MSI reveals first USB4 expansion card, delivering 100W through USB-C
techspot.com
techspot.com
Also, where is the video signal coming from? I assume the card doesn't have a GPU, but I don't see any internal ports either.
Or did the article get it wrong and the DP sockets are really inputs that are then spliced into the USB-C outputs?
Ah, and the source article https://www.techpowerup.com/309532/msi-first-motherboard-mak... got it right.
Replace the signal entirely with the voodoo’s own signal when generating 3D graphics.
Could just be one DP cable to the GPU without extra fuss, like decade ago...
The level of BIOS bugginess on recent motherboards is reaching astronomic levels. The MSI motherboard I was trying that on will literally _duplicate_ the entire ACPI DSDT whenever you enable TBT (Linux shows a hundred warnings when booting up, which MSI claims is fine)...
Ah, the ASMedia experience! Glad AMD picked such an experienced and well-regarded company to do their chipsets /s
edit: Okay, the linked part actually uses an Intel chip, though the point still stands. ASMedia has so many other chips and bridges (including the mentioned AMD chipsets) and they're all pretty notorious for weird "huh that was supposed to work" kind of problems. Problems that generally don't happen on Intel platforms.
(also an older Asus with its TB3 expansion card only worked at all in Windows if you disabled the "enable Windows support" option in the BIOS, which is an interesting choice)
Oddly my OWC thunderbolt dock/switch somehow manages to provide it’s gigabit nic my surfacebook 3 over an _active_ thunderbolt cable. But the surfacebook doesn’t have thunderbolt support at all! So somehow the USB fallback and the display attached via a usb-c to displayport cable works. If I plug a real thunderbolt device in, it can see them and tries to enumerate them, which of course fails and throws up a malfunction message, stating that the thunderbolt device does not work correctly. Then it bluescreens…
That's a relief I guess, I was afraid we were getting a new connector again. How do normal people keep all this USB crap straight? I consider myself something of a nerd but I find all of this cable/port diversity utterly bewildering.
There's a vocal subset that argues *USB4 itself is confusing*, but 95% of the time they're referring to either:
A) power (the crappy $5 Amazon cable from 3 years ago will not carry 100W for your M2 Pro Apple Silicon Apple MacBook Pro
B) crappy 3rd party cables you can't trust because you can't trust crappy 3rd party cables, ever
Even other laptop manufacturers have cables for charging and cables for high speed data transfer. Samsung's official cables seem to do either USB3 or high-speed charging, but not both at the same time. Lenovo has a Thunderbolt 4 cable (with no details on the power capabilities) or a USB 3.2 2x2 cable that can carry up to 100W. Dell Europe doesn't seem to be selling C-to-C cables. HP seems to sell a competent cable for one of their docks, but that's out of stock. Asus' cable is USB2 only. Acer doesn't seem to sell any cables as far as I can tell, except for a USB 3.1 cable for Chromebooks.
If you want a fully-featured USB4 cable, your only options are either buying a cable from Apple or going for third parties and with the prevalent scams on online web stores and the risk of burning your house down if the cable turns out not to be up to spec, getting good cables can be a real challenge.
Apple sells their cables for a ridiculous price (€150) but I wouldn't expect the average consumer to know where to reliably spend their €30-€50 for a charge cable. Device manufacturers really need to step up and sell some kind of certified cable that doesn't cut any corners.
That seems implausible/unlikely to be the cable's fault: Since different wire pairs are used for power supply and data, why would the two be mutually exclusive?
> I wouldn't expect the average consumer to know where to reliably spend their €30-€50 for a charge cable
The situation was tricky for a while, but these days, even on Amazon.com's search results (which are frequently swamped with spam/uncertified products), searching for "Thunderbolt 4 cable" yields products by trustworthy-looking vendors supporting 100W charging in the first 5 results.
5/10/20gbps cables, those I’ve seen limited to 60W.
I know it's only a few amps but there's still a real risk of melting plastic and starting fires (and this has happened in the past).
The USB forum has completely lost any sort of messaging muscle it once had.
USB3 was somewhat exciting in its original 5Gbps form-- it made it feasible to put things like spinning rust external HDDs on there with no compromises, and in effect strangled eSATA and the last places you'd see external SCSI ports.
Since then, all they've been able to deliver is an alphabet soup. First, nothing was special because everything keeps getting upgraded-- that "3.0" device I was going to buy became "3.2" without having any actual changes made. There's an ever growing set of laundry-label style icons for power supply and DisplayPort compatibility, precision-engineered to be either ignored or misused by lowest-bid vendors.
USB 4.0 could really have benefitted from a strong message-- something like "Here's ONE big and obvious 4.0 badge and it means any cable with it will support ALL the features promised in this slide deck."
That's seven at least by my count. I probably have some USB 1.1 Type A peripherals in my closet but those might be USB 2, they look the same so I'm not sure. The only devices I counted were: phone, kindle, laptop, PC, mouse/keyboard, printer, portable HDD, and a GPS nav unit. Maybe I'm weird for still using the last one, but otherwise I don't think any of this is particularly unusual.
There have been several common B (B, miniB, microB, appleB) but it was mostly all microB for quite a few years before C happened.
We just have a drawer full of various USB things. If something doesn't fit/work, just try another one. If none work, or the drawer is running low, buy some more. You might have to buy multiple times if the new ones don't work.
At least, this is what works for me.
Is it in GPU RAM of another GPU in your system, with pixel data being DMA'ed over the PCIE bus? Does that mean my screen goes blank if I ever get contention on the bus?
Could I put loads of these cards into a machine and run 20 independent displays, all with one GPU?
Loopback cables are a bit clunky, but it does mean there's no pressure on the PCI-E bus from moving the pixels from the GPU to the USB4 card.
Apple kinda has this in their M1/M2 SoC's where the GPU is entirely separate from the stream-data-from-ram-to-the-display logic.
And put displays onto hubs and cable extenders.
Basically the CD-ROM analog audio cable all over again.
so you need to have video signal and power on one usb-c output.
The monitor has a framebuffer of it's own.
Otherwise how could it display the OSD (On Screen Display)?
Nvidia had some on the 2000 series GPUs but dropped them with the 3000 series. This was part of the VirtualLink system which failed, but they’re otherwise fully functional.
Some of AMD’s newest cards have USB-C ports on them now: https://www.amd.com/en/products/graphics/amd-radeon-rx-7900x...
USB-C ports on graphics cards are already quite readily available.
> They also saturate their PCI-E slots so trying to shove more data through it isn't tempting.
No they don’t. Most cards and use scenarios don’t even saturate x8 PCIE4 let alone a full x16 PCIE5 slot.
48V is ubiquitous through POE et al
And with 5A the gauge of the wire is important but it's not going to be running hot to the touch
I doubt you'll see it go much higher though, especially the current
The only issue I see would be counterfeit cables, but that's the same issue you get with any low voltage system that allows separate cables, and 120VAC even has the same issue, people burn down houses with space heaters and extension cords incessantly, because we are apparently idiots who think it's fine to not have fuses in the cords.
That kind of thing. Am I being paranoid? It just smells like a house fire in the offing.
Whenever you charge a device you're already trusting a complex computer-controlled system not to turn the lithium ion pack into an incendiary device, trusting a computer not to overload a copper cable is small stakes relatively speaking.
I expect there will be some surprises with cheap cables pretending they can handle full power.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/02/google-engineer-find...
> Sources Shall detect the type of Attached cable and limit the Capabilities they offer based on the current carrying capability of the cable determined by the Cable capabilities determined using the Discover Identity Command (see Section 6.4.4.2) sent using SOP’ Communication (see Section 2.5) to the Cable Plug. The Cable VDO returned as part of the Discover Identity Command details the maximum current and voltage values that Shall be negotiated for a given cable as part of an Explicit Contract.
Please don't talk about stuff you have no idea about.
[1] To be fair, it's more like 60-80 Watt for most models, but these days it can be up to 140 Watt, as far as I know.
The main risks from each are different though. Simplified explanation for the non-physicist:
Lots of Amps make wires get hot, make connections melt, etc. In general, thin wires (eg headphone wires) are good for 1 or 2 amps safely, and chunky wires (eg. AC cords) are good for 10 or 20 amps safely. The exact amount depends on how much cooling they get - which is why you should never put blankets over power cords. If you screw this up, the outcome is probably a fire, which maybe kills you.
Lots of volts causes electrocution. Thats because your skin is pretty decent at blocking electricity, but when you have enough volts, some can sneak through your skin, freezing up your muscles, stopping your heart which probably kills you.
So - amps and volts have totally different mechanisms of death. USB-C @ 100W is 20 volts at 4.5 amps. The voltage is well below dangerous levels, and the current is pretty safe in the cables specced, but I can totally imagine a few fires.
It's worth noting that about 10x as many people die from amps (electrical fires) than volts (direct electrocution).
Thats 48 volts (fairly safe IMO) at 5 amps (only marginally safe IMO, on that connector design).
There are laws in many countries capping voltages, but not on currents - which is why the standard is pushing the safety envelope there!
The standard has no way to detect damaged cables (ie. baby chewing through the cable), nor connections getting hot (ie. an old dirty connection heating up and catching fire). But I suspect a future revision will allow both more volts and more amps, and will add those safety features - I'm hoping on the next version being 500 volts and 8 amps, allowing it to replace all household outlets.
"blah blah blah worm security blah blah"
-- same sentence different language.
(and -- I'm entirely trying to be tongue-in-cheek -- the notion of little dynamically updated microcontrollers everywhere in my house, getting bricked or asking me for a micropayment to turn a light on is a pkd story come to life)
Of course it does. All it needs is to ask the other device what voltage is on the other side, calculate resistance off it and trip or drop to lower power mode if it deems that there is too much power lost in the cable. Still not perfectly safe as say 3W lost over whole cable is far less dangerous than this 3W loss focused solely on dodgy connection but still.
Standard USB-PD only requires that you negotiate a voltage and current suitable for both sides (among a preset list). It essentially goes open loop after that; you can't exceed the current limit set, but beyond potentially tripping the PD controller (on the sink side) if the voltage drops too low, there's not really any protection here. It's fully on the PD sink to implement (or, not implement) any sort of protections like that.
None, which is the fucking problem. Cheap cable can just lie about it's current capacity.
Clearly one of those numbers is wrong
I've had high-end devices (Macbook Air I'm typing this on) give me unreliable connections for basic USB 1.1, and now they're planning to run amps over similarly-sized pins?
My experience with USB-C on laptops has been nothing but terrible.
Now? Between 2016-ish and the re-introduction of MagSafe, MacBooks have been using USB-C charging exclusively!
It seems like comparing the amperage of M.2 to USB-C is indeed a little silly.
ETA: I guess your question was specifically about the connector interface, which is less of a problem because there are 4 power and 4 ground pins. 1.25A per pin is no issue.
A USB-C contact is much smaller (seems to be around 0.5 mm).
This is the part I don't understand. If you require a 0.9 mm diameter wire, how can you have it connect to a 0.5 mm landing strip?
hacks like that are not required.
If you're saying the plugs don't have more resistance than the equivalent length of cable, that's wrong. From what I can find it's very typical for a USB C plug to have 40 milliohms of contact resistance. Even if you divide that by 4, that's 10 milliohms in a single centimeter. 20 gauge wire is 0.3 milliohms per centimeter.
there are 4 connectors for ground and 4 connectors for power in USB-C connector
This is a very common practice on PCBs. You can use a very wide trace where there's room, and narrow it to get around tight spots like between pins on an IC.
When I built solar race cars in college, we optimized the powertrain for resistive losses over weight. We used 00 AWG wire from the battery to the motor, knowing it would max out at 40 amps. We would then "neck it down" to 8 AWG to go into 40A rated connectors. To a casual observer it definitely appeared ridiculous and wrong.
Wire gauge requirements are related to current, not power; that's why high-speed trains usually operate at 25000V or 50000V to allow their megawatts of power to be delivered through a ~1cm diameter overhead line.
That said, I still hate USB-C as a power standard. I would have much preferred 2 connectors just supplying 20VDC, no questions asked, with a standard connector, just like 120VAC power works. Pick another connector for the USA low-voltage standard, none of this negotiation fuss, none of this complicated power circuitry, and much harder to get cables wrong. With the complexity of USB-C there are just way too many substandard cables flooding the market, and average Joes don't understand the difference between a 100W-capable cable and a 60W-capable cable and one that is charging-only, one that is USB 3.0, one that is USB 3.2, one that is USB 3.2 + 100W charging and all of that. People just buy "5-star" rated cables online that often don't meet the standard and it's a shitshow.
https://www.ti.com/lit/ds/symlink/tps65987d.pdf
I incinerated 250 seconds of my time, or about a billionth of my life for this answer for you - for free! Hope the little dopamine hit was enough for you today. I won't be back.
The closest thing I've heard of was a cable that pretended it was a device, making it so that unplug events didn't register properly.
I'm really happy with being able to plug my laptop into my tiny 5V, 2A power adapter and slowly charging it, yet being able to fast-charge it at home at 100W using the same cable on a larger power adapter.
No, it would not require any of that. It would require only for cable to signal it's max current capacity.
So cheap cable would allow for say 20v/0.5A (10W), while decent one could signal 2A(40W) or max.
Simplest way of signal would be as the previous USB buses used, via a specified value resistor on one of the pins.
More complex would be signalling the power supply power to the device on the other side, especially if you want dynamic power or reversible charging direction. But USB-PD is generally horrifically complicated for what it does
As you say yourself a bit later, you'd need at least two "simple" resistors (one for the cable itself, one for the adapter) – otherwise it's only fixed-cable power supplies (and I really, really hate having to throw away an entire high-quality power supply just because the cable frayed at the laptop end).
> But USB-PD is generally horrifically complicated for what it does
Which parts would you suggest are safe to omit, in a world where you want to be able to charge both small accessories (Bluetooth headphones etc.), smartphones, and large laptops using a single connector?
You could have end device regulate itself by looking at voltage drop, akin to MPPT. And note that simple (sub-10W) devices could opt to implement nothing whatsoever and just get the minimum 20V/0.5A, making small accessories need nothing whatsoever when it comes to extra chips to handle it.
You really need communication only when you start needing features like switchable sink/source function or voluntarily lowering power usage.
>>But USB-PD is generally horrifically complicated for what it does
> Which parts would you suggest are safe to omit, in a world where you want to be able to charge both small accessories (Bluetooth headphones etc.), smartphones, and large laptops using a single connector?
Not talking about featureset but how hideously complex the implementation is. I remember some early adopters tried to implement it using a microcontroller and it ate like 30+kB of code and it was more than half of total product's code
The spec (3.0, rev 1.1) is 574 pages. No fucking wonder we have so many devices implementing it subtly wrong. Hell, they even decided "no, none of the existing serial protocols fits our super special use case, need to invent that too. At least they didn't reinvent CRC32...
I also wish they had implemented a dedicated solar profile to simplify solar generators, so a panel could say "I will act like a current source and do MPPT".
They probably could have done Dallas One Wire for the signalling and been just fine. It could also be how the cable chip communicates, and very small simple devices could use it without the full USB stack.
But, I can accept it just because of how well it works in practice as is.
No, we would just start to have both 20VDC sockets on all the walls in the world in addition to 120VAC/240VAC, and people would stop needing to lug around power adapters.
Yes there would be a maximum current per socket, maybe 5A or 10A, that's not much different from the 15A limit on most AC sockets.
The conversion to 20VDC could be be wired into buildings as standard.
Before then people can lug around a 20VDC adapter that supplies enough current for their own devices. If they have a laptop they might need a 10A adapter, if it's just a phone they could get by with 1A.
And if we do get it wrong, do we change the mechanical plug shape if we decide that no, actually 40V (or 15V, or 32.945V) would have been better so that no unsafe connections become possible?
USB, on the other hand, is "hey I have a new plug" every 5 years. We'll have USB-D in 2030 and everyone will have to buy new cables and adapters.
Anyone who needs 40V should just design it to use 120V/240V instead.
It's way too much to charge small accessories (without an internal step-down converter [1]), yet it's probably not enough to sustain (let alone charge) beefy laptops.
> "hey I have a new plug"
You do realize that this is exactly your pitch for these 20V "standardized" plugs/outlets, right? :)
[1] A big reason why USB's 5V is so popular is that it's just the right voltage to charge lithium ion batteries and run simple circuits without expensive (in terms of parts) active voltage converters.
No, it's not. Lithium is nominally 3.7 volts per cell and charging voltage goes up to about 4.2 volts max, maybe 4.3. Definitely never 5V.
A 5V->4.2V buck converter isn't particularly different than a 20V->4.2V buck converter. In fact it's probably a bit easier to make a 20V->4.2V converter since you don't have to worry about parasitic losses as much.
> You do realize that this is exactly your pitch for these 20V "standardized" plugs/outlets, right? :)
Not exactly, (a) I'd use an existing connector, maybe a Lenovo 20V connector (b) USB keeps having to switch things because they weren't a charging standard to begin with, they were abused as a power plug and then had to keep evolving with that while maintaining backward compatibility and continually keeping up with Moore's law in bandwidth requirements.
A 20VDC plug would just be that -- a low-voltage socket for <100W appliances.
Anything higher, just use 120V/240V and get upto 1800W.
Energy efficiency.
The only issue is that an expansion card powered by the PC supply would have an extra conversion step to get the voltage to USB-C levels.
That's solvable though, maybe they could route the USB through the power supply itself. Or a docking station can power both PC and monitor. Maybe the next generation of PC parts will run directly on 48v or 20v.
Titan Ridge worked to an extent -- but usually it couldn't add PCIe buses so the number of PCIe devices connected to your desktop TB3 card at boot defined the limited until the next reboot. You could remove and add different devices as long as they didn't need extra PCIe buses compared to what got reserved at boot.
Can't see why Maple Ridge would work differently.
Yeah, what a reasonable naming convention.