The mesh is described in a bit more detail in Anandtech's previous article [1]. The figures are directly from the paper they cite [2], which is available on SciHub. I admit to not reading it in detail, only looking at the figures, but I'm amazed that with as many redrivers and repeaters as they have, they can only hit 2.4GHz on the mesh (as quoted on page 7 of this article). That thing has got to be dragging the whole architecture down.
> Just for curiosity: what workload allows you to go with NVIDIA instead of Intel (rather than AMD)?
The particular workload I'm thinking of is Abaqus FEA. Per-core licensing is a part of that, but it's starved for double-precision (FP64) FLOPS and thus runs great on an appropriate Tesla. We have a number of K40s (which last I looked was the best workstation FP64 Tesla) for that exact reason. And they cost less than a single "Gold 6154" Xeon that the sibling comment (rightly) singles out for good single-thread performance. Throw in Abaqus's horrid per-CPU-core licensing and it's a no-brainer. Intel is just charging too much money for anything launched today to be viable in a workstation.
[1]: http://www.anandtech.com/show/11550/the-intel-skylakex-revie...
[2]: MoDe-X: Microarchitecture of a Layout-Aware Modular Decoupled Crossbar for On-Chip Interconnects, DOI: 10.1109/TC.2012.203