PCI Express on the Raspberry Pi 4 (mloduchowski.com)

Article summary

The article describes a hack to enable PCI Express on the Raspberry Pi 4 by desoldering the USB 3.0 chip and using a PCI Express riser card. This allows for the possibility of using external devices such as GPUs or other PCI Express cards with the Raspberry Pi 4. The hack requires some technical expertise and specialized equipment. The author's goal was to see if it could be done and to explore the possibilities of using PCI Express with the Raspberry Pi 4.

Main themes

• Raspberry Pi 4
• PCI Express
• GPU support
• Hacking
• Embedded systems
• ARM architecture

What commenters say

• Using a modern GPU on an ARM-based board is possible but may require emulation or custom drivers.
• The VideoBIOS is not necessary for running a GPU in the OS, but it can be useful for initializing the card.
• Alignment issues and memory-cacheability attributes can be a problem when using GPUs on non-x86 systems.
• Some AMD cards have an ARM build of their UEFI firmware available, which can allow video from boot.
• The size of the BAR space can be a limiting factor when using PCI Express devices on embedded systems.
• InfiniBand can be a viable option for low-latency and high-throughput communication in clusters.
• Using Ethernet for clustering is a more conventional and possibly more cost-effective approach than using PCI Express.