how feasible will it be for framwork to make it so that some of the pcie lanes are reassignable in the bios maybe even 2 user profiles based on whether the motherboard gets a signal from the exp bay or not (up to the card makers to implement of course)
Judging from the expansio bay git repo, the existance of the dual nvme bay does indicate that at least 2x4 and 1x8 configurations are possible. The schematic for the dual nvme does not contain a pcie switch or anything like that so there must be some bifurcation going on.
It is not entirely clear to me how the expansion bay signals what pcie config it wants and what configs are possible but the eeprom on the schematic looks like it may be the culprit there.
I wonder if only 1x8 and 2x4 is possible or 8x1 or even mixed stuff like 1x4+4x1 are possible, would make for some interesting applications like a wifi scanner hedgehog with like 8 full power m.2 wifi cards or something.
i mean assigne pcie lanes in between different ports like the bay and the card slots on the side and the wifi and nvmes etc
There are no pcie lanes in the card slots, or at least not ones you can assign. The ones for pcie tunneling are part of the usb4/thunderbolt ports and are only accessible via that.
it would necessitate down grading the card port usb 3 somthing to take lanes to use the lanes elsewhere
i also would like to have the bay slot where i could assign 0-16 pcie lanes
You can’t get those lanes, they are internal to the chip and belong to the usb4/tb interface. You get them tunneled through usb4/tb or not at all. This isn’t like back in the day with external thunderbolt chips which were connected to regular pcie lanes off the cpu.
Nowhere near enough pins on the connector and there may not be enough lanes on the cpu anyway, you also need some for storage and wifi.
what if i decide i want only usb storage and no wifi?
so could you send some thunderbolt to the bay?
and couldn’t they possibly use/be using the chips for some thunderbolt ports?
then you’d still be short a couple lanes and there isn’t a pcie x13 standard
If you completely rewired everything maybe but not as it is.
For additional ones, sure they could have but that would be expensive, power hungry and eat up pcie lanes that are already pretty scarce.
What are you doing that requires more than 2 full bandwidth thunderbolt ports (or a pcie4x16 link for that matter)?
thats a given
nothing i more want to move all or at least some of the connectivity around like all to the bay or from the bay or make the fron cards thunderbolt instead of the rear
i was thinking 8x for the gpu 2x4 for bigger expansion slots with maybe a slot on the top for a row of like 8+ ports or maybe a dock that has a few external hard drives a 7700 xt or 4090 and like 6 displays and yes i may be going a bit wide so i would be happy for the closest practical implementation to what i want although i would probably still want more
That’s unfortunately not really practical anymore with consumer hardware, amd used to put 6 crtcs in their higher end consumer cards till last generation but are down to 4 now too. I understand that having more than 4 displays is pretty rare but still a bummer.
even with multiple gpus?
no, that’s per gpu but do you seriously want to hook up multiple gpus to a laptop?
Might as well just build a pc in a pelican case at this point, this is way outside the realms of what’s reasonable in a laptop.
Since you can dasychain usb4 you can hook up quite a few gpus to a single port but it’s a bit of a meme.