[gnode]

I agree that 8x Thunderbolt 3 is probably excessive, and I wouldn't want to trade away the current connectivity options as was suggested.

> If you take away the bandwidth from Thunderbolt 3 it just becomes USB

It becomes low bandwidth Thunderbolt / PCIe. You could still use it to attach PCIe devices which don't need a lot of bandwidth. GPUs can be attached for high performance compute where CPU-GPU bandwidth isn't critical. PCIe has non-bandwidth benefits over USB such as DMA and interrupts.

> why not just offer USB connectors which have even broader support and not as many cabling restrictions?

You can't attach PCIe devices via USB, but you can attach USB and PCIe devices via Thunderbolt.

[kllrnohj]

You could also do all that with just a PCI-E x1 slot and use the x1 to remote x16 connector referenced in the blog post to extend it. No reason to mess with Thunderbolt just to have any PCIE capability at all.