News Intel Nova Lake specs leaked — Up to 52 cores and 150W of TDP for Intel's AMD Zen 6 rival

[thestryker]

There wouldn't be an operational problem with that, just not the performance you'd want and perhaps an economic waste.

The performance problems caused are the real issue as bandwidth is finite. I've never seen a downstream connection that allows for more individual link bandwidth than is available total. I imagine it wouldn't be particularly difficult to limit maximum link lanes based on PCIe generation. The biggest issue with providing 16 lanes is still board and silicon cost.