12VO power standard appears to be gaining steam, will reduce PC cabling, costs
tomshardware.com
tomshardware.com
Surely this will simply move part of the complexity from the PSU to the motherboard? Resulting in more efficient and simple PSUs, but more inefficient and complex motherboards? I've only ever had motherboards fail because of leaky capacitors or busted voltage regulators. The only PSU failure I've ever had was on account of a broken fan. Won't this lead to more motherboard failures?
The cynic in me thinks that Intel would be fine with that, because that way they can sell more motherboard components.
For example, the "MSI Pro H610M 12VO" hyperlinked in the article has a manual that shows it as having two SATA power ports, and an image shows one such port connecting to a single drive. Now I imagine this is a simplified illustration and maybe each port will have enough power to supply 3-to-4 HDDs (depending on current rating of the HDDs of course), but that's still a max of 8 HDDs. Meanwhile the non-12VO PSU I use has four ports available that can each connect to 3-to-4 HDDs each, so a max of 16 HDDs, and it definitely has enough spare power to support them because I sized the PSU for that need.
Your adapter board that will need an extra pair of switching power supplies. I doubt you'll even need an extra board.
(Not that I expect anybody to actually adopt the standard. People will continue to drag their feet, mostly because there aren't enough gains to switch.)
An adapter from 12VO to SATA power can work, or it can be a $5 board that does $2,000,000 of damage.
That timestamp is where they address this issue. It seems the argument is that in sleep mode (low power modes), the system will draw overall less power with ATX12VO vs today's standards.
Further, if you go directly to the specs: https://edc.intel.com/content/www/us/en/design/products-and-..., you can see they talk about ALPM (alternative low power mode) which seems to be the reasons for this design.
If it's so desperately vital that they have some "it's low-power, but still doing something like checking for notifications" mode, couldn't this be done with a mini-coprocessor with the specs of a RasPi 1 running on +5VSB?
I somewhat wished they’d gone to 48vdc instead of 12vdc, though to further reduce cabling, but I guess that would be a big change, the 12vo seems much simpler
components use 12v, 5v, or 3.3v in pcs currently. why do the step down from 48->12 instead of running 12v naturally? 12v is also what is used by the most power hungry components of a PC (GPU).
In fact the exact opposite is true, it is safer in practice. In a true fault condition into flesh the currents involved aren’t substantially less safe (4x microamps is still microamps). With protection circuitry and current limiting, the permitted currents are that much lower, which is easier to deal with.
which are cut because of costs.
There shouldn't be an intermediary step down to 12V. Google's been doing direct step down from 48V->~1V with GaN fets for half a decade, which is vastly more power efficient than the two step 277V->12->1V that many server systems go through.
It'd also be amazing to have usb-c extended power (48v) be something we could just add for free, essentially. (Alas this is complicated by needing to step down to lower voltages too, necessities some semiconductors in the delivery path to usb-c, which would have some voltage drop. This strongly implies to me something more like 52V or 54V would be ideal instead of 48V.)
For anything that typically runs under 100W, I agree that 48V is ridiculous. But I would love love love to see some motherboards for ThreadRipper that have GaN fet for direct conversion from 48V, or stuff like that. It'd be pretty niche. But it should be an option!
One of the big potential winners could be people with solar; being able to run your system directly off your solar bank would save double digits percent of power, versus inverting then converting back.
You're right that in the immediate term we'd see a lot of intermediary conversions. I'd love to have a better game plan, for not just motherboards but other components to expect either 48v or wider voltage inputs. Non-trivial to support 10-60V but if that was a market expectation & not a niche need we'd see very affordable solutions spring up practically overnight. There's already a range of usb-c focused power converters that are exceedingly cheap that could step in for this need!
Edit: seems like Google is using two stage conversion primarily, but not necessarily 4:1 48V:12V. Their fixed ratio converter seems to have a 6:1 mode (8V) target as well, or be configurable for even bigger ratio (they said up to 12:1 in their talk). As of 2019, a bit of change of tune from original 2016 ambitions. Good talk? https://youtu.be/aBkz2JR4UVs
It depends on the current. Your 48 V suppply won't supply microamps, but Amps.
The GPU voltage is also step down to 1-1.5v by graphics cards VRMs.
An additional issue is that the sweet spot for voltage conversion is around the 1:10 ratio. Going 120V -> 12V -> 1.2V makes a lot of sense, 120V -> 48V -> 1.2V less so.
I don't buy this at all. 48V and 96V are standard telecom DC voltages. Those parts already exist.
If anything, this would be a big boon as it would enable using both telecom and consumer parts interchangably (thus increasing volume on both).
You use a 100K resistor if you really need to keep things at 0402 for 100V. (P=V^2/R = 0.1 watt)
A 0.1uF 0402 ceramic cap rated at 100V is half a cent.
The biggest problem are your power transistors with max Vgs. That requires a bit of care at 24V; requires quite a bit more care at 48V; requires very specialized topologies at 96V.
So the solution is to.make 75 % or even 100 % of the mainboard, the PSU. /s
Its like a code refactoring
Mains power is dangerous and should be kept in a box separate from current limited lower voltage DC, which could be on the mainboard instead.
Nothing actually needs 12v, it all just converts locally to the desired voltage which is why the mainboard is already a psu
If you put most on 12v but you have a motherboard pulling more from 5v, you have a problem. Currently power supplies divide it based on average motherboard usage, but these slowly change, and your old power supply will stop having the optimum mix.
The solution is to output it all on one rail.
There was a time when the 5V and 3.3V rails on ATX power supplies weren't vestigial, but that era was shorter than the current era of all the major high-power components using a 12V supply.
RAM doesn't have an interface voltage, it uses the voltage supplied, typically around 1.2V.
USB uses 3.3v signalling up through USBHS. (USBSS is 1V differential.) The higher voltages are for power delivery only.
And M.2 using 3.3V is kind of weird and limiting.
Though RAM does its own conversion now, starting with DDR5.
Efficiency jumps a little too. 48V to PoL is pretty common now as well.
Note: a lot of flyback-style transformers are setup to step down the AC voltage 1/10th (12V in 120VAC, 24V in 240VAC) because transformers are cheap/abundant for that. It’s cheaper often to put a buck converter that takes any voltage from 12-24V and convert it to a fixed required voltage.
You’d have HUGE savings on the copper required for a standard home, plus you’d get a substantial increase in power capacity.
And for that matter, I wouldn't want 240VDC on utility poles either. If a line goes down, it's so much more dangerous.
The more sane solution would be a high capacity DC converter installed next to the line transformer that feeds your street. DC infrastructure inside the home makes total sense at moderate voltages. City scale DC at line voltages is honestly terrifying.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_injury
It is, however, considerably more complex to make DC circuit breakers or ground fault detection devices.
Utility poles are 10’s of thousands of volts (AC), I guarantee you that will cook your goose AC or DC.
Most of the copper is spent on carrying hundreds of amps at low voltage not the 12V lanes.
If they're going to go to the trouble of coming up with a new standard, it's asinine to base it on 12 volts, which is already known not to be sufficient. They need to use 48V.
The problem is that safely handling "20-30 amps or so" cannot really be done with cheap consumer-level Molex connectors, or at least should not be done, ideally. More expensive connectors are needed, so what they are doing now is asking for trouble. However, the voltage doesn't determine how hot it gets; only the current influences that. If they were distributing power at 48 volts, the current would be about 1/4 what it is now, and overheating at the connector would not be an issue.
Also I do understand how it works.
Meanwhile, it's true that point-of-load regulation from 48V directly to 1V will be less efficient (well, maybe; see nimish's link below). But by the same token, regulation in the PSU would be more efficient if it didn't have to go all the way down from 150-300 VDC on the primary side down to 12 at the output.
A good compromise would probably be the geometric mean between a few hundred volts and the voltage at the load with the highest current. Assuming 250 volts on the primary as a compromise between 120/240VAC operation and 1V all the way downstream, that would be about 16 volts. Doesn't seem like a big improvement, but it would be enough to lower the current at the GPU input connector by about 1.8x compared to 12 volts.
Either way, sticking with 12 volts in any new standard is just stupid. 48 has another advantage, which is that automotive is going to (finally) start moving to it over the next few years. There could be a lot of room for parts-sharing between the two industries.
Indeed - drop the phillips head already. Hex or torx, please. 50A is really on the very high side, though.
Also the capacitive coupling for 48v is quite more dangerous.
Like mentioned (by a sibling comment), it's not a single conversion, but the efficiency is not the prime issue regardless - it's the reaction time and the voltage sag. Load insertion causes the voltage at the CPU (inside) to drop and be significantly lower than the one measure at at the VRM, due to losses at such high currents.
The lack of voltage simply causes the systems to crash.
It's a reduction in cables, but I wouldn't say drastic. An 8-pin with good components can handle over 500 watts at 12 volts. Just modernizing gives you most of the possible benefit.
You’d better not have any corrosion in that connector, or a loose wire if you want to be able to do that without fire risk. And you’ll get non-trivial resistive heating in many cases over time.
Doing the same at 48 volts is 10.5 amps total, 2.6 amps per pin. Hard to mess that up.
I mean, the much smaller pins on the 12-pin got rated for 8.3 amps. And yes that connector does have issues, but they're around bad latching much more than current.
This change is unlikely to make motherboards significantly more failure-prone than they are now.
Intel produces motherboards, especially server-side, and has significant amount of profit from it, much less margin they get from PSUs.
So it just increases profit for Intel. Consumers will likely to pay more for nothing.
It seems you could take a page out of the laptop handbook and go to USB-C 20V standard. There must already be a whole ecosystem of 20V capable PMICs / SMPS already, so this doesn't seem like it would be a drastic change.
Heck, it seems like we should just jump to the USB C power delivery standard for desktop PCs. The high end is currently 48V / 240W (which I'm guessing is a limitation of the connector + max safe voltage). Either go with a different design for the connector to get above 240W, or just parallel up 2-4x USB C connectors internally. That would be more than sufficient.
I'm sure you'd be taking advantage of some of the production scale of laptops.
And this would allow easy extension to stuff like power external monitors etc from the desktop PC directly. Being able to charge a laptop and have an external display (or two) all connected to the desktop PC instead of their own dedicated power bricks would be awesome.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-100_bus
> Power supplied on the bus is bulk unregulated +8 Volt DC and ±16 Volt DC, designed to be regulated on the cards to +5 V (used by TTL ICs), -5 V and +12 V for Intel 8080 CPU IC, ±12 V RS-232 line driver ICs, +12 V for disk drive motors. The onboard voltage regulation is typically performed by devices of the 78xx family (for example, a 7805 device to produce +5 volts). These were linear regulators which are commonly mounted on heat sinks.
It might allow for a slightly smaller PSU, but you get a substantially larger motherboard back in return as it needs to include voltage conversion for all the peripherals you could potentially attach. If you're making a truly tiny build you won't have much peripherals anyways so all those parts are wasted and something like a Pico PSU might already be a better option today.
[0]Yes, cue the xkcd comic.
12v is a good compromise because PSUs can be manufactured to support both the new and old standard and motherboards could even accept ATX power inputs and just ignore the 5v and 3v rails.
It allows for a transition period that’s much smoother than a complete revamp. It’s the more pragmatic solution.
I'm not sure if this was a typo or deliberate, but either way the irony is beautiful.
>12v is a good compromise because PSUs can be manufactured to support both the new and old standard and motherboards could even accept ATX power inputs and just ignore the 5v and 3v rails.
The biggest sticking point with 12VO is that it's physically incompatible with ATX. 12VO doesn't provide the voltages ATX expects (obviously), nor does 12VO provide compatible physical connections (this incompatibility is a selling point).
ATX's biggest selling point and why we still use it to this day is its backwards and forwards compatibility. Outside of certain outliers you can just expect an ATX PSU to work with ATX equipment, regardless of when you buy or bought the parts; the virtues of a well-followed industry standard.
I love the idea of making as many components as possible 12V-only.
I think pulling the +5V from the AT-style drive connector and deleting all SATA power connectors is a mistake.
https://bydbatterybox.com/uploads/downloads/230530_BYD_Batte...
48 volt makes power conductors thinner and cheaper for the same functionality.