Since the Compute Module 4 came along last year, there have been a few projects that use it that make me do a double-take: They did what with a Pi?
Alftel's Seaberry is a carrier board for the CM4 in the Mini ITX form factor that adds on eleven PCI Express slots:
If you read the title of this blog post and are thinking, "10 Gbps on a Pi? You're nuts!," well, check out my video on using the ASUS XG-C100C 10G NIC on the Raspberry Pi CM4. Back? Good.
To be clear: it's impossible to route 10 gigabits of total network throughput through any Raspberry Pi on the market today.
But it is possible to connect to a 10 gigabit network at 10GBase-T speeds using a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 and an appropriate PCI Express 10G NIC. And on my Pi PCI Express site, I documented exactly how I got an ASUS XG-C100C working on the Raspberry Pi. All it takes is a quick recompile of the kernel, and away it goes!
January 1, 2021 Update: My 1.34 Gbps benchmark was flawed. See this GitHub issue and this updated blog post to learn more: WiFi 6 is not faster than Ethernet on the Raspberry Pi.
After buying three wireless cards, a new WiFi router, optimizing my process for cross-compiling the Linux kernel for the Raspberry Pi, installing Intel's WiFi firmware, and patching Intel's wireless driver to make it work on the Raspberry Pi, I benchmarked the EDUP Intel AX200 WiFi 6 PCIe card and got 1.34 Gbps of bandwidth between the Raspberry Pi and a new ASUS WiFi 6 router.
This is my story.
tl;dr: I successfully got the Intel I340-T4 4x Gigabit NIC working on the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4, and combining all the interfaces (including the internal Pi interface), I could get up to 3.06 Gbps maximum sustained throughput.
Update: I was able to boost things a bit to get 4.15 Gbps! Check out my video here: 4+ Gbps Ethernet on the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4.
After my failure to light up a monitor with my first attempt at getting a GPU working with the Pi, I figured I'd try something a little more down-to-earth this time.
And to that end, I present to you this four-interface gigabit network card from Intel, the venerable I340-T4:
The Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 eschews a built-in USB 3.0 controller and exposes a 1x PCI Express lane.
The slightly older Raspberry Pi 4 model B could be hacked to get access to the PCIe lane (sacrificing the VL805 USB 3.0 controller chip in the process), but it was a bit of a delicate operation and only a few daring souls tried it.
Watch this video for more detail about my experience using these GPUs on the CM4:
GPUs on a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4!
There is a companion video to this post: Is fast NVMe storage coming to the Raspberry Pi?.
A couple days ago, Tom's Hardware posted an article stating NVMe support might be coming to the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4.
On the first episode of The Pi Cast, Eben Upton, the CEO of Raspberry Pi, said "microSD will always be the baseline for storage", but "it's fairly likely we'll support NVMe soon on the Compute Module 4, to some degree, using single-lane PCI Express." (Skip to about 11 minutes into the video for the NVMe discussion).
He also said NVMe support is not without cost, since there's an extra connector silicon required. And with the System on a Chip used in the Pi 4, there's also a tradeoff involved: There's only one PCIe 1x lane, and it's currently used for the Pi 4's USB 3.0. If you want to add NVMe support, you'd have to drop the USB 3.0 ports.