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Comment by dsr_ | Hacker News Reader

It's a demand issue.

Business users get: laptops, mostly. You need a desktop? It's either because you aren't trusted/don't need to take a laptop around or because you need a workstation. The low end doesn't need PCIe slots for anything: integrated GPUs are good enough to do all generic business work, integrated sound, network, blah blah blah.

So we've identified workstations as the business case for more PCIe slots. The AMD workstation CPUs (ThreadRipper and EPYC-P)have lots and lots of PCIe lanes. More than that. The Intel workstation CPUs ... don't. G12 has 16xPCIe 5 and 4xPCIe 4. So you buy AMD this year.

Home users: either you're a casual gamer or a hardcore gamer. Either way, you need a maximum of 2 PCIe slots for GPUs, and you're done.

What's left? People on HN who run server and workstation tasks on repurposed desktop hardware, some of whom buy used server gear and live with the noise, some of whom buy AMD workstation gear

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So few buy used hardware. I got a used Dell laptop and the WiFi card was shit. Dell doesn't always make the right call but because WiFi card was a replaceable PCIe card, I was able to get more life out of the machine. On the one hand it was good for me. On the other hand it was bad for Dell because I didn't replace the whole machine. Dell is learning, however. Their new machines have every thing soldered in place with no pesky upgrade/repair options, not even a stray NVME or RAM slot. It's amazing they left a USB port.

I've used PCIe a lot for storage and networking applications in laptops, servers, and desktop form factors. It has allowed for much cheapskating--which is why it's got to go. Repair and expansion options are bad for business.

Curious what replacement card you went with. I know the WiFi/BT are combined, Bluetooth headphones cutting out last night for no reason at all and the thought came around again to flip a replacement in.

Nice to meet another used hardware buyer. I think the total cost of my laptops over the past 10 years equates to roughly the price of a single new high spec Macbook, and that's with repeat replacements due to damage / spills / etc.

I went with an Intel 7260HMW BN for $20. Dual band with Bluetooth 4.0.

USB 3 can trash your WiFi/BT spectrum as many device manufactures provide inadequate shielding. I got some foil tape and carefully lined the inside of an external drive enclosure and fixed some intermittent WiFi issues. FCC should scrutinize USB devices more, I thinks. Probably wack-a-mole though.

If the FCC cared, windowed gaming PCs wouldn't have ever been a thing.

Couldn’t you have a window with a grid or grill, like a microwave?

Intel Wifi 6 is as solid as they come.

The PCIe versions of those cards are widely known to experience frequent microcode hangs (which can also hang your entire machine) depending on "some circumstances" (allegedly linked to 5 GHz 802.11n or something).

> Their new machines have every thing soldered in place with no pesky upgrade/repair options, not even a stray NVME or RAM slot. It's amazing they left a USB port.

I'm gonna shill a bit again and say the LG Gram series belies anyone saying this has to be done for weight / slimness reasons, as even the 1.0 kg 14-inch model has two M.2 2280 slots.

Instead of building gaming rigs, I keep my knowledge and skills current by reviving/reusing/repurposing older hardware. Some new ram, a fast SSD, system is good for another 5 years or more. It keeps an old hobby alive and saves me quite a bit of money in the process.

PCIe x1 for networking is quite common, PCIe mounted SSD aren't unheard of, PCIe USB expansions see pretty common too (others already mention audio/capture cards). Not much else I can think of unless you're getting really out there.

I find PCIe USB expansions and SSDs very uncommon, but I guess my sample size is mostly nerds who also game, not even sure when I last opened up a work-issued desktop PC...

I use a 7x USB 3.0 expansion card for my gaming system, because I hate hot-plugging input devices into my front panel I/O. My gaming uses a mix of peripherals from a Keyboard and Mouse (separate from the ones I use for productivity work on the same PC) to an Xbox controller to a HOTAS & Pedal kit, plus charging cords for my Valve Index controllers that I leave plugged in and routed. And of course high-end gaming headsets usually use USB these days, plus a webcam. I use a lot of ports. :)

That's a reasonable method but I think most people would use a hub to achieve those goals.

Recently I had some USB enumeration loop (turned out to be the Index umbilical connector) that made me disconnect everything one by one. What a marathon. The USB hub dedicated to wireless dongles alone has a wireless keyboard/touchpad adaptor, the one of the Steam Controller and an ANT+ stick. Elsewhere the homebrew stick/rudder is linked up, the Nrf52 devkit, keyboard, mouse, another touchpad, the hub where I connect Android devices for development and occasionally a Garmin for some cIQ stuff. A modified webcam I used to use for infrared headtracking and that cheap portable usb audio with built in phantom power for a condenser mic headset (the firewire audio interface seems to be acting up). The old laser printer is permanently connected whereas the scanner is only plugged in on demand. Currently disconnected are the throttle quadrant, the trim box (with yet another touchpad, still ps/2) and the midi controller. Somewhere there's an arduino configured as an nrf52 programmer. Yes, I need a notebook computer free of most of that stuff to get actual work done.

And if you get 3x full body vive trackers for your index, those each have a USB receiver and you need 3 more ports and they can't be consolidated for some reason. And if you want to charge those from your computer, that's 3 more ports.

I have an anker 5-port USB power hub (no data, not connected to computer) next to my machine for charging phone, headphones, earbuds, etc, and another 10-port hub for charging the 2 index controllers, 3 full body trackers, and 3 track straps with builtin batteries for extended play (for days when you feel like spending more than 7 hours in VR anyways...)

“M.2 NVMe” SSDs are PCIe add-in cards in a laptop formfactor.

> Intel workstation CPUs ... don't. G12 has 16xPCIe 5 and 4xPCIe 4.

Intel's current workstation CPU line, launched a year ago, has 64 PCIe 4.0 lanes. https://www.pugetsystems.com/recommended/Recommended-Systems...

I didn’t realize Xeon had improved that much but his point still stands as threadripper has 128 lanes. AMD is better at the moment.

I believe the red team processors don't treat all PCIe lanes equally, much like the earlier blue team processors did. So that 128 lanes is not 128 lanes. More like 128 lanes with caveats. Though my information may be out of date as it has been a year or so since I last looked at AMD options.

The only caveat I know of is that on a dual socket system you won't get twice as many lanes. 48 (or 64, depends on the configuration) of each are used for the interconnect to the other socket. Then of course the performance of any slot-to-slot traffic may depend on the different paths taken inside the interconnect, but that only matters for very high-bandwidth of low-latency applications.

It is true, the CPU-to-CPU interconnect fabric on both blue team and red team play into that, and it varies between generations and motherboards and chip sets. It gets very confusing quite quickly. Some server boards will let you dedicate PCIe slots to a specific CPU, others won't let you not dedicate certain slots to a CPU.

Unless you're looking at a Zen 1 chip, it should all be pretty equal.

There’re plenty of uses that you may not see: I have a capture and sound card in addition to two GPUs.

I'd be confident in saying that you're an outlier in that though.

I have a PCIe sound card but I have to say these days that I'm actually using a tiny apple usb dongle for my audio, and it sounds cleaner than the internal sound card does. The dongle was also a fraction of the price of the sound card, and way more convenient.

That may be true but in an industry that produces millions of new computers every year there's quite a bit of room for outliers. After all someone has been buying all these specialised expansion cards for all these years.

Graphics, sound and networking may have been the biggest reasons and may now be adequately catered for in everyday PCs without the extra hardware. However the high end of all of those markets still needs more than what you get on any basic motherboard and processor and then there are all the speciality cards as well catering for who knows how many niche markets.

No, we're all doing that now. This loss of PCIE expansion is really annoying and I'll probably be skipping this next gen largely for that reason. Highend threadripper is unobtanium and has been for the last couple years. But I have a gpu from like every generation that I wish I could plug into my pcie bus and have it be useful, if I could buy a platform that supported that I would.

Which of those need to be at PCIe3 or 4 bandwidths rather than USB3 bandwidths?

Which of them need to be at PCIe latencies rather than USB latencies?

Capture cards need the bandwidth. Whether they need the latency is arguable, but they need a lot more latency determinism than USB tends to offer out of the box.

Introduced latency on the capture side makes latency tuning your entire production pretty difficult. For non-real time usage, sure, latency in the 100-200ms range is more than acceptable (assuming it's deterministic, as you pointed out), but in the real-time world? Keeping things within a frame is pretty much required, and with the popularity of software-driven studio workflows across both amateur streaming and professional production, it's been real hard to get reliable performance out of USB hardware that didn't add frustrating amounts latency due to pre-ingest compression or seemingly random amounts of delay due to protocol or CPU time starvation.

Yep, there's a reason I have Blackmagic quad 4K capture cards in my workstation. Syncing multiple video streams with USB capture cards would be nigh impossible even if you put them on separate USB controllers. Ingest over USB is fine (though slow) but pretty much every USB capture card does its own internal compression, as you point out, and then involves the CPU to decompress it and get it into VRAM or DRAM.

Realtime video production is definitely an outlier. You probably want a workstation-class system anyway, with a full TB of RAM so you know that's never an issue.

USB latency should be under a millisecond as far as I know.

This is both only true for small transfers (not bulk/asynchronous transfers) and for the ~99th percentile. Large transfers have some buffer management and handshaking, so they tend to have highly variable latency that has a very fat tail.

The latency degradation for large transfers is so noticeable that most audio DACs (not just ones for gullible audiophiles, also for the pro market) use custom drivers and USB protocols. For 1/1000000th the data rate that a capture card would need.

but is it /consistent/?

USB everything tends to end in dongle spaghetti. And then plugboard spaghetti to hold all of the power adapters. Just the feature of being an expansion mounting rack and power/data backplane is valuable even if it only ran at basic USB 3.0 speed.

I use multi seat on Linux. You need one graphic card per seat. So our whole family shares one computer but everyone have their own work station with monitor, keyboard, mouse and headset. Ohh you also need separate sound cards.

I understand how to do this... but I have to ask, why?

Not the OP, but I've thought about doing something like this, because you can justify a much fancier computer if it's shared. I have no reason for 16-cores, but 16-cores across three people is reasonable, maybe not even enough, so better get something bigger.

Then at least 64 GB of ram, and a sweet disk array, etc.

I did run a dual head Windows environment for a while, but it did have issues from time to time.

Yes, need at least one beefy system for gaming, why not let everyone share it ? Could run machine learning during the night.

Having everyone gathered in the same room is also a feature. But you will want to have a good headset =)

Did try Windows but Windows has no built in support for multi seat, so it didn't work well. Linux however have great support.

> Did try Windows but Windows has no built in support for multi seat, so it didn't work well.

Windows kind of does have built in support for multi seat[1], it's just Microsoft won't sell it to you, and if they did, licensing costs would be enormous for 2-5 people; I was using third party software to enable multiseat, which worked ok for the version of windows it was built for, but hotplugging USB was always an opportunity for calamity, etc.

[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/remote/multi...

> Ohh you also need separate sound cards.

hdmi/displayport audio?

It's a shame that Linux can't do multi seat with a single video card that has multiple outputs. Same goes for the sound card assuming that stereo sound is enough.

I'd like a PCIe card with room for more NVMe drives on it. I'd like to replace my SATA connected SSDs for performance, but I can only stick two M2 cards on my motherboard.

There are multiple products in that space, such as https://www.asus.com/Motherboards-Components/Motherboards/Ac...

Something like this?

https://www.amazon.com/Adapter-advanced-solution-Controller-...

Highpoint and Squid are your goto options in that space. There are others, e.g. dumb cards, if you just want to bifurcate an existing PCIe slot to handle four M.2 drives. But if you want 16 or 64 NVMe drives, the two manufacturers I mentioned have offerings. I have a Highpoint U.2 card, which gives me the option to handle 8x U.2 or M.2 drives (with adapters) in a single PCIe slot.

you buy a cheap adapter to plug a m.2 nvme drive into a pci card

and vice-versa (why? m.2 slots have ACS support for pci passthrough)

they're essentially just a wire as it's the same bus

The vast majority of users are happy with a few tb fast storage and the rest on regular hard drives.

The users who aren’t tend to be building servers.

> You need a desktop? It's either because you aren't trusted

What do you mean with "you aren't trusted" ?

An awful lot of people work in a corporate desktop environment where the machines are bolted down. They don't go home with you. You don't have admin privileges, you can't install software, and there's probably corporate spyware installed.

Customer service. Tech support. Inbound sales. Outbound sales.

The company doesn't trust you. If you take a machine home, you're probably going to lose it or break it or sell it, so that's a hard no.

It's also a security risk. They may generally trust you, but may not trust you 100% in the little detail of never ever getting malware on your laptop, which then would invade their internal network. I'm actually astonished that so many companies allow you having a laptop that you take home and that also connects to the company network.

Being “in the network” doesn’t matter anymore because everything has moved from unsecured intranet services to Internet exposed stuff authenticated with SAML. One user having malware is as much of a threat as someone else at the cafe having malware. No longer an issue.

If you were correct in this assertion, then there would not be a malware epidemic.

Ipso facto...

The world isn’t uniform. Quite a lot of companies continue to self-host and take care to not expose their data to the cloud.

Those companies have to continue using bolted down PCs without admin access then. For the rest, take home laptops with full access work fine.

Admin access is fine, you only need to block the USB ports and secure your network and domain policies heavily enough. The alternative to desktop PCs are VMs in the company's data center accessed either remotely or from local thin clients via remote desktop.

I can't imagine how unproductive people would be working under all these restrictions. You walk in to the meeting room but can't plug your laptop in to the TV because it's using a usb c cable. Can't visit the websites you need to get your job done because they might contain software you can install on them. Have to wait for IT to approve everything and just sit around being unproductive.

Just so the company can continue to have insecure internal services.

Actually most of the time with companies that still self-host I see take home laptops with VPN since work-from-home is a must. So not only does the risk still exist, the malware doesn't even have to wait for you to go back into the office.

> The low end doesn't need PCIe slots for anything: integrated GPUs are good enough to do all generic business work, integrated sound, network, blah blah blah.

Although 'low end' may be a misnomer, you do have a point.

But then, if expansion slots are not needed, you can go with ITX motherboards as that's the point. If I'm buying a full size ATX board, it better have plenty of expansion capabilities.

Many a times a workstation ATX board is necessary only because you want tons of RAM. All the card space is essentially wasted PCB.

Since Threadrippers until very recently didn't support RDIMM, you could only put 256GB in them -- but even for that little you needed eight slots. Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/6icdyo/amd_threadrippe...

It was the TR Pro last year which finally started to support RDIMM. No one released an mATX version though, pity. The earlier platform did have an mATX version but only four DIMM slots, kinda pointless there.

(My laptop has 64GB RAM, so I do not think 256GB on the desktop is unreasonable.)

> Business users get: laptops, mostly.

That's far from universal. The business users I've worked with recently almost all have desktops. A few (mostly management) have laptops for work. I'm sure a lot of that has to do with whether the business is remote-work-friendly. There are still quite a few businesses who are decidedly NOT.

You're forgetting independent creators and artists

To be fair, the chip and system makers have mostly forgotten them too.

I think that falls into the workstation category?

Not really, all you need is a beefy PC or laptop. These guys aren't usually running Xeon or Threadripper

Yeah it really sucks that you can't get a normal computer with decent A/V capabilities (or expansion slots to add them) and instead have to opt for a workstation you don't need since "normal" users apparently only use office.

Not all motherboards have built in wifi, which leaves the option of a USB external adapter or a PCIe card.

The higher end Intel CPU's always have tons of PCIe lanes.

Not even business, since 2011 on the projects I worked on, the workstations if needed, were always some beefy cloud VM.

Demand and capitalism. Bigger, better, and newer.

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