Intel Beats AMD in NVMe PCIe Gen 4 SSD - 11% More Performance!

That Intel is late (very late if we are very technical) to the fight for PCIe 4.0 in its mainstream processors is a fait accompli. AMD swept them away in this regard for a long time, taking the advantage of the higher bandwidth available to its processors for two years. Now, Intel tries to alleviate this temporary disadvantage with its Rocket Lake architecture, and according to the first leaked data, that could be said about: the last will be the first since the i9-11900K manages to outperform the Ryzen 9 5950X in SSD performance.

The fight seems tighter than ever in the range of gaming CPUs par excellence. And it is that although Intel has lost the battle of the cores in this generation, it seems that that will not matter when evaluating the performance in games and software is about. Its new flagship, the i9-11900K, will apparently be faster than its direct rival in a section so far key for many users: the speed in NVMe SSDs.

Intel cuts all the downside and achieves the best performance with PCIe 4.0

At #CES21 we looked at Rocket Lake-S gaming. Here’s a sneak peek of Core i9-11900K PCIe Gen 4 storage performance - up to 11% faster on PCMark 10 Quick System Drive Benchmark vs the 5950X. Thanks @Malventano for the data. Backup: https://t.co/LcI5n5Cok2 pic.twitter.com/NhblHRQJSC

— Ryan Shrout (@ryanshrout) February 23, 2021

Although the normal thing in these cases would be to compare both processors in an area as common as the M.2 slot with PCIe 4.0, the comparative tests have gone a step further and have wanted to ensure the performance of the tested unit (Samsung 980 PRO 1 TB) under that version of the bus.

And it seems that the BIOS version of the Intel processor motherboard was in BETA version at that time, so the only way to ensure that the SSD was connected to the processor directly was using a PCI-E AIC card. This was also done on the AM4 platform, so the contest was completely even in this regard.

The slide shows an 11% better performance for the Intel CPU in a test that could be somewhat controversial, such as the PCMark 10 Quick System Drive Benchmark since we are not facing real environment software no matter how much 3DMark insists on state otherwise. But this also does not detract from the data provided as such, since most tests are made with synthetic benchmarks of similar depth.

The advantage is that using this test the OS of this Samsung 980 PRO has been excluded, so the SSD has been tested as a test unit only, free of any operating system load.

Differences in platforms are key

Although Intel has finally updated to PCIe 4.0, the truth is that AMD has another clear advantage, and it is nothing more than its X570 chipset. Intel in its new Z590 does not include PCIe 4.0 lines, but PCIe 3.0, so the performance factor in RAID systems for M.2 is more than limited, which is not the case in AMD. Therefore, having tested them with a PCIe card guarantees that in both cases the performance has always been related to the CPU.

If the data ends up being confirmed in the corresponding reviews, any SSD will perform more on Intel's platform than AMD's, and not by little, because 11% is not a marginal difference as such, it is rather bulky.

This would leave Lisa Su quite bad, since if finally, Rocket Lake wins the crown of gaming performance for GPU and also for SSD, they would only have as a claim the highest number of cores because the performance in IPC seems to also fall from the side of the blue team.

Could Rocket Lake-S be a lot better than we thought? Does Zen 3 finally have a competition to the point of becoming inferior as a platform?