AMD Begins Cutting Prices On Ryzen CPUs

[grok]

Ryzen 5/7 offers more lanes than "regular" i5/i7 CPUs, but less than higher end ones like >= 6800K. AMD has a track record of poking Intel by not purposefully crippling lower-end parts and offering features down the whole stack. This is a good and common underdog strategy. Ryzen already does this with overclocking, SMT, etc. whereas Intel limits these features to certain SKUs. Zen2 may very well try to do this with I/O. If Ryzen 7/5 2*** (guessing on marketing evolution) are all 4 CCX parts it would immediately give them a PCI-E advantage over Intel at the high end, and make Intel look ridiculous in the middle/low range where they'll offer far more I/O.

Even if 4 CCX is only for the Ryzen 7 replacements it would still give AMD a I/O leg up down the whole stack.

This all assumes Intel sits still in this regard, and they've made it clear they will not. The CPU race is back on! :-D

A four CCX die obviously won't fit in an AM4 motherboard, unless you don't connect the new additional memory channels and PCIe.
So I'll disagree about an advantage on the low end, unless they will somehow move everyone to Thread Ripper motherboards and make them very cheap (which I doubt as well : 155W CPU support and tons of lanes and stuff will not find their way on a $50 or $60 motherboards).
In fact on the low end AMD only has 8 PCIe lanes for the "graphics" PCIe slot although for now the stuff below Ryzen on AM4 are OEM products only. (APU and CPU with the iGPU disabled)
Of course there are the "storage" 4 PCIe lanes, the built-in USB etc. so it's not too bad either. Low end Intel (Celeron, Pentium) does have 16x PCIe lanes although on low end chipsets they can't be broken up, are for the first PCIe 16x slot only.