Intel is prototyping PCIe 4.0 SSDs, but needs AMD CPUs to test them
Facepalm: An errant tweet has revealed that Intel’s second generation Optane 3D XPoint SSDs are being sampled to developers, with a new flagship feature: PCIe 4.0 support. The only problem? Intel doesn’t have any CPUs that support PCIe 4.0. Maybe AMD can lend them some. Oh, the irony.
AMD became the first to support PCIe 4.0 with third-generation Ryzen. While at launch the upgrade over Intel’s PCIe 3.0 was mostly academic, a slew of PCIe 4.0 SSDs have since been released with speeds almost twice as fast as previous generations. Intel’s CPU department might not have seen that as a big deal but apparently, their storage division does.
