One of the cooler applications of Thunderbolt is the ability to connect external GPUs. However, you lose a lot of performance that way because PCI Express has to be wrapped in Thunderbolt, and that's inefficient. You get better performance if you simply run a wire for a direct PCI Express connection, which is exactly what the OCuLink standard is for, but you really don't see that on consumer hardware much. Well, thanks to the modularity and open-source nature of Framework laptops, an enterprising user has added an eight-lane OCuLink connector to his Framework Laptop 16.
Framework asked its customers way back in June of 2023 if they would be interested in an expansion bay module for the Framework 16. That machine includes a PCI Express x8 connection that can be used for upgradeable high-performance graphics or storage with an appropriate module. Framework's founder and CEO, Nirav Patel, said at that time that a mostly passive adapter board to connect the Framework motherboard's PCI Express x8 connector to an external OCuLink port "is probably possible," but that it "probably isn't something that [Framework] would build," largely due to how niche a product it is.
