If building a lower end/low cost router this is absolutely a consideration. In single socket regular ATX form factor, and products in the price range of $165 for a motherboard and $250-400 price range for a CPU.

Comparing the PCI-E lanes available on an Intel Core i7 series to something AMD zen/zen2 based (Ryzen), the AMD has greatly more. Some of the Intel single socket core i5/i7 products have just enough PCI-E lanes for their own onboard gigabit NIC and one PCI-E 3.0 x16 GPU for gaming purposes.

Would absolutely be a consideration if trying to build something with 8 to 12 10GbE interfaces capable of bursty traffic, but not flows and traffic levels that would require line rate on all ports simultaneously.

On Sun, Oct 25, 2020 at 10:13 AM Vincent Bernat <bernat@luffy.cx> wrote:

❦ 24 octobre 2020 09:55 -06, Keith Medcalf:

> And do not use an Intel CPU.
>
> Intel only has 4x PCIe lanes that are shared out into whatever
> configuration they claim to have and are totally unsuitable for use in
> a computer that actually has to be able to do high-speed I/O.

That's likely to be incorrect. Intel CPU usually have 48 lanes for the
Skylake generation. The 4 lanes limitation only applies to what is
connected over DMI to the PCH, which is usually used for low-bandwidth
stuff (1G NIC, SATA, 1x PCIe slots). Look at your motherboard manual to
check how many lanes are affected to each component.
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