Alder Lake and the Z690 Chipset

https://www.pcmag.com/about/alder-lake-and-the-new-z690-chipset-is-this-intels-most-innovative-platform

It will be interesting to see. I've heard AMD isn't going the big.LITTLE route (yet), planning to have CPUs with equal cores for the next generation Ryzen.

Speaking of comparisons...

AMD Ryzen 3000/5000 series CPUs have 24 PCIe connections:

• 16 to standard PCIe slots -- typically the first one or two.
• 4 to one of the (PCIe compatible) M.2 slots
• 4 to the chipset -- which shares that bandwidth among the integrated audio processor/controllers, integrated network controllers, USB ports, SATA ports, other M.2 slots, etc

I noticed Intel didn't upgrade/expand to 24 PCIe lane support, still just 20 lanes, on the Alder Lake CPUs.

Originally posted by PC Magazine The remaining four PCIe 5.0 lanes are intended for use with M.2 NVMe SSDs.

I'm slightly confused by this after seeing the diagram.



The interconnect is "X8 DMI 4.0" -- coincidentally clever? Four PCIe 5.0 lanes equal eight PCIe 4.0 lanes. In other words, to me, these are the four PCIe five lanes besides the 16 allocated to the first two standard PCIe slots.

Where are the "+ 1x4 PCIe 4.0 lanes" (top-left of diagram) coming from? Do the CPUs have 20 PCIe 5.0 + 4 PCIe 4.0? If so, that's not what I understood from the article.

Edited by MrCheetah - 29 Oct 2021 at 8:53am