Not long ago I stumbled upon the ability to hack apart the Raspberry Pi with its USB 3 chipset to acknowledge a PCIe interface PCIe / PCI Express on the Raspberry Pi 4 B? Apparently So!
Thanks to an article highlighted on Hackaday, this technology is going a bit further, though the hardware hackers are being limited by apparent software restrictions purposefully put into Raspbian.
Welcome to the PCI Express multiplexer.
With the amazing work done to solder onto pads, I'm realising that for my own work I want to get hold of a microscope..
Using 'riser cards' is not a new concept, in the early days of personal computing it was typically setup so that you would have to extend the 'bus' of the computer with breakout boards, I remember on a particularly old 486DX2-66 using a Vesa VL-BUS riser card to be able to insert a very long graphics card. My how far technology has come, but the graphics cards are still pretty long:
This hack is still very much hands-on, it's not for the faint of heart, and people are wondering what functionality will be broken out onto a possible Compute Module 4? Or will we see a socketed version of the chip to help people pick and choose how they want this to function?
One thing's for sure, it entirely depends on software support.
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