Storage 1TB M2 - 3200mb/s Read speed

Intel really needs to slap an extra 4 PCIe lanes onto cannonlake dedicated to a M.2 slot, as DMI is going to bottleneck things pretty quickly here.

 

On Z170 boards it caps at 3.5GB/s, so yes, Intel will certainly need to address this.

However, if they don't want to update it again within 6 month they might as well go full monty and go PCIE 4 x16 M.2...

 

You can't add lanes because that adds cost, that's the problem. The next step is making them PCIE Gen4 and doubling the throughput on the same # of lanes or using an alternative, fast fabric.

 

Whilst i much prefer Anand's testing methods vs PCMark & whatnot, the graphs at the top of page 4 show how pointless the extra speed is for an average consumer - which is what i've argued with m.2 drives since last year; if there is significant extra cost vs a decent 2.5" drive, of course.

Then, looking further at the thing, if i were in the market then i would personally wait a few months for the 960 Pro as there's also some odd performance issues, that will be reliant upon f/w updates - &, ttbomk, the retail 950 was much better served in this regard than the 951.

 

I seriously doubt adding an extra 16 or so pins and a bee's dick worth of die space is going to break the bank. If intel can provide 16 lanes on Celeron dies, I think they could do 20 on the i5/i7's. Besides, if the lanes are hardwired to a M.2 slot, there's no risk of cannibalising SLI/Xfire s2011 sales.

That being said, when PCIe 4 shows up, we can probably drop graphics to 8x (do PCIe lanes actually need to be a power of 2 or can we do 12x?) and have dual 4x m.2 slots.