PCIe, also known as PCI-Express, is a highly powerful interface. So let’s see what it takes to hack on something that powerful. PCIe is be a bit intimidating at first, however it is reasonably simple to start building PCIe stuff, and the interface is quite resilient for hobbyist-level technology. There will come a time when we want to use a PCIe chip in our designs, or perhaps, make use of the PCIe connection available on a certain Compute Module, and it’s good to make sure that we’re ready for that.
PCIe is everywhere now. Every modern computer has a bunch of PCIe devices performing crucial functions, and even iPhones use PCIe internally to connect the CPU with the flash and WiFi chips. You can get all kinds of PCIe devices: Ethernet controllers, high-throughput WiFi cards, graphics, and all the cheap NVMe drives that gladly provide you with heaps of storage when connected over PCIe. If you’re hacking on a laptop or a single-board computer and you’d like to add a PCIe device, you can get some PCIe from one of the PCIe-carrying sockets, or just tap into an existing PCIe link if there’s no socket to connect to. It’s been two decades since we’ve started getting PCIe devices – now, PCIe is on its 5.0 revision, and it’s clear that it’s here to stay.
Now, there’s a reason why we don’t see more of such hacks. This seems to be a Latitude E5440 and the card is plugged into a mini-PCIe slot, which means the entire contraption is bound by a single PCI-E Gen2 x1 link, heavily offsetting the gains you’d get from an external GPU when, say, gaming. However, when it comes to the types and amount of peripherals, this is unbeatable – if you want to add an external GPU, high-speed networking and a SAS controller to the same computer that you usually lug around, there isn’t really a dock station you can buy for that!
