Logic board with 20 USB3 ports

https://portwell.com/products/detail.php?CUSTCHAR1=PEB-9783G2AR

by zdw • 6 years ago

50 65 6 years ago

ethanpil• 6 years ago

So, what's the use case here?

adamhearn• 6 years ago

USB flash drives are very reliable and should be used in raid 0 with this logic board for maximum raw size and speed. /s

Ballas• 6 years ago

I have multiple mice and keyboards plugged in at once. This will do nicely.

lostlogin• 6 years ago

What do you use multiple of each for?

kichik2• 6 years ago

All weird hardware recently seems to be for cryptominig. Probably for using a lot of USB miners.

octoberfranklin• 6 years ago

Maybe back in 2014...

sitkack• 6 years ago

CIA agents with 16 FIDO keys.

This machine is clearly designed to straddle the DMZ in an infosec army. And/or Goldman Sachs, which is the same thing.

dutchmartin• 6 years ago

I could see this used for livestreams where you have a lot of cameras to connect. The 3 independent video outputs also make this great for a multi monitor setup.

morio• 6 years ago

I develop hardware. At any given time I have 3 programmers, various charger cables, usb to serial cables, logic analyzers, a mouse, a spacemouse (for CAD), flash drives, 2 x label printer (strip and shipping) and various other stuff plugged into my 12 port hub. And I still have to switch them out due to lack of ports. And hubs don't play well with high speed USB3 based logic analyzers.

numpad02• 6 years ago

Surveillance or “self driving” demo gear on multiple webcams?

Phone farms? 20 random Android phones as physical emulators. More with hubs.

Testing USB flash drives? Flash drive factories use standard Windows boxes to test new drives and pre-load with bloatwares.

jmnicolas• 6 years ago

Flash drive factories use standard Windows boxes to test new drives and pre-load with bloatwares.

You mean they do this manually by plugging each drive? I would have thought the "bloatware" was already written on flash.

Jaruzel2• 6 years ago

I'd be interested to see all 20 fully loaded with HDDs/SSDs that support UASP, and see how well it holds up as a highly redundant Storage Server.

rektide2• 6 years ago

https://wiki.debian.org/Multi_Seat_Debian_HOWTO with a bunch of USB3 docking stations: run an entire coffee-shop or class-room off one computer.

With active USB3 cables you can attach 20x 4K terminals, up to 10m away from the computer, easily.

Gelob• 6 years ago

Now make one with 20usb-c

cbhl• 6 years ago

That would be a lot of power if you supported PD on more than two of them

arcticbull2• 6 years ago

Well, that would depend on how much power you're willing to pump through on PD. PD doesn't in and of itself mean the downstream facing port support the full 100W (20V/5A). You could conceivably add a PD billboard and pump out the minimum supported wattage, which I believe is 150mA @ 5V, so 0.75W?

[edit] Looks like PD2.0/3.0 supports 100mA @ 5V minimum. [1]

Now what you could do that would be really neat is have a set power budget for all your ports, say 250W, and allocate that power on a first-come first-served basis. Provide a minimum of 5W per port, and then the rest is allocated in accordance with the power delivery negotiation protocol.

Say you plug in a laptop, it requests 85W, and you give it 85W. This leaves a power budget of roughly (250W - (minimum)(20*5 = 100W) - 85W = 65W).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_hardware#USB_Power_Deliver...

Hackbraten• 6 years ago

And have each port support a different set of capabilities.

Jaruzel2• 6 years ago

It's actually a full motherboard. The title should be updated to reflect this.

bayindirh4• 6 years ago

The PCI express port looks like it connects to some form of daughterboard for port breakout and is deceiving.

Apple calls motherboards as logic boards making non-apple devices look illogical piles of electronic components. :)

numpad02• 6 years ago

IIRC the rationale was a logic board has a soldered CPU, but IBM calls it “System Planar” so yeah

paxswill• 6 years ago

The explanation I got for logic board was from the classic all-in-one Macs. They had a high voltage “analog board” for the CRT, and the low voltage digital “logic board” for the CPU.

reiichiroh• 6 years ago

Windows won’t have enough logical resources even they did away with IRQs and stuff. I’ve run into this at around a dozen USB devices—got to find the article on this.

tumblewit• 6 years ago

macOS doesn't even support beyond 15 ports. And USB 3.0 counts as 2 ports due to backward compatibility.

sgt• 6 years ago

Surely that's possible to do using hubs?

noizejoy2• 6 years ago

Not sure, if your experience is more dictated by USB hub limitations, rather than hitting a Windows limit that soon. Here’s an interesting page describing how to best get to high USB device counts[0]

[0] https://www.yoctopuce.com/EN/article/how-many-usb-devices-ca...

FpUser4• 6 years ago

I have more than 20 devices connected, no problems. Using hubs though.

rrreese• 6 years ago

Yes I also have more then 12 right now, so its a little odd.

coldtea• 6 years ago

Running all as USB3 though? Very few peripherals have USB3 level inputs...

ddlsmurf2• 6 years ago

May I ask which 20 devices ? I'm having trouble imagining more than say 5

rbinv• 6 years ago

I'm curious: what kind of devices? Seems like a lot.

ytch• 6 years ago

But in the book "How We Test Software at Microsoft", they mentions Microsoft test USB implementation with "USB Cart of Death", which including 10 of 8 port usb hub:

https://books.google.com.tw/books?id=X5lCAwAAQBAJ&pg=PT414&l...

Edit: Maybe it is no issue with USB hub, but not work with too many usb controller (USB port to MB directly)?

bsder• 6 years ago

This is unlikely for USB 2.0 and up.

It might be true if you have old devices, though. If you have USB 1.0/1.1 full speed HID devices you can overcommit the available bandwidth for a human interface device. HID devices generally require that they be serviced every 1ms with a 64 byte packet. You might overrun that if you put enough old devices together on an old hub. It's quite unlikely for USB 2.0+ with anything High Speed.

The only issue with new devices is that USB 3.0+ requires twice the endpoints of USB 2.0. The problem is that the Intel controller chips allocate the same amount of memory for USB 3.0 as they do USB 2.0. So if you have a system with a lot of devices (96+), you can hit the memory limit of the controller.

We hit that limit with a 192 device system. It took a while to figure out what the heck was wrong.

Urgo2• 6 years ago

Reading the comments I'm surprised so many people think 20 usb ports is so out of this world. For me this would be great! The list below isn't 20, but its still 14 and honestly I could find more things to keep plugged in w/o much effort either.

- mouse

- keyboard

- keyboard extra power

- audio

- streamdeck

- webcam

- printer

- photo scanner

- card reader

- phone

- microphone

- digital camcorder

- controller

- usb drive

ohazi• 6 years ago

keyboard extra power

Come again?

lb1lf• 6 years ago

Not OP, but presumably the keyboard is fitted with a USB hub requiring extra power.

Urgo2• 6 years ago

My understanding was the second plug powered the LED lights in the keyboard but now I'm not 100% sure if its for that or just for the passthrough USB port on the keyboard itself.. maybe both?

arcticbull2• 6 years ago

Sometimes USB keyboards with PS/2 backward compatibility have 2 plugs, one for they keyboard you can use with a USB to PS/2 passive adapter, and one that supports a built-in hub or some other secondary high-power feature such as RGB.

I suspect this has more to do with PS/2 compatibility than it does requiring a second port's worth of power.

noizejoy2• 6 years ago

... and numerous midi controllers, instruments, and other musical gadgets in my home studio :-)

ClikeX• 6 years ago

And the iLock. Don't forget that waste of USB space.

jwr2• 6 years ago

Don't forget:

- yubikey

And those of us working on electronics routinely connect another bunch of devices:

- logic analyzers

- oscilloscopes

- JTAG interfaces

- USB microscope

- dev board interfaces

- android embedded devices

- multimeters

That's why I'm so annoyed by manufacturers (hi Apple) reducing port counts and moving to USB-C only.

cogburnd02• 6 years ago

I do stuff with electronics & retrocomputing so add on top of that a bunch of USB->serial adapters to connect to old hardware; let's see

Apple //e

TRS-80 Model 100

Vt330 terminal

Plusdeck 2c cassette tape deck

Lego serial IR tower for RCX

Serial port for self-built cheap arduino clone (an NKC electronics freeduino serial) ( http://web.archive.org/web/20100131051737/http://mcukits.com... )

cable to connect TI calculators (I have a USB version of this too, though, so I don't need to use a USB-to-serial converter with my old serial cable based one.)

And that's just what comes to mind right now, I'm sure there are more.

Bud2• 6 years ago

Apple didn't move to USB-C only; they moved to the vastly-superior Thunderbolt 3. (Which, yes, is a superset of USB-C.)

Furthermore, that's just on laptops, since USB-A ports no longer fit in Apple's increasingly-thin designs. The iMac still has four USB-A ports, right now, today. The Mac mini still has two USB-A ports. The Mac Pro can have dozens of USB-A ports, if you want them.

anorphirith• 6 years ago

what would a use-case be ?

DominoTree2• 6 years ago

One use case might be flight simulators with a bunch of different switch/indicator panels and controllers and things

DominoTree2• 6 years ago

But none of that would require anything near USB3 bandwidth, let alone across twenty ports.

altmind• 6 years ago

Cambrionix SyncPad54 USB Hub Offers 56 USB 2.0 Ports https://www.cnx-software.com/2020/09/21/cambrionix-syncpad54...

emwjacobson• 6 years ago

Could this be used for USB-based Bitcoin miners? Or do most modern ASIC miners have their own system they run with?

bayindirh4• 6 years ago

On a second thought, this would be the dream industrial process, control or monitoring board.

A lot of monitoring hardware runs on legacy protocols (ModBUS comes to mind) which are encapsulated over and over newer protocols. I'm sure most of these controllers also come in USB flavors. Moreover, USB 3.0 is full duplex and supports more power than 2.0 This means better communication in real time monitoring applications using more complex controllers/adapters.

So, it may not be a speed-first but connectivity-first motherboard which is optimized for many small data bursts over many USB ports. Three displays will also help showing the information obtained from these devices in a nice videowall-ish view.

Fun.

rektide2• 6 years ago

i just want to point out that a USB4 connection is good for 40Gbps, which is 2.5x PCIe 4.0 lanes of throughput. 20 ports of USB4 would take 50 PCIe 4.0 lanes to saturate.

i'm not sure how many actual pcie lanes USB4 can transport? 2x?

Logic board with 20 USB3 ports

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