USB Overload: Portwell Motherboard Has 20 USB Ports | Hacker News Reader

USB Overload: Portwell Motherboard Has 20 USB Ports

tomshardware.com

4 pointstbakker4 comments

The "mining" use case mentioned is a misunderstanding I think: While PCIe-extenders used for cryptocurrency miners use USB cables, they only use those because they are cheap, common and good enough: they do not use USB protocol.

Could maybe see it in R&D one-offs, or some industrial use cases: Lots of cameras and other peripherals? Testing USB devices?

I run ProxMox on my home server and do full USB pass through for a few guest OSes. I could imagine something like this being useful if I had more guests that need peripherals.

I thought one comment was interesting:

You know what, as a sysadmin for some companies in Brazil, that could be a solution for multi user desktop in the enterprise around here. If the price isn't prohibitive. With a 10 core cpu it's possible to have 8 to 16 office user on one of those with a 10 core cpu using the the micro atx version. (if you shove 2 to 4 VGA boards for graphic processing and monitor outputs) Kinda grey area, but i could save a ton on software licenses. Just with microsoft licences I could save up to 32 hundred dollars on the first year.

"Multi-user desktops?" Is this a thing? Seems like a 10GBe network with remote desktop clients would indeed be a valid way to work around licensing costs.

You wouldn't need physical ports for that, although I could see this particular board being useful for other things.

Don't most of the really expensive software packages already allow you to run an on-site server for floating licenses?

I once worked on exactly this product in Microsoft, called Windows MultiPoint Server. You could buy one computer and plug a bunch of keyboards, mice, and monitors to it so multiple users could use it at the same time. It was aimed at the education market as a way to cut hardware costs. I think it’s now been discontinued as a standalone product though.

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