[Rohansi]

Yeah but some people need to justify their $1,800 USD purchase of laptop that comes with only 8 GB of RAM. Even though most laptops manufactured today would also come with NVMe (PCIe directly connected to the CPU, usually) flash storage, which is used by all operating systems as swap.

[mschuster91]

NVMe by no means is directly connected to the CPU directly, usually it's connected through at least one PCIe switch.

[Rohansi]

It's harder to confirm for laptops but you can refer to motherboard manuals to see if any of your PCIe-related slots go through a switch or not. For example, my current PC has a PCIe x16 slot, x1 slot, and two M.2 NVMe slots. It says everything is integrated into the CPU except the x1 slot which goes through the motherboard chipset. I don't see why any laptop would make NVMe go through a PCIe switch unless the CPU doesn't provide enough lanes to support everything supported by the motherboard. Even the at the lowest end, a dual core Intel Core i3-10110U (laptop processor from 2019) has 16 lanes from the CPU which could support at least one NVMe without going through a switch.