Intel is reportedly releasing its 11th Gen Core desktop processors in spring 2021. Dubbed Rocket Lake-S, one of the platform’s biggest advancements is support for the blazing PCIe 4.0 interface – old news for AMD fans, but something that Intel aficionados will certainly appreciate.
While the current generation (Comet Lake-S) ran into unfortunate signal/jitter issues that handicapped motherboards to PCIe 3.0, leaked benchmarks from ITCooker suggest that Rocket Lake-S’s PCIe 4.0 support is good to go for the fastest NVMe drives on the market.
The test includes a screen capture of a CrystalDiskMark 8 test running on a purported 11th Gen Core processor and ASRock Z490 Taichi motherboard, which shows read and write speeds as high as 4,995 MB/s and 4,267 MB/s, respectively. Obviously, only PCIe 4.0 is capable of these flashy speeds – the interface provides twice the throughput of PCIe 3.0 with transfers rates as high as 16 GT/s and throughput up to 31 GB/s (x16).
Seagate’s FireCuda 520 (2 TB) was used for the test. This is a PCIe Gen4 ×4, NVMe 1.3 SSD that’s rated for sequential read/write performance up to 5,000/4,000 MB/s. As the storage giant notes, that means 9x faster sequential reads than SATA SSDs.
