Intel Raptor Lake-S CPU platform: DDR5-5600 support, 16 PCIe 5.0 lanes

Intel's new 13th Gen Core "Raptor Lake" CPUs are a few months away yet, but we've got previews and reviews out already, and now some more details are coming out from a presentation held in Shenzen, China, by Intel this week.

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The meeting itself saw Intel focusing on NAS products and other roadmaps, but there was a slide that Intel had up titled "Raptor Late-S Platform Overview" with some new details. The slide teases that Intel's next-gen Raptor Lake-S will support DDR5-5600 memory officially, a big jump over the current 12th Gen Core "Alder Lake" CPUs with support for DDR5-4800 (the JEDEC default for DDR5).

Not only that, but the slide also means that Intel's upcoming Raptor Lake CPUs will have support for DDR4 memory, with up to DDR4-3200 supported. Intel's current-gen 600-series chipset and its associated motherboards have SKUs with DDR4 or DDR5 memory, so it looks like we can expect the same for the upcoming 700-series chipsets: motherboards with either DDR4 or DDR5 memory.

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My attention is with the PCIe 5.0 lanes on the Raptor Lake-S platform overview, where Intel says that the CPU will have 16 lanes of PCIe 5.0 and 4 lanes for PCIe 4.0. Intel does note "additional PCH PCIe 4.0 lanes" on Raptor Lake.

This means that if you have a juicy new, next-gen PCIe 5.0-capable GPU that uses 16 lanes of PCIe 5.0, you won't be able to have a new PCIe 5.0-capable SSD at the same time. Well, you will... but the PCIe 5.0 GPU will be sharing the 16 lanes of Gen5 goodness with the PCIe 5.0 SSD.

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We won't know if you'll need all 16 lanes of PCIe 5.0 on a next-gen GPU to pull everything from it -- but you sure as hell don't need 16 lanes of PCIe 4.0 to enjoy the best GPUs using that standard -- AMD's fastest Navi 21-powered Radeon RX 6950 XT graphics card, or NVIDIA's new GA102-based GeForce RTX 3090 Ti graphics card. They'll perform beautifully, even on PCIe 4.0 x8 with 8 lanes, down from 16 lanes.

• Read more: AMD Navi 31 GPU: flagship Radeon RX 7000 series uses PCIe 5.0 x16
• Read more: Phison teams with AMD + Micron for PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSDs of the future
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If you want to use a full-speed PCIe 5.0 SSD then you'll need 4 lanes for the most part, until you start using bigger RAID cards and wanting to drive something like Sabrent's everything-destroyer in the new Rocket 4 Plus Destroyer 2 SSD. That beast brings up to 64TB of SSD speeds at an insane 28GB/sec speeds... all over PCIe 4.0 x16.

• Read more: Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus Destroyer 2 SSD: 64TB SSD @ 28GB/sec insanity
• Read more: Phison teams with AMD + Micron for PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSDs of the future
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If you're using a next-gen Gen5-capable SSD on PCIe 5.0 x4 (4 lanes) then you'll enjoy up to 15-16GB/sec reads out of next-gen SSDs. Using the full 16 lanes on a PCIe 5.0 x16 slot will deliver up to 64GB/sec on next-gen SSDs of the future (in RAID cards like Sabrent's new Rocket 4 Plus Destroyer 2 SSD).