New Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 review and benchmarks

The Compute Module 4 is basically a Raspberry Pi 4 model B, with all the ports cut off. Instead of the ports, you plug the Compute Module into another board with its special board-to-board connectors. But the Compute module has a few other tricks up its sleeve:

Faster eMMC: It has optional onboard eMMC storage, which is now much faster than any microSD card I've tested PCI Express: It drops the USB 3.0 interface for a PCI Express interface, meaning you can do some pretty cool things in lieu of having a couple USB 3.0 ports. WiFi and U.FL: It has an external antenna connector for it's wireless interface. What's that? Oh yes, there's now a version of the Compute Module with Bluetooth and WiFi! More Options: There are now thirty two different Compute Module flavors to choose from, whether you want onboard WiFi or not, whether you want eMMC storage, or whether you want 1, 2, 4, or even eight gigabytes of RAM!

You can boot over USB but not yet via NVMe. The same NVMe drive (Samsung 970 EVO) was 2x faster for random access when mounted as an NVMe drive vs. in a USB 3.0 adapter with a superspeed PCIe USB 3.0 adapter card.