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Absolutely doable. The modern i7's have 40 PCIe lanes. If you built a quad processor system you would have 160 PCIe lanes... Have a look at the obscene number of PCIe lanes in modern server architectures.

The bigger issue would be memory bandwidth, but I think that could also be engineered around.

Edit: SuperMicro sells a system with 8 PCIE 3.0 x16 + 7 PCIE 3.0 x8 ... 184 lanes not counting the other onboard peripherals. So it basically exists minus the Apple form factor.



> Edit: SuperMicro sells a system

Which product is that, specifically?

It’s of course achievable with any CPU using PCIe switches. However, they don’t magically increase bandwidth.

Two CPUs is probably all that can be crammed into a case that small, so 80 lanes (+ ~8 via PCH) is as good as it gets.


A very ugly 7U server: https://www.supermicro.com/products/system/7U/7088/SYS-7088B...

The point was less about the form factor and more about the number of PCIe lanes that can conceivably be available and the associated memory/bus bandwidth that is possible.


Haha, I see. That's a blade center with 8 "PCs", each supporting one PCIe x16 card and some supporting an additional x16 card (with only 8 lanes connected).

It's not really comparable to this project.




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