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Intel strategist claims PCIe 4.0 SSDs will be faster on 11th gen CPUs than AMD

AMD might need to watch out if SSDs are this much faster on Intel's 11th gen

A photo of an Alder Lake CPU with its LGA 1700 attatchment, next to a previous generation Intel chip

Intel’s late to the party with PCIe 4.0, but after three generations of AMD exclusivity, the upcoming 11th gen processors will finally include support for the feature. Instead of putting the two companies on a level playing field, Intel’s chief performance strategist, Ryan Shrout, released an internal benchmark showcasing that Gen4 NVMe SSDs will reportedly run faster when paired with Intel’s Rocket Lake-S CPUs.

The PCMark 10 quick system drive benchmark is credited to Intel’s storage technical analyst, Allyn Malventano, seeing a 1TB Samsung 980 Pro PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD performing up to 11% faster alongside the upcoming Intel Core i9 11900K than when used with the AMD Ryzen 5950X.

Before you begin setting aside money for an upgrade, however, it might be worth holding off until reviewers can corroborate these findings. As the disclaimer says at the bottom of the graph, ‘results may vary’ depending on your configuration, PCMark 10 isn’t exactly representative of real-world performance, and the side-by-side comparison is just relative performance instead of crunchable numbers.

Shrout confirms that the test wasn’t even conducted using M.2 slots, but instead using an add-in card to plug the SSD into a x16 slot “to make sure it was CPU attached on both platforms.”

It’s great to see the Intel i9 11900K show signs of becoming the best gaming CPU, but it’s worth keeping an open mind until we see more than a single graph of relative data. The new range is expected to land next month, so we should find out more then.