Right now, Arm"s DevSummit is taking place, and AMD is about to announce its Zen 3 architecture tomorrow, so you might not be surprised to hear that Intel has something to announce as well. The company confirmed that its 11th-generation "Rocket Lake" desktop CPUs will be arriving in the first quarter of 2021.
It also confirmed that the new S-series processors will finally have support for PCIe 4, which has double the bandwidth of PCIe 3, as it was a significant shortcoming for Comet Lake S against AMD"s Ryzen chips. That"s all that Intel confirmed, although we can reasonably expect native support for Thunderbolt 4, like we"ve already seen in the 11th-generation mobile processors.
One other thing that we know is that Rocket Lake S processors will use the LGA 1200 socket that debuted with Comet Lake S, so if you"re upgrading from 10th-gen, you won"t have to get an all-new motherboard. LGA 1200 won"t stick around forever though. LGA 115x was supported from sixth-gen through ninth-gen; don"t expect the same from LGA 1200.
The biggest question mark will be if Rocket Lake will still be based on a 14nm process, which Intel has been using for years in its desktop chips. The company finally produced some 10nm chips for ultrabooks with the 10th-gen lineup, but the bulk of 10th-gen was still 14nm.