It appears that Intel’s 10th Gen Comet Lake-S CPUs won’t support the PCIe 4.0 standard after all. Gamers and enthusiasts looking to leverage the fastest SSDs will have to look towards AMD’s X570 platform for the time being. While there have been no indications of Intel upgrading to PCIe 4.0 in recent reports, considering that all the 3rd Gen Ryzen 3000 parts support it, it was a possibility nonetheless. Multiple motherboard specs-sheets leaked recently more or less confirm the absence of PCIe 4 from Comet Lake-S:
None of the 400 chipsets that have surfaced till now include support for PCIe 4, and it’d be safe to say that that won’t change in the future either. Intel’s 10th Gen desktop CPUs will see a major socket change. For the first time in nearly a decade, the company is shifting away from the LGA115x nomenclature. The 400 series chipsets will be featured on the new LGA1200 boards, and as expected, the newer chips won’t work with existing motherboards and vise versa:
Compared to LGA1151, LGA1200 will have a higher pin-count and will most likely be retained for at least another generation. Alder Lake (12th Gen) could see an updated socket as it’ll be Intel’s first 10nm desktop CPU.
In the server space, the Ice Lake-SP processors might support PCIe 4 as the eco-system benefits more from the faster platform. It’s still not confirmed though, so make no assumptions.
