This is from the 7040 series mainboard schematic:
Is there are reason to not expose 4 PCIE 4.0 lanes on this slot as it could really help with expansion for things like 2230 storage, Oculink etc.
Would like know if there are technical/financial reasons to not do this.
It is a physical limitation.
M.2 is only the rough form-factor. There are differently keyed variants that indicate different uses of the various pins and are designed so that some variants are physically incompatible.
A classic slot for NVMe SSDs will be M-Key. Here we have E-Key. Which is specifically for WiFi cards and for example contains USB, which is used for the BT part instead of the 4 PCIe lanes of M-Key
Since WiFi is very standard nowadays and the normal consumer does not remove the WiFi card to make room for another SSD, M.2 was designed this way.
Frameworks offer USB4 ports, those offer more PCIe bandwidth than E-Key slots are designed for.
Thanks for explaining, that makes sense.
I think a lot of performance is being left on the table if we’re not maximizing expansion options, which is kind of important for this product.
It’s certainly kind of sad that there are a whole bunch of pcie lanes left inaccessible but breaking them out would likely require more pcb layers which would increase cost for something very few people would actually use so it is somewhat understandable they didn’t do it.
Still would have been cool if they did. As it is you do still get 2 full featured usb4 ports so that’s a bit of a consolation.