Motherboard vendor Gigabyte says its customers can expect Intel’s Rocket Lake desktop CPUs to arrive in March.
The vendor made the announcement in a press release discussing how existing Z490 Gigabyte motherboards that use PCI Express 4.0 will support the upcoming CPUs. “The latest 11th Gen. Intel Core processors will be launched on March 2021,” the statement says.
The news comes after rival motherboard maker MSI mentioned in a tech forum that Intel’s Rocket Lake is scheduled to land at the end of March.
Officially, Intel has only said that 11th generation Rocket Lake chips will launch sometime during the first quarter. Naturally, PC builders hope it’ll be sooner rather than later. However, the statements from MSI and now Gigabyte indicate consumers will be waiting a few more months.
Gigabyte went on to say owners of its Z490 motherboards with PCIe 4.0 will be able to run Rocket Lake CPUs following an update to the motherboard’s BIOS. “Gigabyte’s R&D team is speeding up on the verification of more Z490 motherboards for a full-fledged support to the 11th Gen. Intel Core processors,” the company says. “The updated BIOS files will be uploaded to the Gigabyte official website, so please check it out regularly.”
Intel is expected to announce more details about Rocket Lake at next week’s CES. In the meantime, benchmarks for the chips have started to leak, which indicate the silicon can go toe-to-toe with AMD’s new Ryzen 5000 CPUs. Intel’s Rocket Lake has also been designed to support the faster PCIe 4 interface. Stay tuned for our coverage.