Intel Skylake Chipsets May Receive a Significant PCIe Upgrade

[[Coi] Mr.CLuBBeR]

Leaked slide shows next generation chipsets with more PCIe lanes

It's been several years since we've seen a meaningful upgrade to PCI Express in Intel's chipsets. For the most part, budget on up to high-end motherboards have been limited to eight lanes at Gen2 speeds, though it appears that's going to change once Skylake arrives. A leaked slide posted to a Chinese-language website indicates that Intel's forthcoming 100 Series chipset for Skylake will ditch PCIe's eight Gen2 lanes for up to 20 lanes running at Gen3 speeds.
Only the H110 chipset with stay at Gen2 speeds with six lanes. Here's how the others look:

• H170: 16 lanes, Gen3
• Z170: 20 lanes, Gen3
• B150: 8 lanes, Gen3
• Q150: 10 lanes, Gen3
• Q170: 20 lanes, Gen3

These upgrades play into the push for solid state storage, and according to the slide, the 100 Series chipsets will provide up to four lanes of bandwidth for M.2 SSDs. And on the high-end Z170 chipset, it lists Intel Rapid Storage Technology as supporting up to three M.2 or SATA Express drives -- the Z97 supports just one.
In addition to upgrading PCIe, you can expect more USB 3.0 ports, at least on higher end boards. The Z170, for example, supports 10 USB 3.0 ports, and 14 USB ports total. Today's Z97 chipset also supports 14 total USB ports, though just six are of the USB 3.0 variety.
What the slides don't reveal are any potential upgrades to the chipset's CPU interconnect.
You can check out the slides here.
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