I'd have expected HDMI LA to be very very strict in enforcing actions against HDCP strippers. If not, why even keep up the game? It's not like pirates can already defeat virtually all copy protection mechanisms on the market, even before HDCP ever enters the field.

I use ROG board that has 4 PCIe slots. While each can physically seat an x16 card, only one of them has 16 lanes -- the rest are x4. I had to demote my GPU to a slower slot in order to get full throughput from my 100GbE card. All this despite having a CPU with 64 lanes available.

> 1x PCI Express x16 slot (PCIEX16), integrated in the CPU:

> AMD Ryzen™ 9000/7000 Series Processors support PCIe 5.0 x16 mode

> * The M2B_CPU and M2C_CPU connectors share bandwidth with the PCIEX16 slot.

> When theM2B_CPU orM2C_CPU connector is populated, the PCIEX16 slot operates at up to x8 mode.

[1]: https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/X870E-AORUS-PRO-ICE-rev...

[0] shows a pretty "worst case" impact of 1-4% - that's on the absolute highest-end card possible (a geforce 5090) and pushing it down to 16x PCIe3.0. A lower end card would likely show an even smaller difference. They even showed zero impact from 16xPCIe4.0, which is the same bandwidth as 8x of the PCIe5.0 lanes supported on X870E boards like you mentioned.

Though if you're not on a gaming use case and know you're already PCIe limited it could be larger - but people who have that sort of use case likely already know what to look for, and have systems tuned to that use case more than "generic consumer gamer board"

[0] https://gamersnexus.net/gpus/nvidia-rtx-5090-pcie-50-vs-40-v...

Same thing that Avego did with Broadcom, LSI, Brocade etc... during the 2010's, buy a market leader, dump the parts that they didn't want, leaving a huge hole in the market.

When you realize that Avego was the brand produced when KKR and Silver Lake bought the chip biz from Agilent, it is just the typical private equity play, buy your market position and sell off or shut down the parts you don't care about.