I wish a PC form factor like NLX[0] had become popular where the CPU and memory is on a board that's inserted into a backplane parallel to the add-in cards (sim

I wish a PC form factor like NLX[0] had become popular where the CPU and memory is on a board that's inserted into a backplane parallel to the add-in cards (similar to VME[1]). IIRC NLX was mostly intended for low-profile applications like corporate desktops and retail systems (point-of-sales) but it never caught on. I can see the edge connector and backplane potentially being an issue with old school parallel PCI (that's a lot of pins) but the serial nature of modern PCIe and the advent of PCIe switches would significantly reduce the number of signal lines. [0] https://www.halolinux.us/hardware/images/2249_56_22.jpg https://www.halolinux.us/hardware/images/2249_56_22.jpg [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VMEbus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VMEbus