It’s only been a few months since Alder Lake-S that we are already talking about the sequel: Raptor Lake-S. Indeed, we have some information about what the new Intel 700 Series chipsets would offer.
700 Series: more PCIe and more USB… Basically!
For the moment, as you can imagine, we are clearly far from having all the information concerning the future batch of Intel chipsets. On the other hand, there are already some elements, especially regarding the number of USB and PCIe lines. It remains to be seen whether this will change in the coming months.
Anyway, for the moment, the 700 Series should support more PCIe lines. Well, more PCIe 4.0 lines especially. As we can see, the 700 series sacrifices PCIe 3.0 for 4.0. Thus, the future B760 would lose four lines in PCIe 3.0 to add them in PCIe 4.0, the same for the H760. The Z790 would gain 8 PCIe 4.0 lines while sacrificing 8 PCIe 3.0 lines.
The aim seems to be to emphasize M.2 storage with this type of interface, or at least to maximize the possibilities with the latter.
Concerning the USB, we notice that the future Z790 gains in USB 3.2 Gen2x2. The number of ports increases from four in the Z690 to five with the Z790. Nothing extraordinary, but it should also be noted.
As a reminder, Raptor Lake should arrive at the end of the year (if all goes well) and offer processors with up to 24 cores/32 threads.
