PCIe CPU upgrade

[sm625]

Imagine a video card that actually contains a brazos in place of the gpu. It would be dual slot, and have 4 usb ports, and an ethernet port a coming out the back, in addition to the typical complement of DVI, VGA, etc. And of course it would need a Hudson FCH and a few SATA ports.

Is there such a beast in existence? If not brazos, then maybe of the atom variety? If there was then it would be a super easy way to upgrade old machines. I think there should be a product like this on the market by the time we hit 22nm. If I wanted to search for one, what would it be called? PCIe SBC?

 

[Zap]

Search for single board computers and backplanes. This has existed in the server world for a long time.

 

[Arkaign]

While I like the idea, I think it's completely unfeasible as a business model for the following reasons :

(1)- Power supplies are too varied in the wild, and even amongst production models. Arguably this could be remedied by keeping the total power draw to ~25w or so.

(2)- Bios is waay too varied in units to make this workable as a guarantee in most PCI-e systems. For example, what happens with memory access, how will resources be managed across and between the boards? Arguably some of this could be remedied by a 'qualified' list of compatible systems and mainboards. It would be a mammoth undertaking though.

(3)- Price. At a time when pretty reasonable basic PCs can be found for $299 new, complete with new Windows license, it's gonna be a hard sell to make enough profit to make this venture worthwhile.

(4)- LEDs, cable routing, proprietary front audio/usb leads on some OEM systems, extra leftover onboard outputs on the back that may no longer be valid for connecting items, it would just be a logical nightmare trying to support this for the average user.

The reason this works in the server arena in the past has generally been because much like Mac design, the maker of the type of board you're describing only has to match one series of servers, and is almost invariably designed by the same engineers and project managers as the ones responsible for the server in the first place. IE; all bios works okay, all connections/leds/cablings/etc makes sense. Size, TDP, power supply requirements, everything is taken into account for that specific set of variables.