Intel has just announced their new 10th Gen Comet Lake CPUs. And as expected there are many questions raised in relation to this release. One of those question is whether or not the Z490 motherboards will support the 11th Gen Rocket Lake CPUs? Well, Gigabyte (unexpectedly) confirmed that it will support the next gen CPUs. Check out more details below.
Intel 11th Gen Rocket Lake CPU Will Be Compatible with Z490 Motherboards
The new Z490 motherboards feature a new socket LGA 1200, even though the size of the CPU is the same with Coffee Lake (Refresh). The new socket can support higher pin count unlike the previous LGA 1151. Also, the 8th and 9th gen CPUs are not compatible with the new Z490 motherboards, and the new 10th Gen Intel CPUs are not backwards compatible with the Z390 / Z370 motherboards.
One reason why the new 10th Gen CPU is using a new socket is because of “future proofing”. On a Q&A portion from Gigabyte’s live stream, the host has confirmed that Z490 motherboards will be able to support the upcoming 11th Gen Rocket Lake CPUs. See video below (1:33:22).
Personally, I’m not surprised about this since we have seen the same scenario on Coffee Lake (Refresh) CPUs and Z390 / Z370 motherboards. Also, if you noticed the current 10th Gen CPU doesn’t feature PCIe 4.0, but some of the Z490 motherboards are “PCIe 4.0 ready”.
Intel Rocket Lake-S promises to support PCIe 4.0 and it is expected to bring a new microarchitecture and new core design. It is also reported to offer wider DMI 3.0 x8 and support for Intel’s Xe graphics. This makes me feel that the 10th Gen CPUs are just a stopgap product while Intel prepares for the 11th Gen CPUs that will bring newer set of features and not just more cores and higher clock speeds.
