An interface for coupling an agent to a fabric supports a load/store interconnect protocol and includes a header channel implemented on a first subset of a plurality of physical lanes, the first subset of lanes including first lanes to carry a header of a packet based on the interconnect protocol and second lanes to carry metadata for the header. The interface additionally includes a data channel implemented on a separate second subset of the plurality of physical lanes, the second subset of lanes including third lanes to carry a payload of the packet and fourth lanes to carry metadata for the payload.