Framework made a 25-minute video a few days ago covering the development and some more details of the RISC-V mainboard.
One thing in particular that caught my attention is the only m.2 slot is dedicated to wifi and they’re using a microSD slot and a sort of defacto-standard eMMC socket for storage (and, of course, many Linux distros can be installed onto USB as well).
This begs the question though—is the wifi’s m.2 slot an E+M key (rather than the E-key only seen on the current Intel/AMD mainboards) so that an NVMe SSD can be used instead of wifi if so desired, like if using the 2.5Gb ethernet module? (the video even specifically mentioned the Cooler Master case which is a perfect use-case for not needing wifi and/or preferring ethernet—though, at that rate, why not have E+M key for the wifi slot on all Framework mainboards?)
I guess it is pretty clear that for laptops like FW, one will need risc-v chips with far more pcie and usb4 interfaces and inter-cpu links, so one can put more cpu chips on the mainboard to get more processing power.
The pinouts of e and m-key are not really compatible, the keys are there for a reason. M.2 is a connector with multiple different pinouts, the keys are both to tell you what kind it is and prevent you from plugging the wrong thing into the wrong port.
Another thought I just had—around 5 years ago, m.2 SATA SSDs were pretty common. Why not add a SATA-only m.2 slot? Or is the issue that SATA still requires PCIe lane(s) due to SATA presumably not being natively integrated into the SOC directly?
NVMe and wifi are both just PCIe devices, and so the m.2 connector is simply being used as a smaller version of the bog-standard PCIe slot you find on desktop motherboards or the like (even more-so since I don’t believe any Framework mainboards support m.2 SATA SSDs).
There was already another user that repurposed their wifi slot on the x86 Framework 13 mainboard for their SSD in order to use the main NVMe slot for an external GPU and it all “just worked”… at least on Linux:
Sata does require sata, some socs do provide that directly or you can convert pcie or usb or something into it.
You can easily, you just need an adabter that wires the 1 pcie lane for the wifi to the e-key pinout. You can do that pretty much anywhere pcie wifi cards are used (some devices use the same chipset with just the proprietary intel wifi protocol and no pcie).
Is the RISC-V chip on this Mainboard affected by this vulnerability? The article mentions a specific RISC-V based chip, but stops short of commenting on whether it affects all chips implementing this architecture or not…
Any updates on a possible release date? I’m excited to get one whenever they’re available. I’ve just been waiting, and haven’t heard any new info in the last couple of months.
Framework released a new video today interviewing their CEO together with the CEO of DeepComputing. The CEO of DeepComputing mentioned at the end that they’re starting mass production of the motherboards in November.
