Portwell Builds Intel Xeon Motherboard with 20 USB Ports

erek

erek

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Not even USB 3.1 Gen2 / USB 3.2 :(

"Portwell has put an astonishing 20 (you read that right) USB 3.1 Gen1 ports on the board, which you can run at a full 5 Gbit/s data signaling rate at the same time. The board doesn't use any splitting technology so you are getting the full bandwidth. To get that many ports to run at full capacity, Portwell has presumably re-routed chipset lanes for SATA 3 connectors and used them for USB ports, leaving only two SATA 3 ports. The board is built for the FlexATX form factor and features a sideways PCIe 3.0 port. Being built for Xeon, the board also features support for ECC memory and up to 128 GB of it. While the pricing is not yet available, you can get a quote on Portwell's website."

1600720777115.png


techpowerup.com/272380/portwell-builds-intel-xeon-motherboard-with-20-usb-ports
 
I've seen this picture before, but I thought it was a joke, not a real product!

Icecold said:
What is the use case for this? Another website suggested cryptocurrency mining?
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No idea. I usually use two USB ports on my desktop (Mouse and Keyboard). Sometimes three on the rare occurrence I hook up a microphone...

Some streamer kids just have a ton of USB peripherals maybe?
 
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Monitor walls? Like for airports and train stations.
 
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Icecold said:
What is the use case for this? Another website suggested cryptocurrency mining?
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If you've got a lot of software that needs USB dongles to run? Or plug in security tokens? Or something with testing or factory programming USB devices? Or a whole hell of a lot of webcams?

I'm pretty sure the cryptomining is confused from the mining board with a bunch of pci-e x1 ports on board that were setup for those pci-e extensions that use USB cabling cause it's readily available.
 
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toast0 said:
If you've got a lot of software that needs USB dongles to run? Or plug in security tokens? Or something with testing or factory programming USB devices? Or a whole hell of a lot of webcams?
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I had thought of most of that, but outside of the webcams none of those would likely require much speed/bandwidth so you could just use USB hubs.
 
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Icecold said:
What is the use case for this? Another website suggested cryptocurrency mining?
Click to expand...

I saw a commenter say no. Miners sometimes use external PCIe boards to hold GPUs, to take up more space for airflow or whatever, and they use a USB cable to transfer data or power, I don't remember which, but they're not using it for USB purposes as such--it's just a cable that happens to have USB plugs on both ends.
 
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I know a number of places that could use this. USB 3.1 would be overkill for them as they would mostly just need to hook up Serial adapters to each of them but yeah, I have some clients that fill the PCIE slots with USB cards just for running 12-16 serial ports to connect back to the various sensors and scales all over their plants. The Hundegger, I worked on some 15 years ago needed 12 alone just to operate correctly, let alone the various pieces of equipment feeding it or cleaning up after it.
 
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1_rick said:
I saw a commenter say no. Miners sometimes use external PCIe boards to hold GPUs, to take up more space for airflow or whatever, and they use a USB cable to transfer data or power, I don't remember which, but they're not using it for USB purposes as such--it's just a cable that happens to have USB plugs on both ends.
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AFAIK in that case it's just using a USB cable instead of the ribbon cable PCI express risers to make the cabling easier. Like you said, though, it's not USB it's just using that cable and is going into a PCI express slot. What I was referring to though is there are USB ASICs for mining. I'm not into mining so I wasn't sure if with those ASICs if it is simply using USB for power or if there is a software it's interacting with on a PC communicating through USB.

Lakados said:
I know a number of places that could use this. USB 3.1 would be overkill for them as they would mostly just need to hook up Serial adapters to each of them but yeah, I have some clients that fill the PCIE slots with USB cards just for running 12-16 serial ports to connect back to the various sensors and scales all over their plants. The Hundegger, I worked on some 15 years ago needed 12 alone just to operate correctly, let alone the various pieces of equipment feeding it or cleaning up after it.
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That's fairly surprising to me. In my experience the USB to serial adapters are much less reliable than PCI or PCI express serial adapters, will change com port numbers on reboot, etc. I'm not disagreeing, just surprised. If I had a need to run a ton of RS-232 I think I would get one of those mining boards that have 10+ pci express x1 slots and then a bunch of the 4 port SIIG pci express serial cards. With how low of bandwidth serial is, though, why wouldn't your clients just use a high quality powered USB hub?
 
Being Flex ATX this could easily be mounted in a rack, and most new switches have USB interfaces and are ditching the Serial connector for direct management. So instead of having a network switch configured for the management ports then putting all those off on a VLan and blah blah blah you could have one of these, simplify the network stack, and use the direct USB connection to monitor and manage the switches in said rack and get a lot more information in real time about what the switch is doing, there is probably some decent datacenter software out there for real time threat detection that requires the faster interface speed and ya de ya de ya. My datacenter isn't big enough to have to worry about those complexities.
 
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To be fair, even some "top tier" enthusiast boards only have something like 4 USB 3.0 ports, which is kind of sad. In doing some research for a new build, I was surprised to see how many have 2-4 USB 2.0 ports still.

My current motherboard seems to have issues with USB resources being tapped, and I don't even have THAT many devices.
 
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It does seem difficult to think of a use case for this. For some devices, it makes sense to plug them directly into the motherboard. Stuff like a fast external hard drive, an external LAN adapter, a phone, etc. But for the vast majority of USB peripherals, you could easily have a dozen running from a single USB port, even a USB 2.0 port, simply by using one or more hubs. Might be interesting for something like a file-server with 16+ external drives.

MavericK said:
I was surprised to see how many have 2-4 USB 2.0 ports still.
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You don't need a USB 3.0 port to plug in a keyboard or a mouse.
 
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Icecold said:
That's fairly surprising to me. In my experience the USB to serial adapters are much less reliable than PCI or PCI express serial adapters, will change com port numbers on reboot, etc. I'm not disagreeing, just surprised. If I had a need to run a ton of RS-232 I think I would get one of those mining boards that have 10+ pci express x1 slots and then a bunch of the 4 port SIIG pci express serial cards. With how low of bandwidth serial is, though, why wouldn't your clients just use a high quality powered USB hub?
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I didn't set them up that way its just what they had, it worked well enough but yeah there were better ways to do it. Hell I work with a lumber mill here who's equipment still runs on token ring so lots of old strange stuff out there.
But I agree 100% there were lots of better ways to do it, but we didn't have too many issues with it but they folded after a few years anyways, they left me on the hook for like $20K in billables when their upper management bled them dry and fled the country.
 
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GotNoRice said:
You don't need a USB 3.0 port to plug in a keyboard or a mouse.
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True, but why not have them available if needed? Is there any particular reason not to? I've seen some mid-level boards with all USB 3.0, but then some of the higher-end boards have 4x USB 2.0. I dunno, just seems weird.
 
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Lakados said:
I didn't set them up that way its just what they had, it worked well enough but yeah there were better ways to do it. Hell I work with a lumber mill here who's equipment still runs on token ring so lots of old strange stuff out there.
But I agree 100% there were lots of better ways to do it, but we didn't have too many issues with it but they folded after a few years anyways, they left me on the hook for like $20K in billables when their upper management bled them dry and fled the country.
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I had a full time job 15 years ago(so.. 2005 not 1985) doing nothing but supporting a proprietary DOS program with proprietary hardware that only worked with ancient PC's with ISA slots, etc., so I definitely get that. I'm sure they still have a ton of clients using that super old software, though they were making a big push to get everybody on the modern Windows version when I worked there. Often it's hard to justify the incredibly expensive upgrades when you're working with industrial equipment, etc. I can't say I've seen a token ring network any time recently though.
 
Icecold said:
I had a full time job 15 years ago(so.. 2005 not 1985) doing nothing but supporting a proprietary DOS program with proprietary hardware that only worked with ancient PC's with ISA slots, etc., so I definitely get that. I'm sure they still have a ton of clients using that super old software, though they were making a big push to get everybody on the modern Windows version when I worked there. Often it's hard to justify the incredibly expensive upgrades when you're working with industrial equipment, etc. I can't say I've seen a token ring network any time recently though.
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Yeah I costed out the replacement for them some 5 years back and to replace it with ethernet they would not only need to trench it all a good foot down because of the interference of the heavy machines but there was almost 30km of it running around. though with the costs of fiber going down replacing the whole setup with some multi mode would do the trick but the hardware upgrades were costing in the multi millions so the market still isn't in a place where they can justify the upgrades when the damned near 40 year old machinery can still be serviced and kept running. Their scale is still running on a 486, that is still ticking along happily.
 
Be handy in an office of coffee drinkers .. hook a bunch of these up to it

61vK1prZLZL._AC_SL1001_.jpg
 
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Asus had 20 USB ports on their X370 Hero VI motherboard from a few years ago (granted...it wasn't all on the back of the board...)


4 x USB 3.0 port(s) (4 at back panel, blue)
AMD X370 chipset :
1 x USB 3.1 Gen 2 front panel connector port(s)
AMD X370 chipset :
6 x USB 3.0 port(s) (4 at back panel, blue, 2 at mid-board)
AMD X370 chipset :
6 x USB 2.0 port(s) (4 at back panel, black, 2 at mid-board)
ASMedia® USB 3.1 Gen 2 controller :
2 x USB 3.1 port(s) (2 at back panel, black+red, Type-A + USB Type-CTM)
 
atp1916 said:
Couldn't be.

Plenty of existing boards like this on the market:
*Snipped*
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Those are directly tied to PCIE lanes. These are not USB ports, they just happen to use USB cables because they are cheap shielded cables that can operate at high frequencies. They use them with PCIe extenders. The one posted are ACTUAL usb ports and will not function if you plug a PCIe extender into it made for mining.
 
I've been forced to attend quite a few presentations where the "gift bag" contains a cheap USB stick with the hosting business's logo and some pdfs or powerpoints or other marketing materials on the stick. Having a board like this would facilitate copying data to hundreds of memory sticks per presentation.
 
Teenyman45 said:
I've been forced to attend quite a few presentations where the "gift bag" contains a cheap USB stick with the hosting business's logo and some pdfs or powerpoints or other marketing materials on the stick. Having a board like this would facilitate copying data to hundreds of memory sticks per presentation.
Click to expand...
I actually considered that too, but usually the performance of those cheap USB sticks they give out are low enough that I don't know that you would be bottlenecked by using normal PC and a bunch of USB hubs. A lot of times those cheap USB drives have like a 2MB/s write speed or something absurdly low, so you could have quite a few running off hubs before maxing even one USB 3.1 port. You're right, though, if you had several hundred drives to do or even more, this along with a bunch of hubs probably would be faster.

[Spectre] said:
View attachment 281694
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:D I think we figured it out.
 
A mass of hubs have a bunch of trailing wires, takes up space, and can be jostled around. This seems like an easy way to swap out 20 drives, have a batch program copy over the gigabyte-ish worth of files and then swap for a another 20 drives in a neat and tidy space.

Alternatively, you could be transferring data that would saturate a USB 3.0 or 3.1 used as the baseline for a hub while this is cannibalizing SATA ports for bandwidth.

Edit: though this still might run into a DMI bandwidth limit.
 
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Well it is super annoying how few ports threadripper boards have but this might be a little bit overkill 😂
 
MavericK said:
True, but why not have them available if needed? Is there any particular reason not to? I've seen some mid-level boards with all USB 3.0, but then some of the higher-end boards have 4x USB 2.0. I dunno, just seems weird.
Click to expand...

I haven't run into this issue with Win10 (never tried Win8), but while installing Win7 kb+m plugged into USB 3+ ports wouldn't work because there was no accessible USB 3.0 drivers. You could probably get around this with an unattended installer, but given I wasn't installing on more than one system with that set of drivers, wasn't worth.
 
EnFission said:
I haven't run into this issue with Win10 (never tried Win8), but while installing Win7 kb+m plugged into USB 3+ ports wouldn't work because there was no accessible USB 3.0 drivers. You could probably get around this with an unattended installer, but given I wasn't installing on more than one system with that set of drivers, wasn't worth.
Click to expand...

I'm not even sure Windows 7 is officially supported on newer chipsets/processors...is it? Seems like kind of a non-issue, but I get what you're saying.
 
D-EJ915 said:
This might be for USB software license dongles.
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The old HASP key! (or similar, I'm pretty sure HASP keys were almost always parallel port though not USB). I haven't ran into one of those for awhile either. Out of curiosity - what type of a situation would you need that many license dongles hooked up at once? They also barely use any bandwidth so I wouldn't see any reason they couldn't be used with a USB hub, but I could be missing something. This is definitely turning into an 'obscure proprietary business products' type thread but I find that stuff interesting.
 
I may or may not use kvm and USB dongles mapped through to hosted vms as a really dodgy way to get greater utilisation of really expensive stuff :cautious:

depends who is asking
 
I decided to just ask them. They sent me this product announcement link- https://portwell.com/productnews/PEB-9783G2AR.php

From that link "According to Maria Yang, American Portwell’s product marketing engineer, among the many features of the new PEB-9783G2AR is the ability to support 20x USB 3.2 Gen 1 ports, allowing customers to connect to many peripheral devices such as cameras that can be used for robot and vehicle navigation."

and

"Ideal for AGV and peripheral enriched applications
Applications for Portwell’s PEB-9783G2AR include automated guide vehicle (AGV), industrial automation, manufacturing robots, factory process control and smart transportation among many others"


I guess that answers why you would need a ton of really high bandwidth USB devices hooked up at once, and not through a hub.
 
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