Why aren’t motherboards mostly USB-C by now?::I’m beginning to think that the Windows PC that I built in 2015 is ready for retirement (though if Joe Biden can be president at 78, maybe this PC can last until 2029?). In looking at new des…
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There’s no reason to replace USB A on most desktops since it would break 20+ years of backwards compatibility without any real benefit. Maybe 1 or 2 would be useful.
Thats the thing, with a small adaptor that has no logic/silicon, usb-a device is fully compatible with a usb-c port. And things like framework solved this issue ages ago to make hardware expose either, or both, usb-c and usb-a…
If anything, i think the usb-c price might be why its nowhere to be seen. However, with the eu laws that might change in the next 8y, but i doubt it as usb-c to usb-a are a thing
If manufacturers start making printers, mouses, keyboards, headsets and all other peripherals with usb-c cables and provide c to a adapters in the boxes, then motherboard manufacturers should start adding more ports to support them without those adapters.
But the Apple way of changing all ports to USB-C because “you can just use dongles!” is dumb. Motherboards have plenty of space for both, usb-c is like the smallest connector that exists right after the 3.5mm audio plug.
Having lived through the initial rollout of USB, I remember a period of time when a PC would come with a few USB ports, printers had parallel and USB ports on them, mice came with USB to P/S2 adapters in the box etc. so there was a transitional period. Everyone seemed to be onboard with the idea that USB was the future. Within a decade, P/S2, RS-232 and parallel ports disappeared from PCs.
That same drive to move the fuck on and complete the transition doesn’t seem to be there this time. Mobile device manufacturers have adopted USB-C as entirely as they can because of their weird obsession with making devices uselessly thin. Peripheral manufacturers really haven’t; displays are still HDMI or DP, Logitech outright refuses to make a USB-C Unifying Transceiver…“dongle life.” And desktop PCs have relatively few USB-C ports meaning if you do manage to collect up USB-C peripherals for your mobile life, they’re a pain on desktop.
If y’all still have desktops, there’s just no excuse. There’s room to include any port that may be convenient, and having some extra would let you modernize as you need to replace accessories.
At least with laptops, there may be a space argument for limited ports
So, much as I hate to admit it, the real reason for this is bandwidth. Lets look at the best case scenario without dipping our toes into server grade hardware. AMD CPUs tend to have more I/O bandwidth allocated than Intel, so we’ll take the top of the line desktop AMD CPU as of right now, the Ryzen 9 7950X (technically the X3D version is the actual top of the line, but that makes certain tradeoffs and for our purposes in this discussion both chips are identical).
On paper, the 7950X has 24 PCIe 5.0 lanes, and 4 on board USB 3.2 ports on its built in USB controller. So already we could have a maximum of 4 type-C ports if we had no type-A ports, however in practice most manufacturers opt to split the difference and go with 1 or 2 type-C ports and the remaining 2 or 3 ports as type-A. You can have more USB ports of course, but you need to then include a USB controller on your motherboards chipset, and that in turn needs to be wired into the PCIe bus which means taking up PCIe lanes, so lets take a look at the situation over there.
We start with 24 PCIe lanes, but immediately we’re going to be sacrificing 16 of those for the GPU, so really we have 8 PCIe lanes. Further, most systems now use NVMe M.2 drives, and NVMe uses up to 4 PCIe lanes at its highest supported speed. So we’re now down to 4 PCIe lanes, and this is without any extra PCIe cards or a second NVMe drive.
So, now you need to plug a USB controller into your PCIe bus. USB 3.2 spec defines the highest supported bandwidth as 10 Gbps. PCIe 5.0 defines the maximum bandwidth of a single PCIe lane as a bit over 31 Gbps. So the good news is, you can successfully drive up to 3 USB 3.2 ports off a single PCIe 5.0 lane. In practice though USB controllers are always designed with even numbers of ports, typically 2 or 4. In the case of 4, one lane isn’t going to cut it, you’ll need at least 2 PCIe lanes.
I think you can see at this point why manufacturers aren’t in a huge rush to slap a ton of USB type-c connectors on their motherboards. With a modern desktop there’s already a ton of devices competing for limited CPU I/O bandwidth. Even without an extra USB controller added in it’s already entirely feasible to come dangerously close to completely saturating all available bandwidth.
Thank you for the detailed and enlightening explanation!
They don’t all have to be high speed. For example, we already see a distinction in USB-A based on things like power and data speed. I don’t see why anyone would be surprised at a similar arrangement for USB-C. Let me have my low speed keyboard and mouse ports, my low power watch charging port
While that is true, it does cause some headaches for end users. There’s a (barely followed) code for differentiating the speeds of type-A connectors, but I’m not aware of any such system for type-C. Generally people expect a type-C connection to be full USB 3.2 or USB-4 speeds (not to mention the absolute state of the USB spec with them changing the nomenclature constantly). If you started putting USB 2.0 ports with type-C connectors you’d quickly find people complaining about that I’m sure.
Really, in the long term I’m sure in another CPU generation or two we’ll have enough bandwidth to spare that manufacturers can start putting extra USB 3.2 or USB 4 controllers on the motherboards at which point they’ll be able to replace most of the type-A ports with type-C without losing speed. In practice though I expect we’ll see history repeating itself with “low” speed type-C ports and high speed type-C ports that support whatever the latest and greatest USB spec is, and no doubt some kind of distinguishing mark to differentiate them. We already see something like that with lightning, although that’s just a little too proprietary to really cut it, we’ll need to get something that’s part of the USB spec itself.
Almost none of the alternate modes or advanced features are required for USB-C devices. Most smartphones don’t support high data rates over their single USB-C port. There are are probably more USB-C ports using the USB 2.0 specs, for example peripheral devices like mice or keyboards. Beyond stuff like DisplayPort alternate mode, there still isn’t a big demand for more than one or two USB-C ports with high data rates or the full feature set.
In USB-4 the only “alt” mode is Thunderbolt, which is basically PCI over a cable.
USB 4 has both PCIe and Display Port alternate modes. Not all USB-C ports are USB 4 though unfortunately.
The latest USB standard has a minimum of 20 Gigabit. Of course, they could only support USB 2, but there would be complaints.
Not al usb c ports have to gen 2.2, just a few 3.0 ports would be neat.
USB A is still really common, especially for plug in peripherals…
I agree most motherboards should at least come with 2 or 4 USB-C ports.
That being said, people upgrading all their peripherals happens significantly less often than the PC upgrade itself, and 90% of my current setup relies on USB type A, so if a motherboard (specially mATX) needs to decide what ports to fit into limited space, I’d prioritize USB A for sure.
Am I throwing away all my mice, keyboards, DAC, digital pens, and other peripherals just so I can have a connector with more bandwidth than I’ll ever need? Nah.
Am I buying them or adapters all over again just so I can be compatible with a new universal standard that I don’t need? Double nah.
KVM switches, or breakout hubs that these devices plug into, then a single USB c device goes to the computer is the most logical avenue for a migration. But this will take a long time. Most people don’t even have that kind of luxury.
On the other side of that, I’m already stuck throwing away all my Lightning cables and chargers, and ideally want to change only once. Why is it so hard to jump right to C for everything?
But we’re not at the point of debating whether users should replace all of their devices. If motherboards with a single USB-C are so common, we’re actually at a place where we’re expecting users to buy all their new peripherals to be USB-A as well.
Usbc connectors are expensive and more difficult to drive. Usb-a connectors are cheap and easy to drive
Not to mention the numerous amount of accessories that use USB-A. My keyboard, mouse, and flash drives all use USB-A.
In my cable collection, odds are that if a cable has USB-C on one end, then either USB-A or C is on the other end. That means every other connector still requires USB-A or a dongle.
USB-A‘s longevity (~20 years) basically ensures that until it’s much cheaper to use USB-C, it won’t replace USB-A.
I don’t understand why I would want a bunch of usb c ports? On a phone where there obviously isn’t space for a full sized port sure, but I find that fiddling with the one usb c port on the back of my desktop is a pain in the ass and the port really struggles to keep a good connection when attached to a stiff or heavy cable.
Yeah, not once have i had any need for a usb c port on my pc? Not having to deal with orientation is nice, but I’ve also had the experience that usb-c is worse at keeping a connection, and I have so many cables with USB-A at one end anyway.
Back in the late 90’s why did we want USB ports when serial and parallel and P/S2 worked so well? There were decades worth of hardware that were compatible with the old standards.
I’d honestly love to see everything USB-C-ified. Would be great to finally just have one standard to concern yourself with.
Nobody tell them about the massively fragmented set of standards using the USB-C connection.
I know, but at least we’d only have one physical connector at that point. While there are indeed a lot of standards for USB C, many of them are not all that relevant in day-to-day use when you’re mostly just looking to connect some basic USB peripherals like a mouse, a thumb drive or charge your phone.
I disagree.
More technical people would understand, but your average Joe would try to plug in their external monitor and RMA PC because it’s not working, same with slow charging phone speed etc.
I’m honestly all in for keeping USB-A for basic I/O devices. Although inventing an USB-A female connector that works both sides and is backwards compatible would be neat.
Because there is no reason to have more than 1 or 2 since almost everything uses a type A connector.
Standard USB type A ports are cheaper, and more importantly, STURDIER then USB C ports. This is extremely important for peripherals that do not need to be disconnected and reconnected often.
USB C is great for convenience for certain things, but it’s a weaker port in terms of physical connection strength.
This is about cost. The standard USB ports are far cheaper and they probably already have a billion of them on hand. Plus all the board layouts already use standard USB for their layouts. Also you’re not really getting any advantage from the USB c size wise or performance wise.
Further more now you’d have to make USB c to whatever form cables and make customers buy these new cables.
If u had to choose between 2 computers and 1 made u buy completely new cables for every peripheral which would u buy?
billion of them on hand
Been thinking that for a long time! For example, I can imagine Chinese warehouses jammed with micro USB connectors. Want to build a low-cost widget? Meh, save some pennies per unit and put a micro on there.
Weirder is that you can’t really find usb c mice and keyboards, though I really don’t know why.
Extra cost for no real benefit
There are a few, but certainly not many. And they mostly seemed to be aimed at plugging into Mac laptops. But at the moment, manufacturers can count on every computer made in the last 20 years or whatever having at least one USB-A port, and most computers still having zero USB-C ports. The options are to make it USB-C and pay extra to include an adapter, or just say the hell with it and make it USB-A. Or relegate yourself to basically selling to Mac users only.
Most manufacturers, naturally, will pick the second option.
This was written in 2021. Is it still true?
I have never seen a desktop motherboard with more than 2 type-c ports. I just went and did a quick look through all the Intel and AMD desktop motherboards (I didn’t look at server motherboards) and as of right now still could not find one with more than 2 USB type-c ports.
I believe the idea is, on the newer motherboards, is that the high speed (20Gbps) USB-C ports are ideal for external hubs. Personally, I like my workstations to be under my desk and out of my way and having one USB-C cable for a hub and one for my phone is clean and convenient.
USB-C to USB-A hubs are cheap. I am constantly moving thumb drives back and forth between my PC and my 3D printer and CNC so damage to an integrated port on my PC would be a real possibility.
Everyone has their own usage habits, of course. For me being restricted to two or maybe three built in USB-C ports is for the best.
Yeah, this is still true for ASUS boards at least.
A couple of X670E boards have 4 onboard plus front panel header. That gets to 5, but only 2 can do USB 4.
Yeah, that’s right. I still find myself wishing for more. Niche vase I guess.
My kids laptop has 4 IIRC. Getting a PC motherboard with more than one on rear and one connector for front of case was impossible last I looked. I generally keep my pc’s for about 5 years and wish to future proof somewhat. It is beyond ridiculous at this point. Although, I haven’t tried to buy one for a few months so perhaps this has changed.
Where does L4SBot pull data from? R*ddit?
