Intel Alder Lake-S to add DDR5 support - up to DDR5-4800 expected

Some new details leaked about Intel's Rocket Lake-S and Alder Lake-S architectures. First up is Rocket Lake-S, this new 11th Gen Core series is expected to be out later this year. It will use the LGA1200 socket that was introduced with the Comet Lake-S generation but it will feature only up to eight cores.

Why Rocket Lake-S will have only eight cores, and not up to ten like Comet Lake-S, is unknown. We do know that Rocket Lake-S will add support for PCI Express 4.0, a feature already available on the AMD platform. Rocket Lake-S will reportedly be offered in 65W, 80W, and 95W TDP versions.

Next there's also some information about Alder Lake-S. This (presumably) 12th Gen Core series will launch in 2021 and will require a new motherboard with socket LGA1700. Alder Lake-S will be the first big upgrade since the introduction of Skylake. Based on earlier rumors, we already know that Alder Lake-S will have up to sixteen cores. But this will be in an ARM-like big.LITTLE configuration, with eight high-performance cores and eight smaller cores that focus on energy efficiency.

Alder Lake-S is expected to use a smaller node than 14nm and will reportedly support both PCI Express 4.0 and DDR5:

This was, in fact, rumored for a while, but now even the memory speeds are mentioned. Intel’s Alder Lake-S is expected to support DDR4 at 4800 GT/s but only with one 1DPC (one DIMM per channel or interchangeable with one single-rank DIMM per channel). The speed will decrease to 4000 GT/s if 2DPC are used (that’s two DIMMs per channel or one dual-rank DIMM per channel).

These memory modules will be more expensive than DDR4 as they have onboard ECC by default and need 6 PCB layers.