Z170 bandwidth

[Cenuij]

I don't understand the reasoning behind some of the Z170/skylake architecture choices...

So there's 20x PCIe 3 lanes chained off the PCH right? So I read about this and think "Oh that's nice, RAID 1 on a couple of NVME drives, plenty of room for my older SSDs". Then I notice there's only 4 lanes between the chipset and CPU... So none of these current "high end" motherboards actually have the bandwidth to support the I/O connectivity they advertise?

What's the likelyhood of a different chipset release this cycle to make up for this? As it stands it looks like a bit of a duffer of a release

 

[Dave2150]

Z170 is the evolution of Z97.

Z97 provided 2GB/sec between PCH (chipset) and CPU.
Z170 provides 4GB/sec.

Double the bandwidth is quite a good improvement IMO, as it allows consumers to use a fast M.2/U.2 PCI-E V3 X4 SSD and get full speeds from it.

If you need more bandwidth than that, X99 has been available for over a year already.