The Intel Rocket Lake S platform has been spotted on the famously leaky SiSoft Sandra database, and it appears to be brandishing a PCIe 4.0 SSD. The doubly-fast PCIe standard was introduced last year onto our gaming PCs alongside compatible AMD Ryzen CPUs. Today's sighting, however, further suggests that Intel's 11th Gen chips will also be raring to go.
Spotted by TUM_APISAK on Twitter, the SiSoft Sandra benchmark shows an Intel Rocket Lake S compatible motherboard with an unnamed 1TB NVMe SSD rated to PCIe 4.0 x4 speed. That effectively means this particular drive has a controller ready to make the most of a full 4x NVMe slot with the utmost bandwidth commonly available today.
Only a few companies currently design controllers capable of such a PCIe 4.0 controller. The most common culprit comes from Phison, whose PS5016-E16 controller was the first to offer the greater bandwidth at 5GB/s seq. read and 4.4GB/s seq. write. There's far more that PCIe 4.0 has to offer, however, and the controller within Samsung's 980 Pro SSD is rated to 6.5GB/s and 5GB/s, respectively.
The difference between PCIe 3.0 and PCIe 4.0 is namely a question of bandwidth. Whereas a PCIe 3.0 x16 slot, such as the one most often occupied by your graphics card, is capable of driving up to near enough 32GB/s, a PCIe 4.0 x16 slot will be able to run at 64GB/s.
Now in terms of raw bandwidth your graphics card actually requires, the bump in bandwidth has very little effect. GPUs run just fine on a x8 PCIe slot, let alone a PCIe 4.0 x16 one. However, storage can be, and often is, limited by your platform's bandwidth, and that's where PCIe 4.0 comes in.
Spotted by TUM_APISAK on Twitter, the SiSoft Sandra benchmark shows an Intel Rocket Lake S compatible motherboard with an unnamed 1TB NVMe SSD rated to PCIe 4.0 x4 speed. That effectively means this particular drive has a controller ready to make the most of a full 4x NVMe slot with the utmost bandwidth commonly available today.
Only a few companies currently design controllers capable of such a PCIe 4.0 controller. The most common culprit comes from Phison, whose PS5016-E16 controller was the first to offer the greater bandwidth at 5GB/s seq. read and 4.4GB/s seq. write. There's far more that PCIe 4.0 has to offer, however, and the controller within Samsung's 980 Pro SSD is rated to 6.5GB/s and 5GB/s, respectively.
The difference between PCIe 3.0 and PCIe 4.0 is namely a question of bandwidth. Whereas a PCIe 3.0 x16 slot, such as the one most often occupied by your graphics card, is capable of driving up to near enough 32GB/s, a PCIe 4.0 x16 slot will be able to run at 64GB/s.
Now in terms of raw bandwidth your graphics card actually requires, the bump in bandwidth has very little effect. GPUs run just fine on a x8 PCIe slot, let alone a PCIe 4.0 x16 one. However, storage can be, and often is, limited by your platform's bandwidth, and that's where PCIe 4.0 comes in.