> no ability to get chips with newer instructions

I understood that sentiment to mean you want them socketed. Maybe that's me projecting. I wasn't around for the x86 boom days where every week speeds would double. So I don't know how it was solved back then for laptops, but I do know some laptops had sockets even maybe 10 years ago.

> Are you saying that if I took a raspberry pi compute module and soldered power to the power pins, that it would not boot?

Not necessarily. Though if you look at the CM3 (and likely previous compute modules), you'll see that:
1. some modules don't have storage. This is occasionally common with SoMs. That would indeed prevent booting. 2. you need a lot of supply rails. Just hacking up a 5v from a USB cable won't do it. You need like 3-4 regulators or something to get full functionality.

The big difference is that an SBC has connectors for users. A SoM has connectors for integrators. SoMs often have a single card edge (like SMARC, the pi CM3, and some others) or a mezzanine (like CoM-e). These are often high density and not meant for soldering to. So, let's say you did have a SoM that only took 1 supply rail (like a good SoM should) If you soldered power, you'd have a powered SoM. Maybe it booted, you have no way of knowing because there's likely no LEDs, no ethernet jack to connect to, no usb to plug into, no display connectors, etc. All of those you'd need to solder in a connector for. That's what the carrier does, if you've seen those.

> I guess it comes down to which level of interface will have the greatest longevity.

> you're stuck with the pinout in your socket

I think this is where Framework falters. IMO, I need more than 4 ports on a small laptop. Just today I was using 3 type-A, charger, and an hdmi. I could have also been using an Ethernet but because reasons I could get away with wifi. That's 6 ports, potentially. I think the framework 16 doesn't have a headphone jack builtin? I took a call during that so that's 7. Framework decided on a card form factor where you can only fit 1 of most things. And they're now stuck with that. There was a good video I can't find on what it would look like to have the cards be 1.5x the width or so. I could also use a hub, but the whole point of this is that any decent laptop these days can have 1 hub give you tons of IO. The framework should be hubless, ideally, in my opinion.

SMARC is kinda industrial. For different users, that's enough. Not everything even uses PCIe. With storage onboard, if you don't have discrete graphics, those wouldn't even be used (maybe for Ethernet but I think SMARC also usually has that before the connector). USB 3 I could see as being an issue, but honestly a hub is likely needed for these lower end chips anyway. This way the hub can be on the carrier, which saves cost on upgrades. On the embedded side, not much is higher than 3.0 these days anyway. Which is kinda disappointing. FTDI and Infineon have 0 released >= 10 gbps interface chips. Lattice has the first FPGA (and it's from this year) I've seen with an integrated USB superspeed PHY and that's only 5 gbps. Versal gen 2 I don't know about just yet, but I could see it going either way. Zynq MP/RFSoC is only 5. The list goes on. I think except for external SSDs, nothing really uses > 5gbps? So there's that for perspective.

To sum up, it's weird straddling the consumer/embedded industrial world. Embedded/industrial products are currently > a decade behind the consumer. The amount of ARM chips that are still coming out with Cortex-A53 or other early ARMv8 (not even the most recent ARMv8) astounds me. It took a decade ish for ARMv8M to get popular and it's still not looking like it's taking over ARMv7. It's incredible how fast phones move relative to devices like pis.