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nsky-world
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!

3np
The exposed PCIe lanes looks like the killer here. I guess you can now do 2.5GBe, NVMe drives, beefier GPUs, and other fun things?
0-_-0
IIRC the PCIe interface is not compatible with GPUs.
geerlingguy
It may be, but nobody has proven it yet... the biggest issue is lack of ARM video drivers :(

I might pick up an older PCIe card and see how far I can get using it with the CM4.

the_only_law
I have a project where I was going to build a full x86 machine to serve as a domain specific server because the HW interface I need is only available in PCI amd PCIe cards. Wonder if I could hack the drivers to work on one of these.
geerlingguy
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.