Leaked details for Intel’s Rocket Lake-S point to a new microarchitecture

Intel is right on the cusp to announce their 10th  gen Comet Lake CPUs for desktop (they are already available for laptops). That is unless the Coronavirus Pandemic does not hamper their plans, for the announcement at least. The Skylake architecture based 14nm CPUs for desktop haven't even been released and we already have a leak regarding its successor, the Rocket Lake. Or more specifically, the low powered Rocket Lake-S. 

According to a slide leaked by Videocardz (the featured image), the rumoured 11th Gen processors will have a completely new architecture. While many would expect it to be on a 10nm die, given that AMD is already manufacturing Zen 3 CPUs on a 7nm die, the leaks suggest that Rocket League-S will be manufactured on a 14nm die. 

The processor will be based on the new Willow Cove architecture. The most important part of the leak is that the CPU will support PCIe Gen 4.0 directly. It will have also have 4 additional lanes for storage: x16 for GPU and x4 for NVME. Another big news is that it will have support for Thunderbolt 4 and USB 3.2. 

Given the situation of the tech industry right now, no one can say for sure when these will be released, but the leaks say that Rocket Lake-S CPUs can be expected in late 2020.