Any plan to add more expansion slots?

Creators & Developers
1

A lot of laptop have more than 4 IO slots, and it looks like the Framework can potentially have 6 or even 8 slots in total. Any plan to add extra expansion slots?

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2

The decision to go with four is likely to be due to the limited amount of PCIe lanes supported by the cpu.
We have 20 lanes, that makes 4 lanes each plus the internal nvme slot.

I guess it is theoretically possible to add more slots, but you’d loose the thunderbolt speed, since they’d have to share the bandwidth.

Edit:
Also now that they decided to go with four, it is unlikely that they are willing to change the whole board-layout again.

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3

I think that multihport expansion cars are more likely.

4

I think people have already discounted dual port USB A expansion cards due to there being insufficient room for two ports side by side. But dual port USB C expansion cards (implemented as a 2 port hub with no PD) are being explored: Dual USB-C Expansion Card Mockup

And I would hope that Framework will eventually release larger form factors, with room for more than 4 expansion cards

5

I guess multiports with one USB-A and one USB-C are more logical, as this way you don’t have to use a USB-C without PD (USB-A doesn’t support it by spec anyway). Also that combination should be easier to fit on a single card.

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6

Multiport USB-C + USB-A cards would be awesome! My dream setup would be two of those with an HDMI output and the extra slot for swappable 1TB storage.

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