GPU through M.2 slot

just spitballing here with zero expectation of hitting the mitt, would it be possible to hook up a GPU (e.g. a GT 1030 or 710, theoretically underclockable to <15W TDP) through a PCIe to m.2 riser card to the M2X? assuming of course you could figure out the driver situation, is there anything else that would prevent this? Are ARM chips even compatible with Nvidia cards?

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It’s PCIe, so in theory it should work (I’ve tried it with a network card), though you’re going to have to power it externally… As for an nVidia, unless it’s an old one you can use nouveau with, you’ll have no luck because there is no binary driver for ARM64.

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so the m.2 slot doesn’t provide 15W? do you happen to know what it can supply?
Afaict the nouveau drivers should work for 10xx and 7xx series, but I also turned this up with a quick search though I’m relatively new to ARM SBCs and can’t really contextualize it:

looks like they released it just this summer which explains why it might be more or less unknown. the jade emperor has blessed this enterprise with auspicious signs

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Yeah, that driver is definitely a new thing. Good to know, though, thanks!

@anchorite @NekoMay that driver was “actually” designed for the Jetson Nano, and Xavier boards in mind, not that it can’t be done, but it hasn’t been tried, you will run into BAR memory problems with the Edge and VIM3/3L, series, the Rk3588 board set to launch next year, should fix that problem with an improved PCIe controller.

note these are just speculations from the community, and the real thing is yet to be seen, hold on till then :slightly_smiling_face:

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are the BAR memory problems the result of the going from 16x PCIe to 1x? I’m wading into territory I know absolutely nothing about here, but if so there are a few 1x video cards floating around that would bypass the problem

I can’t quote it for the VIM3, for the RK3399 it wouldn’t work. maybe ask @wll1rah, he attempted it once deemed it not possible yet.

BAR memory space isn’t related to the PCI-e slot length, that does relate to power output though. On the RK-3399 it’s has a fixed about of BAR memory that can’t be changed. If the VIM 3 has I/O MMU then you can adjust it. I’ve not tried it yet on the VIM 3. The only working card I’ve know is the Nvidia GT 710 and that’s on an RPI 4, 2GB cards seem to fail, so your likely looking at up to a GTX 750 TI at the most. Nvidia does have native ARM64 drivers and CUDA toolkit now. The only way I could get it to install though was from web it took to much memory for a local install even with a 4GB swap file. Your best bet for now would be to follow what they are doing with the RPI 4 compute and adapt it to our boards. I highly suggest using a programming calc that can switch the results form decimal to hex for you, it just make things easier it’s possible to do it all by hand but I take the easy way when I can.

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