While AMD continues lay claim to the desktop PC market with its 7nm Ryzen CPUs, Intel has clearly been having difficulty making the jump from 14nm to 10nm. Now, to make matters worse, it seems that the semiconductor maker is rescinding PCIe 4.0 support on next-generation Socket 1200.
According to Tom’s Hardware, Intel’s Socket 1200 motherboards were all ready to support the new connective interface first introduced by AMD. However, due to some issues surrounding the Comet Lake chipset, the company had no choice but to backtrack on its original plan and revert back to using PCIe 3.0 instead.
For context, the PCIe 4.0 interface has double the bandwidth of PCIe 3.0. At current, AMD’s X570 chipset and Radeon RX 5000 series graphics cards are the only components capable of making full use of the interface.
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On a slightly brighter note, Intel’s issues with integrating PCIe 4.0 into Socket 1200 is seemingly isolated to just the chipset, with the Comet Lake CPUs themselves having no issue.
That said, Intel’s move is both unexpected and, undoubtedly, an unwelcomed one at most; aside from being unable to move forward from the ageing 14nm process node, not having a PCIe 4.0 compatible motherboard means that Intel will once again be lagging behind AMD. Guess we’ll just have to wait and see if Rocket Lake will be the chipset to get the interface.
(Source: Tom’s Hardware)
