Intel Z890 motherboard should feature Thunderbolt 4
Leaker spills the beans on Intel’s next-gen desktop platform.
Hardware leaker Golden Pig Upgrade (金猪升级包) claims that the next-gen Z890 motherboards will come with Thunderbolt 4 connection as standard. This is a surprising detail given that Intel announced Thunderbolt 5 in September last year .
Thunderbolt 4 isn’t a major update over version 3. For external GPUs using this version, there is no performance benefit as both are limited to 40 Gbps bandwidth. Thunderbolt 5, however, can support up to 120 Gbps, which would be a significant update for such devices and any devices that use a lot of bandwidth, such as SSD storage.
According to the leaker, the Z890 motherboard will feature Thunderbolt 4 as standard. This implies that some may and probably will get Thunderbolt 5, but how many and what the price for this extra support will be is something we do not know yet. As one should remember, Intel is working on a Thunderbolt 5 controller called “Barlow Bridge” , specifically for the Arrow Lake-S processor series.
Intel Z890 & Core Ultra 200 Desktop Rumors, Source: Weibo
Another interesting detail is that the Core Ultra 200 desktop series, featuring the basic GT1 graphics, will include up to 4 Xe-Cores. This is only half of what the Core Ultra 100 Meteor Lake can offer, but there are some low-power SKUs that feature such configurations. Needless to say, this will be a gaming-capable platform, but it is not really meant to be.
On the other hand, Intel will be releasing the Core Ultra 200V series, known as “Lunar Lake,” which is a low-power mobile platform featuring not 4 but 8 Xe2-Cores. As the name suggests, that’s also a newer architecture, so the performance boost over Arrow Lake should be more than doubled.
The specifications of the mobile Arrow Lake series (Core Ultra 200H) are not yet known, but it appears that portable devices intended for gaming should stick to Lunar Lake chips regardless, given their superior graphics performance.
| Intel Core CPU Series (Speculation) | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| VideoCardz.com | Configuration Cores/Threads ↓ | Base Clock (P-Core) | Boost Clock (P-Core) | GPU | PBP (TDP) |
| Core Ultra 200 “Arrow Lake-S” | |||||
| Core Ultra 9 285K | Expected 24C/24T (8P+16E) | TBC | 5.5 GHz | 4 Xe-Cores | 125W |
| Core Ultra 7 275 | TBC | TBC | TBC | TBC | 65W |
| Core Ultra 7 265K | TBC | TBC | TBC | TBC | 125W |
| Core Ultra 5 255 | TBC | TBC | TBC | TBC | 65W |
| Core Ultra 5 245K | TBC | TBC | TBC | TBC | 125W |
| Core Ultra 5 240 | TBC | TBC | TBC | TBC | 65W |
| 14th Gen Core “Raptor Lake-Refresh” | |||||
| Core i9-14900KS | 24C/32T (8P+16E) | 3.2 GHz | 6.2 GHz | 32 EUs | 150W |
| Core i9-14900K | 24C/32T (8P+16E) | 3.2 GHz | 6.0 GHz | 32 EUs | 125W |
| Core i9-14900 | 24C/32T (8P+16E) | 2.0 GHz | 5.8 GHz | 65W | |
| Core i7-14700K | 20C/28T (8P+12E) | 3.4 GHz | 5.6 GHz | 32 EUs | 125W |
| Core i7-14700 | 20C/28T (8P+12E) | 2.1 GHz | 5.4 GHz | 65W | |
| Core i5-14600K | 14C/20T (6P+8E) | 3.5 GHz | 5.3 GHz | 32 EUs | 125W |
| Core i5-14600 | 14C/20T (6P+8E) | 2.7 GHz | 5.2 GHz | 32 EUs | 65W |
| Core i5-14500 | 14C/20T (6P+8E) | 2.6 GHz | 5.0 GHz | 32 EUs | 65W |
| Core i5-14400 | 10C/16T (6P+4E) | 2.5 GHz | 4.7 GHz | 24 EUs | 65W |
| Core i3-14100 | 4C/8T (4P+0E) | 3.5 GHz | – | 24 EUs | 60W |
| Intel 300 | 2C/4T (2P+0E) | 3.9 GHz | – | 16 EUs | 46W |
Source: Golden Pig Upgrade (Weibo)