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Comment by jeffbee | Hacker News Reader

> Intel workstation CPUs ... don't. G12 has 16xPCIe 5 and 4xPCIe 4.

Intel's current workstation CPU line, launched a year ago, has 64 PCIe 4.0 lanes. https://www.pugetsystems.com/recommended/Recommended-Systems...

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I didn’t realize Xeon had improved that much but his point still stands as threadripper has 128 lanes. AMD is better at the moment.

I believe the red team processors don't treat all PCIe lanes equally, much like the earlier blue team processors did. So that 128 lanes is not 128 lanes. More like 128 lanes with caveats. Though my information may be out of date as it has been a year or so since I last looked at AMD options.

The only caveat I know of is that on a dual socket system you won't get twice as many lanes. 48 (or 64, depends on the configuration) of each are used for the interconnect to the other socket. Then of course the performance of any slot-to-slot traffic may depend on the different paths taken inside the interconnect, but that only matters for very high-bandwidth of low-latency applications.

It is true, the CPU-to-CPU interconnect fabric on both blue team and red team play into that, and it varies between generations and motherboards and chip sets. It gets very confusing quite quickly. Some server boards will let you dedicate PCIe slots to a specific CPU, others won't let you not dedicate certain slots to a CPU.

Unless you're looking at a Zen 1 chip, it should all be pretty equal.

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