Intel Rocket Lake-S confirmed with PCI-Express 4.0 support

You know, it's not really that we all don't know that Rocket lake will be PCIe Gen 4.0 compatible, it's just never been confirmed. Well, it now certainly is as a database entry from Sandra is listing Rocket lake, running with a PCIe Gen 4.0 NVMe SSD.

Current generation processors are Comet Lake, the following generation will be Rocket Lake (yes still at 14nm), it will support PCI-Express Gen4. With Rocket lake intel would be going back to 8-cores (that is a rumour though). The generation succeeding Rocket lake then would go upwards to 16 cores (8 large and 8 small cores, you know BIG-little.) Back to Rocket lake though, it is still based on a 14nm node and the LGA 1200 socket to be paired with the latest Z490 chipset based motherboards.

In case you've been wondering, Comet Lake-S processors (the current 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 the presence of Jitter in the Z490 chipset signal, that causes instability in the data signal and that means 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.

proof that Rocket Lake indeed is supporting PCIe gen 4.0 as spotted by @TUM_APISAK

Comet Lake is still an x4 DMI interlink (the link between the processor and chipset), Rocket Lake would likely get an x8 connection. In addition, the processor has received four additional PCIe lanes for a total of 20 from the CPU itself. The slide also mentions Thunderbolt 4, which would provide the same speeds as Thunderbolt 3, we're not quite sure what there would be new on that front though.

	Kaby Lake-S	Coffee Lake-S	Comet Lake-S	Rocket Lake-S	Alder Lake-S
Fabrication Node	14nm	14nm	14nm	14nm (TBC)	(TBC)
Launch Date	2017	2018	2020	(TBC)	(TBC)
Chipset	Intel 200	Intel 300	Intel 400	Intel 500	Intel 600
Core Series	7th Gen Core-S	8th/9th Gen Core-S	10th Gen Core-S	11th Gen Core-S	12th Gen Core-S
Max Core Count	up to 4 cores	up to 8 cores	up to 10 cores	TBC	up to 16 (TBC)
Socket	LGA1151	LGA1151	LGA1200	LGA1200 (TBC)	LGA1700 (TBC)
Memory Support	2ch DDR4 up to 64GB	2ch DDR4 up to 128GB	2ch DDR4 up to 128GB	2ch DDR4 up to (TBC)	(TBC)
PCIe Support	PCIe 3.0	PCIe 3.0	PCIe 3.0	PCIe 4.0	PCIe 4.0
CPU PCIe Lanes	16 (3.0)	16 (3.0)	16 (3.0)	20 (4.0)	(TBC)
PCH PCIe Lanes	24 (3.0)	24 (3.0)	24 (3.0)	24 (3.0)	(TBC)
USB	up to 10x 3.0 up to 14x 2.0	Z370: up to 10x 3.0 up to 14x 2.0 Z390: up to 6x 3.1 Gen2x1 up to 10x 3.1 Gen1x1	3.2 Gen 2×1 (10 Gb/s) 3.2 Gen 1×1 (5 Gb/s) 2.0	3.2 Gen 2×2 (20 Gb/s) 3.2 Gen 2×1 (10 Gb/s) 3.2 Gen 1×1 (5 Gb/s)	(TBC)
DMI	x4 3.0	x4 3.0	x4 3.0	x8 3.0	(TBC)
Integrated WiFi	–	Wireless-AC	Wireless-AX	Wireless-AX	(TBC)
Display Support	DisplayPort 1.2 HDMI 1.4	DisplayPort 1.2 HDMI 1.4	DisplayPort 1.2(1.4) HDMI 2.0a	DisplayPort 1.4a HDMI 2.0b	(TBC)
Intel SGX Security	1.0	1.0	1.0	-	(TBC)