what I don't get: why doesn't AMD just roll Gen6 out in their CPU, bifurcate it to Gen5, and boom, you have 48x2 Gen5s? same argument for gen5 bifurcated to gen4.

this would solve the biggest issue with non-server motherboards: not enough PCIe lanes.

Bifurcation can't create new lanes, only split the existing lane count up into separate logical slots.

What you're saying is possible though, you just need something a little heavier like a PCIe switch do the lane count + mixed-speed conversion magic. That's exactly what the chipset is, but for various reasons it's still only PCIe 4.0, even on the latest generation chips. I wouldn't be surprised if that changed again next generation. The downsides of this approach are switches add cost, latency, and can consume a lot of power. When they first upped the chipset to be a PCIe 4.0 connection in the 500 era, most motherboards capable of using the bandwidth of the chipset actually had to add chipset cooling.

Ideally they'd just add alternative options with more lanes directly from the CPU, but that'd add competition to the bottom of the Threadripper line.

> this would solve the biggest issue with non-server motherboards: not enough PCIe lanes.

Is that a problem?

These days, you don't need slots for your sound card and network card, that stuff's all integrated on the motherboard.

Plenty of enthusiast motherboards support 1 GPU, 3-4 nvme drives, 4 SATA drives, and have a PCIe 1x slot or two to spare.

Is anyone struggling, except folks working with LLMs? Seems to me folks looking to put several $2400 RTX 4090s in one machine ain't exactly a big market. And they'll probably want a giant server board, so they have space for all their giant four-slot-wide cards.