Hopefully it’s clear in some of these comments just how much of this is a discussion of compromises. There’s not a single right answer. We’d like to “have it all”, and we’re discussing why that’s not working out too well so far.
I’ll point out that directly to your point about expensive, the AOOSTAR AG02 is $220 and has both Oculink and USB4. My Framework 16 was like $2,800 going off of memory. This gets extremely subjective given the context because quite frankly I do not see $220 as even remotely “expensive” in the context of what we’re talking about in this thread. Which is the Framework 16. Even the most scrawny configuration is going to cost you over $1,500. This whole thing is not budget stuff. But again, it’s subjective, and I’m not going to tell people what that limit should be. If it’s expensive for you and others that deem it as such, that’s fine, put it on the list as a detractor for USB4.
If you don’t want the 7700S the best part is that it’s completely optional. You just take compromises from one place, and apply them to another. For me, with my travel schedule, the idea that I need to bring an external GPU Controller and GPU packed in my luggage and deployed every time I want to play a game is a complete non-starter. As in, if that was my only option, I wouldn’t have even bought this thing. But that said, I could totally see people who are buying this as “a desktop, but for some reason I don’t want a desktop” could totally use it in a Dock Only for Gaming or GPU-Compute design.
I’m honestly not going to comment too much around the Simple PCB for Oculink stuff because that’s honestly getting so far out of my wheelhouse of acceptance, that it’s for other people to scope / define. I personally would expect any system using an Oculink design that will leave the system to use a proper Retimer. “Repeater” is fuzzy nomenclature so I avoid it per the PCI-SIG. It’s going to either be a redriver or a retimer, and redriver’s in the PCIe 4 era are on their way out. But a retimer in low quantities are going to be approaching $50 for something like a TI DS160PT801. That’s also going to require external EEPROM’s, Firmware Management, and all the things Framework already does today with the retimers built into their laptops. Again, for those trying for ultra-budget methods willing to make those compromises, I hold no ill will towards them. I would not be interested.
In this thread alone, several people have claimed how easy producing this Oculink system will be, and yet 2 years later here we are. I have been using USB4 in the interim for over a year.
If you take all the things you care about, ignore the bits that you don’t, then it’s easy to take two standards, compare them, and declare one standard as “cheaper, faster, and simpler”. But ignoring those compromises as part of that declaration doesn’t guarantee there is enough mindshare in the market to make it successful. This is all a set of compromises.
What’s cheaper, significantly faster, and simpler than all of this? A Desktop. Yet for some reason or another that seems to be a compromise too far. For what it’s worth, I’d love to see Framework themselves bring an Oculink shell module with a proper retimer, bifurcation, and firmware management integrated into the rest of the work Framework already does there. 3 ports, 2 Oculink 4i, and 1 Oculink 8i port. If they charged $200-$250 for the whole Shell / Interposer / PCB, I’d buy it.
Unfortunately, Oculink comes so late in the cycle, we’ll only be able to rely on it for this generation. Things go to CopprLink for the future, but unfortunately the SFF-TA-1032 connector is 3 times the thickness of Oculink, so it’s going to be much more difficult to integrate in mobile designs. But until PCIe 5 GPUs go mainstream, we’ll generally accept the compromise of non-ideal SSD Storage access 