Slightly OT question: what is meant by a chipset supporting Thunderbolt, as the one in this demo is rumored to? Does it mean that there are pins on the chipset that can be connected directly to a Thunderbolt connector, or is it just a meaningless statement that the chipset provides PCIe lanes that could be routed to a Thunderbolt bridge chip, or something else?
"We speculate this is Grantley-EP and Wellsburg PCH. If so, the server supports Thunderbolt and features DDR4 speeds of 2400 and 3200MHz. However, these specs are pure conjecture."
They're obviously under the impression that a new generation of CPU+chipset provides some degree of Thunderbolt support that is lacking in server components currently on the market: either that Intel's requiring Thunderbolt controllers to be included on the motherboard, or that the CPU or chipset provides a Thunderbolt controller.
At high speed you need a dedicated hardware peripheral to manage key protocol elements like fragmentation, bus arbitratration, and forward error correction. By putting that hardware in the chipset you don't need a special chip so costs are lower for the oem, and buyer.
