Intel’s Highly Anticipated Rocket Lake CPUs Will Land In March 2021 And Be Backwards Compatible With Z490 Motherboards

Meh, nothing is really taking advantage of pci-e 4 bandwidth anyways. LINK

Frankly it's a nice change of pace for them to make old pci-e 3 mobos compatible instead of using it as an excuse to force another socket change.
 
drpcphil said:
half way supports pci-e 4
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Not sure I get what you mean, considering Up to 20 PCIe 4.0 lanes...

I imagine it will be fully supported by the Z490 motherboard that support PCIe 4.0 (the old high end models and the new one that will get out)
 
2021 and new 14nm architecture...
I wonder what the hell happened 👀
 
Intel still has trouble with its 10 nm process, and therefore restricted its use to low-power, relatively low-performance mobile parts.

And I am less enthusiastic about Rocket Lake, especially since that architecture (being based on a 14 nm process) will be limited (or rather restricted) to 8 cores and 16 threads for the top-level parts. A step down from the current 10-core/20-thread Comet Lake S CPUs. And if anything, a projected i9-11900K will perform worse in multithreaded processes than the current i9-10900K but better than the i7-10700K.
 
I kind of figured LGA1200 would get another chip. Otherwise it wouldn't make sense to make a new socket for yet another rehash of the same thing. I wouldn't be surprised if the Z490 chipset was supposed to be for the next gen 10nm chip but it (obviously) got delayed so they tweaked the old architecture to work with it when they made Comet Lake as yet another stop gap.

Rocket Lake doesn't really excite me. It's just a little faster, and only 8 cores and 20 lanes. Standard desktop stuff. Of course I'm also not all wound up about Zen 3. Nice bump in speed but not worth tearing my hair out over trying to get one. Of course I'm not into competitive gaming so I just keep a machine around until it annoys me. No need for the best, though if history is any guide Elder Scrolls VI will cost me at least $1000 whenever it comes out. The most performance intensive stuff I do I can't really afford the hardware for... but it's work related and I can just use the perf rack at work if I need to do a performance test so no problem. If AMD or Intel wanted to excite me they'd have to give me something cheap and hackable. My favorite build ever was a dual Athlon XP "Barton" 2500+ machine. Yes, you can run Athlon XPs in a dual socket Athlon MP board. There is some conductive epoxy involved, but it's really not difficult. Then you get your Xacto knife (and possibly more conductive epoxy) out and increase the multiplier.

The PCIe situation kind of reminds me of the socket 2011 rig I built back in 2012. No support for PCIe 3.0 in Sandy Bridge E though the boards could theoretically do it. I think I saw something about a hack to enable it but it might be unstable. I'm thinking Sandy Bridge E was supposed to support PCIe 3 but Intel had an oops. Turns out the board support was not so theoretical. I could just drop an Ivy Bridge E or EP chip into my old X79 board and PCIe 3 would work.
 
zandor said:
Rocket Lake doesn't really excite me. It's just a little faster, and only 8 cores and 20 lanes. Standard desktop stuff.
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And the four additional PCI-e lanes in Rocket Lake basically serve to remove one of the m.2 slots from the chipset and directly onto the CPU. Otherwise, no significant difference.
 
E4g1e said:
Intel still has trouble with its 10 nm process, and therefore restricted its use to low-power, relatively low-performance mobile parts.

And I am less enthusiastic about Rocket Lake, especially since that architecture (being based on a 14 nm process) will be limited (or rather restricted) to 8 cores and 16 threads for the top-level parts. A step down from the current 10-core/20-thread Comet Lake S CPUs. And if anything, a projected i9-11900K will perform worse in multithreaded processes than the current i9-10900K but better than the i7-10700K.
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I think it depends on how much faster the cores are. You could see an 8 core beating a 10 core in multithreaded apps, but it will probably be a mixed bag depending on the workload. See the 5600x vs 3700x debate with AMD. The 5600x is faster in some multithreaded workloads even though it has less cores.

Besides, if multithread is your thing, you probably should be looking at AMD anyway.
 
Backwards compatible. I think that's the first time I've seen that phrase in a sentence with the word "Intel".
 
Mega6 said:
Backwards compatible. I think that's the first time I've seen that phrase in a sentence with the word "Intel".
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I'm interested to see what happens with PCIe 4.0 and the Z490 boards. I guess there were websites looking at the build quality saying that some brands were better than others at being ready for PCIe 4.0.
 
kirbyrj said:
I'm interested to see what happens with PCIe 4.0 and the Z490 boards. I guess there were websites looking at the build quality saying that some brands were better than others at being ready for PCIe 4.0.
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I wouldn't fret too much, knowing Intel - z490 won't be around much longer anyways. I'd be shocked if it last longer than Rocket Lake. This carry-over shows that Rocket isn't going to be ground breaking by any means.
 
Mega6 said:
I wouldn't fret too much, knowing Intel - z490 won't be around much longer anyways. I'd be shocked if it last longer than Rocket Lake. This carry-over shows that Rocket isn't going to be ground breaking by any means.
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I'm sure it's not going to be around as alder lake is a new socket. Z590 is going to have a very, very short shelf life. Similar to Z270 I'd imagine. Z270 not supporting CFL is the most recent reason I loathe buying Intel unless I have to.

At least AMD had the good sense to not release a new chipset for their 5XXX series since the AM5/DDR5 train is supposedly coming around the same time as Intel.
 
kirbyrj said:
I'm sure it's not going to be around as alder lake is a new socket. Z590 is going to have a very, very short shelf life. Similar to Z270 I'd imagine. Z270 not supporting CFL is the most recent reason I loathe buying Intel unless I have to.

At least AMD had the good sense to not release a new chipset for their 5XXX series since the AM5/DDR5 train is supposedly coming around the same time as Intel.
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Agreed, I'm holding out for 6k Series. I don't think DDR5 is going to be as bad as some people make it out to be. Sure it's new RAM tech, but they are already starting to produce it. Plenty of time to debug for 5k. Plus we all know how Ryzen loves memory bandwidth. It will be a great upgrade path because AMD will sit on the new socket for a while and there will be plenty of new compatible CPUs for it.
Edit: 6k series
 
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Mega6 said:
Agreed, I'm holding out for 5k Series. I don't think DDR5 is going to be as bad as some people make it out to be. Sure it's new RAM tech, but they are already starting to produce it. Plenty of time to debug for 5k. Plus we all know how Ryzen loves memory bandwidth.
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I'd like to think so, but DDR2, DDR3, and DDR4 had a significant early adopter tax. I don't anticipate a change on that front.
 
kirbyrj said:
I'd like to think so, but DDR2, DDR3, and DDR4 had a significant early adopter tax. I don't anticipate a change on that front.
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Good Point. Prepare to be raped on early builds. As always, the longer you wait - the better it is. Just not sure how long I can hold out on this SB-e/3930k/R8290. Thankfully, I play older multiplayer FPS games and nothing new really interests me yet. Doom Eternal was fun for a bit and performed fine but single player bores me quick.
 
Mega6 said:
Good Point. Prepare to be raped on early builds. As always, the longer you wait - the better it is. Just not sure how long I can hold out on this SB-e/3930k/R8290. Thankfully, I play older multiplayer FPS games and nothing new really interests me yet. Doom Eternal was fun for a bit and performed fine but single player bores me quick.
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I'm thinking of just maxing out a DDR4 B550 build with a 5950x when I can get one at MSRP and then just ignoring DDR5 until it starts to come down in price.
 
kirbyrj said:
I'm thinking of just maxing out a DDR4 B550 build with a 5950x when I can get one at MSRP and then just ignoring DDR5 until it starts to come down in price.
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That B550/5950x should last you to DDR6 unless you are an upgrade fanatic. Wait until the end of 2021 and Ryzen 6k. I meant Ryzen 6k Series CPUs above.. correcting post 14.
 
Mega6 said:
That B550/5950x should last you to DDR6 unless you are an upgrade fanatic. Wait until the end of 2021 and Ryzen 6k. I meant Ryzen 6k Series CPUs above.. correcting posts.
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I do upgrade a lot...lol. I just like trying new things.
 
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