Intel Rocket Lake-S Will Feature Xe Graphics, PCI-Express 4.0 And More!

An interesting leak from tech website VideoCardz this weekend has given us a bit more information on what the upcoming Intel Rocket Lake-S will feature. In what looks like a major upgrade from Intel’s previous iterations, we can see a whole list of new features from a leaked diagram. 

Rocket Lake-S aims to succeed Comet Lake-S and is Intel’s last use of 14nm architecture – at least for the consumer market. In the future, Intel will be focusing on 10nm for consumers primarily, leaving 14nm for large clients and big businesses. 

What Features Can We See In The Leak?

The image shown on VideoCardz is a block diagram that shows the chips will bring forward a new core architecture as well as some other great features. These include PCIe 4.0, Xe graphics, 12-bit AVI, double the amount of DMI 3.0 lanes and Thunderbolt 4. Interestingly, the Intel Software Guard Extensions have been removed for Rocket Lake-S

Image credit: Videocardz

There will also be 20 lanes of PCI Express 4.0 which will provide the CPU with direct lanes as well as having four lanes for storage. This means that both the NVME storage and the GPU will be directly attached to the CPU rather than the PCH. 

The upgrade of the DMI will allow for double the amount of transfer speed in an x8 link compared to the existing x4. However, we still don’t know the transfer speed of this new DMI connection. 

Support for Thunderbolt 4 will feature a transfer speed of 40 Gb/s. However, it’s interesting to note that this isn’t an upgrade in terms of speed because Thunderbolt 3 featured the same transfer speed. 

When Will Rocket Lake-S Become Available?

At the moment, it’s unclear when Rocket Lake-S will become available. All we really know is that it will be sometime late in 2020. However, lots of tech companies are delaying projects due to the COVID-19 crisis so there’s always the possibility that it will be pushed further back anyway.