Intel drops PCIe 4.0 support for Comet Lake Desktop

[SpaceGhostC2C]

On 1/25/2020 at 4:47 PM, Mira Yurizaki said:

(3.0 wasn't even available until 2012 with Intel's Ivy Bridge and AMD wasn't even on the PCIe 3.0 train until Ryzen).

AMD got into 3.0 with Steamroller in 2014.

 

Not that it adds much to the discussion

 

[Mira Yurizaki]

1 minute ago, SpaceGhostC2C said:

AMD got into 3.0 with Steamroller in 2014.

 

Not that it adds much to the discussion

Socket FM2+ is dead to me :P

[pas008]

On 1/25/2020 at 8:28 PM, leadeater said:

On the desktop side I would have liked to see, at the PCIe 3.0 generation, a move away from x16 slots for GPUs or at least switched the slot to x8 in favor of other devices being able to directly connect to the CPU. So few run two GPUs it makes less sense to me to have two x16 physical slots that switch to x8/x8 when both are populated over instead utilizing those 8 lanes for dual x4 NVMe or NVMe + 10Gbe.

 

If we have all accepted dual GPUs are dead (god damn it I refuse) then stop designing boards around x8/x8 PCIe expansion slots, that's 8 lanes that are wasted and that will be true of PCIe 4.0. Just have 1 PCIe expansion slot connected to the CPU and the rest chipset, we don't actually need more lanes we just need to stop them from being needlessly wasted.

i know on a few of my boards i'd get 8x 4x 4x when all are populated

but on couple dual slot boards its 16x or 8x 8x but if you using 4x in other slot 4x wasted

edit sry

 

not to mention you can set in bios for them but you need to know which is straight to cpu

[Bombastinator]

The whole “are multiple gpus dead for gaming” thing has challenges beside motherboard design.  The brightest hope I see for multi gpu currently is intel.  Suppose all they can stick together after all is a tiger lake igpu.  OK, what if there are 2 or 3 of them on a card, you can stick 4 cards on a motherboard  and they all talk to each other well enough to work together?  A p580 is a garbage gpu. Can barely play at 720p call it 1.3Tflops single.  The full on founders edition T102  does about 10 times that.  So with 4 cards intel would eat titans.

[Bombastinator]

14 hours ago, Taf the Ghost said:

Disney managed to do it twice, actually, and one of the times was through legislation. But they've stopped trying to defend Steam Boat Willy. So it's only content that's 125 years old. Only.

Not gonna see legislation this time I suspect.  That was an even more difficult to arrange thing.  Intel and AMD don’t seem particularly worried about it though which makes me think they’ve got something or other to keep the gravy train going

[leadeater]

1 hour ago, pas008 said:

i know on a few of my boards i'd get 8x 4x 4x when all are populated

but on couple dual slot boards its 16x or 8x 8x but if you using 4x in other slot 4x wasted

edit sry

 

not to mention you can set in bios for them but you need to know which is straight to cpu

Those are the slots though, there's physical PCIe switches on the motherboard that switch the x16 lanes from the CPU to other PCIe expansion slots and that is where the CPU lanes get wasted. It would be better to have the switch chip connect to the first x16 PCIe expansion slot and then off that switch chip connect to another switch chip which connects to two x4 NVMe m.2 slots or one x4 NVMe m.2 slot and one 10Gb NIC. It's really uncommon to have more than a single PCIe expansion card and that is the GPU.

[Taf the Ghost]

29 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

Not gonna see legislation this time I suspect.  That was an even more difficult to arrange thing.  Intel and AMD don’t seem particularly worried about it though which makes me think they’ve got something or other to keep the gravy train going

It was announced a few years ago they weren't going to continue the efforts, but without any Master Copies being available to anyone else, it really won't matter. Also, the Internet & Streaming exist now.

[Kisai]

On 1/24/2020 at 9:52 PM, TrigrH said:

99% of users 1GPU

95% of intel boards: 16pcie wired to top slot

all CPU lanes gone.

 

Nvme drives work better when its not running through the chipset, and you cant do that with mainstream intel unless you reduce your GPU lanes on a Z series board.

The problem is that Intel underestimated USB-C taking off.

 

So now in order to have a single USB-C port that supports thunderbolt, you need 4 PCIe lanes. For each USB 3.1 gen 1 port you need one PCIe lane. So:

1 PCIe GPU

4 NVMe drives (4 x 4 lanes)

4 USB-C Thunderbolt (4 x 4 lanes) supporting ports

 

So that's 48 lanes right there if you want to use all ports simultanously (eg SSD's.) Now, does the average user have that configuration?

1 PCIe 1 NVme drive and 1 USB-C port is 24 lanes, and that's typically all Intel boards come with.

 

Meanwhile:

24 lanes right on the chip.

 

Now, "users don't need PCIe 4.0" Nonsense. NVMe drives will be hobbled. SATA SSD is 520MB/sec, NVMe 4 lanes PCI 4.0 is 5000MB/sec.

 

Where/what we're going to see is all but one USB-C ports being moved to the GPU, taking a page from Apple. The Motherboard will pass iGPU displayport over the USB-C.

[sdmf74]

On 1/24/2020 at 7:35 PM, SeriousDad69 said:

This doesn't really change anything. I can't see GPUs being bottlenecked by PCI-E 3.0 x16 for years to come and FPS snobs will always buy Intel as long as they maintain the slight FPS advantage(220 FPS instead of 200!!!..... At 3X power usage lol)

 

Who gives a **** about power usage? I have a 1300 watt psu, you cant afford more than a 450 watt psu? Oh I get it you want your pc to be as quiet as possible & not scare the kitty kat. I kinda like performance myself.

 

[SeriousDad69]

5 hours ago, sdmf74 said:

 

Intelmao Certified lol

[Dabombinable]

One thing we need on any future gen 4.0 CPU and chipset: boards which bifurcate the lanes so that 2x gen 4.0 lanes get switched to be 4x 3.0 lanes, so we can get at least double the SSD running off consumer CPU/boards with still excellent transfer speeds. I can't be the only one who wants to cut back on the number of HDD in their system.

[GoldenLag]

21 minutes ago, Dabombinable said:

One thing we need on any future gen 4.0 CPU and chipset: boards which bifurcate the lanes so that 2x gen 4.0 lanes get switched to be 4x 3.0 lanes, so we can get at least double the SSD running off consumer CPU/boards with still excellent transfer speeds

Multiplex chips for pcie 3.0 are allready very expencive. 

 

Id rather see m.2 2x at pcie 4.0 speeds. 

 

You could then do 8x m.2 PCIe cards at really nice speeds.