cost Intel some goodwill with them.

On a side note perhaps I misjudged how reasonable AMD was being when they blocked PCIe 4 on X470 boards, it also makes the price on X570 seem a little more reasonable(not to mention that they've come down quite a bit).
 
I guess i'm glad that I went with an X570 / Ryzen setup this round, but unfortunately Intel not having PCIe 4.0 on their latest products will probably delay overall market adoption of PCIe 4.0. That would mean fewer choices for PCIe 4.0 SSDs, etc for those of us who can use them.
 
Damn I didn't see this coming.....Wouldn't it be funny is PCI-E 5.0 comes out before Intel adopts PCI-E 4.0?.....

Man Intel cannot catch a break.
 
I'd like to see how much difference is there when you run a 4.0 ssd on a 3.0 system.

I would assume you would saturate the bandwidth since the speeds they get at 4.0 easily surpass the max speeds on 3.0.
 
IMO the importance of PCI-E 4.0 right now is exaggerated. Really the only thing you are gonna get out of it is higher sustained SSD read/writes, which in itself is just a sub-metric of how well SSD/system performs and won't matter much for normal system or game use.
 
I can fathom dropping PCIe 4.0 for normal slots but leveraging it for the DMI link would be a nice boost for chipset performance. The chipset has often been over committed in terms of how much bandwidth it can provide vs. the DMI uplink to the CPU but traditionally end users didn't stress it much as it'd take some very specific use-case scenarios to do so. Now that isn't true with 10 Gbit and NVMe drives becoming popular alongside faster USB speeds. Simply put the bar is lower to run into DMI bandwidth issues and Intel needs to kick that link speed up a notch.
 
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IMO the importance of PCI-E 4.0 right now is exaggerated. Really the only thing you are gonna get out of it is higher sustained SSD read/writes, which in itself is just a sub-metric of how well SSD/system performs and won't matter much for normal system or game use.
While true, marketing is key. AMD will be able to market as a more advanced platform for even longer now, and many will make assumptions based on that.
 
Damn I didn't see this coming.....Wouldn't it be funny is PCI-E 5.0 comes out before Intel adopts PCI-E 4.0?.....

Man Intel cannot catch a break.

IMHO, this is very likely. I still think the next big delivery jump will be to PCIe 5.0.
 
If they keep having issues like this, they will start having serious trouble with their image as a tech leader.
 
Just saying, datacenters (the server world) is starting to take notice. But again, we were badly burned by AMD in the Opteron days. So, looking at it cautiously. Intel's fab delays are also helping to make it seem less risky.

Server world is very different from enthusiast world. It must run... always! Must work well. No "reboots" due to CPU+chipset/memory/bus problems. Intel may have their Spectre/Meltdown++, but they're pretty reliable at running.
 
Had to do it in preparation for next generation

intellol.jpg
 
IMO the importance of PCI-E 4.0 right now is exaggerated. Really the only thing you are gonna get out of it is higher sustained SSD read/writes, which in itself is just a sub-metric of how well SSD/system performs and won't matter much for normal system or game use.

Supposedly it helps when your GPU has limit vram though that's only helpful for lower end cards or laptops
 
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