I am not an expert, but from what I know, Xeon based chips have a lot more PCI and other IO lanes. So you can for instance have a dedicated lane for each thunde

I am not an expert, but from what I know, Xeon based chips have a lot more PCI and other IO lanes. So you can for instance have a dedicated lane for each thunderbolt and USB 3 port on the laptop. With i7, you may have 2 thunderbolt ports, for instance, but those 2 ports will share the same 20Gbps lane to the chip. With Xeon you can, at least theoretically, connect each thunderbolt on its own lane. Edit: According to the Wikipedia the Skylake i7 and i5 suppose to have 20 PCIe lanes. [1] The Xeon E5 v3 Family has 40 PCIe lanes, so I am assuming same is going to be true for the Skylake version of the Xeon. You also have the possibility of 6 cores! I'll take that :) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylake_(microarchitecture) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylake_(microarchitecture)