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Comment by rbanffy | Hacker News Reader

It'll be awesome now to get a laptop chassis with one (or a couple) connectors for these. If this becomes a long-term standard, we'd be able to upgrade laptops without throwing the old one out (or passing it to someone who needs it).

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It seems like the CM4 design was almost made with laptops in mind. The main issue is cooling, though. The case would need to insure that some sort of heat sink would maintain physical contact with the SoC, and some thermal paste would be a good thing as well, so this might be a little more than "drop in a new module." Otherwise, throttling will be an issue with any sustained work. How much of a problem that becomes depends on the intended use.

It wouldn't be an M1 Mac, but an 8 GB CM4 could still be the heart of a nice low-power laptop, with the bonus of GPIO pins, as long as the cooling is sorted out.

Could you just air cool it? I thought pis were supposed to tolerate passive cooling in general, so I would think it would be enough to have a fan to offset the case

Running at 1.5 GHz, air cooling is enough. The Pi 400 has a massive but thin heat sink that keeps it running well at 1.8 GHz (and I overclocked to 2+ GHz with no ill effect or throttling).

If you have ambient temps under 80°F and a light breeze past the bare SoC it doesn't seem to throttle unless overclocked to 2+ GHz.

Laptops don't always get a lot of air. A good thermal connection to something reasonable can go a long way.

The Pinebook pro just uses a thermal pad touching the IHS and the magnesium bottom panel. It works fairly well but will still throttle significantly under a full load for long enough.

I've got a side project where I'm building a tablet based around the CM4, and one big issue is that none of the RPis can suspend to RAM. If I stick with the CM4 (I may switch to one of the two rk3566 boards mentioned in TFA, which hopefully support suspend), I'll probably end up having my tablet suspend to disk.

A replacement board for the Framework laptop would be nifty.

Didn't think of that, but yes - a CM4 carrier with the same connector layout as the Framework would be awesome.

A 100% Apple-free, 100% x86-free, almost 100% Windows-proof laptop would be a great thing.

I've been salivating at the thought of something like this too, but the whole module system being built around USB4 would be kind of a problem.

Really I'm just waiting for host support to trickle out to chipsets other than those by the vendors who wrote the Thunderbolt spec it was built around.

But on a similar note, personally I'd be even more interested in a board that's just a USB4 hub instead of even having its own internals. Given the moddable-on-purpose nature of them, it would enable a whole new range of capabilities if they could also extend other devices, especially if (I hope when?) they branch out to other form factors.

P.S. I'm typing this comment on one right now -- Batch 5 ^.^

> I've been salivating at the thought of something like this too, but the whole module system being built around USB4 would be kind of a problem.

The CM4 provides a pcie bus, so what's the problem?

Whats wrong with laptops now? You can of course 3D print that.

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