Just wanted to have a discussion of what you would want to see in an AM4 mITX setup as only 1 board has been announced and there is plenty of time before any more get announced and specs given. I've been thinking about it a lot and I have seen some pretty damn good ideas. This is a "dream" layout/config though so go wild with it for your use-case.
I'll start with mine
Ideally my setup would consist of something a bit extreme and unlikely. As AM4 only had 24 pcie slots (16+4+4) and you dont really need 16x for a GPU (8x is more than sufficient), I would love to see someone take 8 of the GPU lanes and split it off into 2x M.2 drives on the underside of the board coupled with a third one from the 4 lanes already given for M.2/storage. This way you could have 3 drives running in RAID, as with the current specs it would be virtually impossible as 1 drive would be coming from the CPU and another would have to be done through the chipset (which i dont think you would be able to RAID the two?). And taking it another step forward, I would love to see SODIMMs being used but not just 2. I would want to see 2 SODIMMs on the top side and 2 SODIMMs on the underside of the board. You could mount them in about the same location, albiet with more pcb layers to get a very nice layout. On top of this, wifi from the chipset wouldnt be so bad (a couple of pcie 2.0 lanes could be used).
This setup would then allow for an 8-core cpu, 4 SODIMMs, 3x M.2, wifi, GPU, and still have enough for a few USB ports (preferably with atleast 1 type-c connector). This would be the ultimate AM4 mITX board in my mind.
I'll start with mine
Ideally my setup would consist of something a bit extreme and unlikely. As AM4 only had 24 pcie slots (16+4+4) and you dont really need 16x for a GPU (8x is more than sufficient), I would love to see someone take 8 of the GPU lanes and split it off into 2x M.2 drives on the underside of the board coupled with a third one from the 4 lanes already given for M.2/storage. This way you could have 3 drives running in RAID, as with the current specs it would be virtually impossible as 1 drive would be coming from the CPU and another would have to be done through the chipset (which i dont think you would be able to RAID the two?). And taking it another step forward, I would love to see SODIMMs being used but not just 2. I would want to see 2 SODIMMs on the top side and 2 SODIMMs on the underside of the board. You could mount them in about the same location, albiet with more pcb layers to get a very nice layout. On top of this, wifi from the chipset wouldnt be so bad (a couple of pcie 2.0 lanes could be used).
This setup would then allow for an 8-core cpu, 4 SODIMMs, 3x M.2, wifi, GPU, and still have enough for a few USB ports (preferably with atleast 1 type-c connector). This would be the ultimate AM4 mITX board in my mind.