Gigabyte Confirms Intel Rocket Lake-S Release In March And Adds Resizable BAR Support To Its Z490 Boards
In its latest press release, Gigabyte has officially announced that the newest yet to be announced 11th Gen Intel Core processors, also codenamed Rocket Lake-S, will ship in March. The press release itself was about the support of the old boards for the new CPUs.
Gigabyte, in particular, announced that all its motherboards based on the Z490 chipset with hardware PCIe 4.0 support will be fully compatible with the new CPUs – it will only need to update the BIOS to the latest version of the F20. In addition, all users of the company’s boards based on the Z490 and H470 system logic sets will have access to the Resizable BAR technology as part of the latest update.
Recall that it is the Resizable BAR (Base Address Registers) resizing technology, which has been in the PCI Express interface specifications since version 2.0, that is the basis of AMD Smart Access Memory (SAM), which provides a performance increase when new Radeon RX 6000 video cards with compatible processors are running. Whereas in ordinary Windows-based PCs, processors can directly access only a portion of the graphics memory up to 256 MB, the Resizable BAR technology can expand the data channel, allowing the processor to use the entire video memory array at once. This removes potential bottlenecks and provides performance gains in some games ( AMD estimates- up to 15 %). The technology is especially relevant now when the amount of video memory used by games often exceeds even 10 GB. Resizable BAR already works well on Radeon RX 6000 bundles with AMD processors on motherboards with B550 and X570 chipsets, as well as with Intel chips on motherboards from ASUS and ASRock. Since this is part of the PCI Express specifications, NVIDIA also plans to add support for the technology to some of its graphics accelerators.
Gigabyte recalled that it introduced support for PCI Express 4.0 last year in Z490 motherboards – we are talking about the corresponding slots, PCIe and M.2 and controllers. With the launch of new Intel processors, this interface will be able to take advantage of the owners of the corresponding graphics cards and solid-state drives.
