Intel fans may want to hold off on their Comet Lake-S purchases, as its successor, Rocket Lake-S, appears to be much more of a significant upgrade.
A leaked diagram obtained by VideoCardz has confirmed that the newer platform, which is also due out this year, includes PCIe 4.0 support. Rocket Lake-S processors will have a total of 20 CPU PCIe 4.0 lanes, four more than Comet Lake-S (x16 PCIe 3.0). These additional lanes are reserved for storage devices – i.e., NVMe SSDs.
The Rocket Lake-S lineup will also feature iGPUs powered by Intel’s new Xe graphics architecture. These are presumably based off of Tiger Lake’s Gen12 solution, which is set to bring huge performance increases, as well as HDMI 2.0b and DisplayPort 1.4a support.
As for other types of connectivity, users can expect Thunderbolt 4 and USB 3.2 Gen 2×2. The former is no faster than Thunderbolt 3 (both are 40 Gb/s), but the latter does double speeds to 20 Gb/s by using two lanes at once (USB 3.2 Gen 2 maxes out at 10 Gb/s).
Rocket Lake-S processors are expected to debut in late 2020. Of course, new motherboards (500 series) are required.