Could future mainboards have x16 interposers? (Not request but possibility)

Framework Laptop 16
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Totally spitballing here, but I’ve heard that eGPUs actually suffer from not having 16 PCIe lanes to play with. It’d probably be a SERIOUS endeavor, but I’m wondering about the possibility - could future mainboards support x16 interfaces with the expansion bay? Is it mechanically possible?

I’m not much of an engineer, despite how much I love the Framework ethos, otherwise I’d try to figure it out myself.

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Everything is possible. But it would be very hard to A) have the new expansion bay be compatible with x8 mainboards B) have the new mainboard be compatible with old x8 expansion bays C) have all of these compatible with the old midplate

Also many laptops CPUs tend to have a very limited amount of PCIe lanes. The 7040 has 20 lanes, using 16 for a GPU gives very little bandwidth for other important things, like SSDs, Wifi cards, USB4 ports…

PCIe Gen4 x8 is already a lot of bandwidth and I would expect the link to go faster instead of wider in the future. PCIe Gen5 and Gen6 are already ready to be implemented.

2 Likes
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I didn’t know about the limited PCIe lanes on laptop CPUs bit. Going faster rather than wider definitely makes sense. Thanks for the response.

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This is the FP11 ( next gen mobil AMD , Strix Halo )
mobil chipset …

850×308 85.5 KB

(via https://videocardz.com/newz/amd-strix-halo-zen5-rdna3-5-premium-apu-rumors-take-shape )

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Looks my seconds SSD will be connected via USB soon oO

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or
we can use
2x Samsung 990 EVO 2TB NVMe SSD with Gen 5 mode with x2 PCIe lanes.
( Interface: PCIe® 4.0 x4 / 5.0 x2, NVMe2.0 )

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I am here for it!

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That is for Strix Halo, AMD’s powerful CPU+GPU combo unit. Since it has such a powerful GPU integrated (rumored to be around 4070 mobile performance) they have fewer PCIe lanes due to not being expected to be paired with a GPU.

Afaik Strix Point, the successor to Hawk Point and Phoenix Point (what Framework currently offers) is still expected to have 20 PCIe lanes.

Also, as you image shows Strix Point is expected to have at least 4 PCIe 5.0 lanes. 4 PCIe 5.0 + 8 PCIe 4.0 is equivalent in bandwidth to 16 PCIe 4.0 lanes. Framework is currently using 17 lanes. So Strix Halo will only have very slightly less PCIe bandwidth than what Framework currently uses, but may require some PCIe switches to make work.