Hardly anyone cares about things like Thunderbolt as well.
A statement that could only be made by someone ignorant of the fact that Thunderbolt 4 is implicitly USB4 compatible. Or in other words, ARL natively supports two USB4/TB4 ports, each running at the maximum 40Gbps, without having to sacrifice any PCIe lanes at all. It's basically free for board manufacturers to add these ports without eating into other board functionality.
In contrast, Zen 5 only gets USB4 (no TB4) with the bolt-on ASM4124, which offers one 40Gbps USB4 ports and one slower 20Gbps one. It also consumes four valuable PCIe 5.0 lanes from the CPU, on a platform that is already lane-staved. Not only does this force board manufacturers to pay for ASM4124, it also forces them to cut four lanes' worth of functionality, and manufacturers hate being forced to compromise.
I stand by my statement that ARL is massively superior to Zen 4 and 5 in terms of platform connectivity. If there are any Z890 boards with dual x16 slots (something literally not possible on Zen 4/5 because of its garbage IO) then I will almost certainly be upgrading to ARL, performance be damned. Hell, even an x16 + x8 combo might convince me (this is theoretically possible on Zen 4/5 but nobody does it because of the way lanes are emitted by the chipset, again, another shit design choice).
AMD needs to wake the fuck up and stop stiffing consumers on IO. I paid a thousand quid for this half-decade-old Threadripper system to get decent IO because AMD's "latest and greatest" won't provide it (not can't, won't, because it was a deliberate decision), and if Intel can give me that IO in a modern platform for less than what I paid for this old one, they will have my money.
I thought the consensus was that E-cores aren’t “real cores” and Intel shouldn’t include them, but give “muh enthusiasts” 2 more P-cores. Now we are straight up making them equal to Ps and not treating them like the HT replacement they are?
So which is it?
View attachment 368842
Goal post moving, that's what.