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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 beca
by dsr_ 4y ago
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
- Q6T46nT668w6i3m 4y agoThere’re plenty of uses that you may not see: I have a capture and sound card in addition to two GPUs.
- highwaylights 4y agoI'd be confident in saying that you're an outlier in that though.
- bentcorner 4y agoI 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.
- Silhouette 4y agoThat 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.
- always2slow 4y agoNo, 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.
- dsr_ 4y agoWhich 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?
- pclmulqdq 4y agoCapture 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.
- belthesar 4y agoIntroduced 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.
- justinlloyd 4y agoYep, 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.
- dsr_ 4y agoRealtime 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.
- jeffbee 4y ago> 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-for-Data-Science-260/Buy_314 https://www.pugetsystems.com/recommended/Recommended-Systems...
- jamiek88 4y agoI didn’t realize Xeon had improved that much but his point still stands as threadripper has 128 lanes. AMD is better at the moment.
- justinlloyd 4y agoI 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.
- hobo_mark 4y agoThe 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.
- justinlloyd 4y agoIt 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.
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- pbhjpbhj 4y agoPCIe 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.
- wink 4y agoI 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...
- Kerrick 4y agoI 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. :)
- Dylan16807 4y agoThat's a reasonable method but I think most people would use a hub to achieve those goals.
- usrusr 4y agoRecently 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.
- pjmlp 4y agoNot even business, since 2011 on the projects I worked on, the workstations if needed, were always some beefy cloud VM.
- li2uR3ce 4y agoSo 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.
- dmw_ng 4y agoCurious 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.
- li2uR3ce 4y agoI 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.
- kevin_thibedeau 4y agoIf the FCC cared, windowed gaming PCs wouldn't have ever been a thing.
- antiterra 4y ago
- kryptiskt 4y agoI'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.
- Tijdreiziger 4y agoThere are multiple products in that space, such as https://www.asus.com/Motherboards-Components/Motherboards/Accessories/HYPER-M-2-X16-CARD-V2/ https://www.asus.com/Motherboards-Components/Motherboards/Ac...
- jandrese 4y agoSomething like this? https://www.amazon.com/Adapter-advanced-solution-Controller-Expansion/dp/B07JKH5VTL https://www.amazon.com/Adapter-advanced-solution-Controller-...
- justinlloyd 4y agoHighpoint 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.
- blibble 4y agoyou 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
- Gigachad 4y agoThe 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.
- JAA1337 4y agoDemand and capitalism. Bigger, better, and newer.
- Melatonic 4y agoThe higher end Intel CPU's always have tons of PCIe lanes.
- z3t4 4y agoI 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.
- dsr_ 4y agoI understand how to do this... but I have to ask, why?
- toast0 4y agoNot 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.
- z3t4 4y agoYes, 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.
- toast0 4y ago> 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/multipoint-services/introducing-multipoint-services https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/remote/multi...
- pdntspa 4y agoYou're forgetting independent creators and artists
- Finnucane 4y agoTo be fair, the chip and system makers have mostly forgotten them too.
- pier25 4y agoI think that falls into the workstation category?
- pdntspa 4y agoNot really, all you need is a beefy PC or laptop. These guys aren't usually running Xeon or Threadripper
- boondaburrah 4y agoYeah 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.
- pier25 4y ago> You need a desktop? It's either because you aren't trusted What do you mean with "you aren't trusted" ?
- dsr_ 4y agoAn 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.
- layer8 4y agoIt'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.
- Gigachad 4y agoBeing “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.
- auxym 4y agoNot all motherboards have built in wifi, which leaves the option of a USB external adapter or a PCIe card.
- outworlder 4y ago> 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.
- _ugfj 4y agoMany 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_threadripper_supports_up_to_256gb_of_ram_942/dj5goiz/ 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.)
- nocman 4y ago> 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.