Update: Intel has made the official Rocket Lake launch-day announcement, seemingly confirming the timeline outlined below.
Original Article:
HD Tecnología has obtained an alleged Intel roadmap that provides us all the details on the chipmaker's forthcoming Rocket Lake processors. However, as with all leaks, we recommend you treat the information with caution.
The roadmap, which HD Tecnología claimed to have acquired from a motherboard vendor, shows that Intel could launch Rocket Lake at the end of March 2021. As a quick recap, Rocket Lake is the planned desktop PC successor to the current 10th Generation Comet Lake-S family. Rocket Lake should land with the 12th Generation moniker, but it's not confirmed yet.
Rocket Lake won't arrive alone, though, as the roadmap suggests that the 500-series chipsets, including Z590, H570, B560, and H510 will launch simultaneously. The workstation-oriented W580 chipset, however, will drop in April. On the other hand, the Q-series might not get a successor since the roadmap shows that Q470 will continue to live on.
We confirmed in the past that Intel's 400-series motherboards would support Rocket Lake chips, and HD Tecnología's sources also say that Rocket Lake will be backward compatible with the LGA1200 socket. That means 400-series motherboards will house the new chips without hiccups. We imagine a simple firmware update would do the trick. Likewise, Comet Lake-S will be compatible with the new 500-series motherboards as well.
It's not official, but the biggest novelty with Rocket Lake should be the rumored PCIe 4.0 support. Many of the current 400-series motherboards are PCIe 4.0 ready. Since Comet Lake-S doesn't do PCIe 4.0, it's almost a given that Rocket Lake-S has native PCIe 4.0 support.
In less important news, Intel doesn't have anything planned for the HEDT (High-End Desktop) market. The X299 platform is expected to do the heavy lifting throughout 2021. The roadmap stops in June, so something big might come later in the year.
