Intel Comet Lake-S CPUs and Z490 boards support PCI-E 4.0 (but it's not active)
A new report on the web indicates that the upcoming Comet Lake-S processors (tenth generation of Intel Core for desktop) actually do support PCI Express 4.0, some Z490 motherboards are designed for it as well. However an issue prevents PCIe 4.0 to become usable, so the platform will support PCI-E 3.0 instead.
The reason behind this is presence of Jitter in the Z490 chipset signal, that causes instability in the data signal and that menas that specifications required for the PCI-Express 4.0 certification are simply not met. PCI-E 4.0 is working at very high frequencies, and that requires that the signal be completely clean.
Several manufacturers added external clock generators to eliminate this Jitter, however not everyone did, so Intel made the decision to not support PCI-E 4.0 on this new platform.
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This is a huge middle finger to the board partners.
Intel tells them to design for PCIe 4, so they use money and time to design the motherboard to meet this standart, Instead of just copy paste from previous gen, but when the Chipset trays arrive and it is time to solder it onto the board, it does not work.
That is how i understand it atleast.
Hope somebody gets fired for this huge fail.
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wow more incompetence from Intel, I'm shocked. The company needs a new CEO to bad Lisa Su has a job.
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Joined: 2016-08-19
Just wait until nVidia announces their new generation Ampere, or 3000 series or whatever the name is and it will be PCIe 4.0 cards.
And AMD's RDNA(2) products will obviously be 4.0 as well.
No-one in their right minds would buy Z490 to willingly give up performance on their shiny new latest generation GPUs... especially considering that AMD's next gen with even more IPC and probably more clocks as well is basically just 6-7 months away from release.
How could they (Intel) screw this up so badly !?
If only people who buy Dell,HP,Lenovo etc etc understood any of that we might get somewhere in boosting AMDs rep to the masses.
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Intel can´t get anything right nowadays... What´s happening inside the company???
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Q: "Do you support PCIe4.x yet?"
Intel: "Yes, we have motherboards right now that support PCIe4.x, but due to technical reasons they only function as PCIe.3x mboards at present."
Q: "So if you put a PCIe4.x device in such a slot, it will function only as a PCIe3.x device"?
Intel: "Yes, that's our PCIe4.x support at present, you are correct."
Reminds me of nVidia in the past: "Oh, yes, we support that feature in this product/drivers and always have--it's just that we haven't turned it on, yet"....
EDIT: Slightly different take here:
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-gets-the-jitters-plans-then-nixes-pcie-40-support-on-comet-lake