In a few weeks. Intel's Rocket Lake CPUs will arrive in the retail space with PCI Express 4.0 support (starting with Zen 2 or AMD's Ryzen 3000 series), which has been available to AMD users for about a year and a half. Intel is late to the party, but intends to crash the party by offering faster storage performance through the PCIe 4.0 bus.

Intel claims that "the 11th generation Core desktop platform will deliver up to 11% better PCIe Gen 4 storage performance compared to the AMD Ryzen 9 5000 platform." As evidence of this claim, Intel benchmarked a 1TB Samsung 980 Pro SSD on two high-end systems powered by the companies' flagship CPUs.

On Intel's side, the testbed was an Asus Z590 ROG Maximus XIII Hero motherboard with a Core i9 11900K CPU, 32GB of DDR4-3200 RAM and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 graphics card The AMD test bed was an Intel Ryzen 9 5950X CPU paired with an Asus X570 ROG Rampage VIII motherboard with the same RAM and GPU. Both ran Windows 10 20H2 and were installed on 512GB Intel 760p SSDs (leaving half a 980 Pro tested alone).

Intel's Ryan Shrout posted the above performance comparison graph on Twitter as a "sneak peak" of Rocket Lake's PCIe Gen 4 storage performance. This raised the question of whether AMD systems might have benefited from mounting the 980 Pro in an M.2 slot attached directly to the CPU, as in the Rocket Lake platform, rather than in the X570 chipset.

"Allyn did not test using the M.2 slot, but rather the x16 slot with riser card to ensure the CPU was installed on both platforms," Shrout explained in a follow-up tweet.

This means that PCIe 4.0 SSDs will run faster on Rocket Lake than on Ryzen. Not so, UL described the Quick System benchmark as "a shorter test using less-intensive real-world traces," noting that it is better suited for running on "smaller system drives that cannot run the Full System Drive benchmark."

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In other words, this is a carefully selected result that likely represents a best-case scenario and is not necessarily representative of how PCIe 4.0 SSDs generally perform in relation to two independent Intel and AMD platforms.

Granted, it is quite possible that Rocket Lake could extract even more performance from the fastest and best SSDs for gaming than we have seen from AMD so far, and if so, hats off to Intel. However, it is also possible that other benchmarks will show different results. However, there is no way of knowing just yet.

The good news is that both Rocket Lake and the two newest models of Ryzen desktop CPUs (the 5000 and 3000 series when paired with an X570 or B550 motherboard) can utilize PCIe 4.0 SSDs. However, in certain situations, an 11% advantage may make sense.

Gaming is not one such application, at least not at this time. Currently, even SATA-based SSDs perform nearly as well as the fastest NVMe SSDs in gaming (the fastest SATA SSDs have top speeds of about 550-580 MB/sec), despite the large gap in rated performance. This situation may change as both modern game consoles will have PCIe 4.0 SSDs, which will allow developers to take advantage of faster SSDs. For now, however, SATA SSDs alone are sufficient for gaming.