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Thanks for the info! Looks like a really awesome little board that's going to allow all KINDS of interesting use cases. I really hope to see a new TuringPi clus

Thanks for the info! Looks like a really awesome little board that's going to allow all KINDS of interesting use cases. I really hope to see a new TuringPi cluster; doubly so with ESXi now being available! One note about your article: Due to the nature of PCIe, ANY GPU will happily run on the 1 lane presented here. The limitation will be data transfer, which primarily shows up in texture loading. Tom's Hardware did an article [0] a decade ago comparing lanes to performance. This is also why some x16 connectors will be listed as "electrically" x8; they only have 8 lanes exposed. However, you will have issues with the power delivery; PCIe GPU's are allowed to pull up to 75 watts from the slot itself before going to direct connectors. There are ways to fix this; I ran a mPCIe (WiFi) to external PCIe adapter for a couple years on an old laptop with a GPU just fine. Another use case (and likely more relevant) would be plugging in an HBA for a NAS. Upgrading the NIC to something multi-gig sounds interesting, but that PCIe x1 is not going to be any faster than the built-in GBe except in edge cases. I'm actually really curious to see what people do with this. [0] https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/pcie-geforce-gtx-480-x16-x8-x4,2696.html https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/pcie-geforce-gtx-480-x1...

geerlingguy 6y ago
Good to know; I'm honestly a little out of my element with GPUs because it's been a while since I've even thought much of them (I don't do much gaming and don't do many GPU-based workloads... the built in GPU is always fine for me!). For the NIC, it's cool to see we'd be able to get two or maybe three gigabit interfaces on the same Pi, could be interesting for a variety of different networking devices, coupled with the faster SoC in the Pi 4.
- CobaltFire 6y ago
  I wanted to correct myself; with 500MBps bidirectional, that single PCIe lane could run a 5GbE at full saturation, or a 10GbE at a pretty solid fraction. That changes the use case a bit; the Aquantia multi-gig cards have drivers for ESXi. You could then run an eMMC boot for the hypervisor and run everything via the higher speed adapter, saving the GbE for management/migration.

geerlingguy 6y ago

Good to know; I'm honestly a little out of my element with GPUs because it's been a while since I've even thought much of them (I don't do much gaming and don't do many GPU-based workloads... the built in GPU is always fine for me!). For the NIC, it's cool to see we'd be able to get two or maybe three gigabit interfaces on the same Pi, could be interesting for a variety of different networking devices, coupled with the faster SoC in the Pi 4.

CobaltFire 6y ago
I wanted to correct myself; with 500MBps bidirectional, that single PCIe lane could run a 5GbE at full saturation, or a 10GbE at a pretty solid fraction. That changes the use case a bit; the Aquantia multi-gig cards have drivers for ESXi. You could then run an eMMC boot for the hypervisor and run everything via the higher speed adapter, saving the GbE for management/migration.