Given the availability of external and pcie compatible high bandwidth interface such as oculink and thunderbolt4 (which might be better since can also pass a reasonable amount of power), shouldn’t ITX boards move to a model where only critical I/O are on the board, and almost all the rest (sounds, wifi, additional USB, hdmi,additional m.2 etc…) provided by some kind of external dock.
Seems to me that this could both simplify the design of the boards, and let user upgrade/select which I/O panels they need more easily. Bonus point for the boards companies new they get to sell us more docking stations.
By like a thousand kinds of external docks. Every board has a different IO panel.
You could just make headers for everything, but that takes up same space as just doing the stuff as usual.
Exactly!
Standardization of hardware beyond those normally integrated would be counterproductive to industries in competition with each other.
Consider earlier mac products!
Specialized interfaces limited the hardware choice dramatically.
As a result on the good side nearly 0 compatibility issues with the selected gear…
On the down side however, exhorbitant prices.
Say you purchased a dell laptop( DOCKING CAPABLE)
And you had an old hp dock.
Of course they wont match so you would have to purchase a dell dock.
So we as customers lose out twice by having to purchase extra hardware for the new And have to deal with disposal of the old.
If a person were to develop a multi dock and software, rest assured corporations would shut them down long before they get a good start.
PCIe 5 has mcio which may finally lead to a short cabling standard that works for pcie, however the reliable cable length is short, so the dock would then need to have an additional extension to another dock, which seems less useful. The pcie 3 and 4 over slimsas were often unreliable.
Thunderbolt is controlled by intel. There are very few AMD boards that will do thunderbolt, which is annoying, also only apple has thunderbolt on arm.
Most of the services are served successfully over USB, just use 40gbps or faster cables.
BTW: check out:
x86 computer with a battery that will last about 5 hours in sleep mode that you can socket into one of their docks as a laptop alternative. An interesting idea, I hope the company makes it big.
