Posted by LorenDB 5 days ago
So I suspect maybe it's just a perverse effect of successive generations of marketing and product managers each coming up with a new system "to fix the confusion?" What's strange is that there's enough history here that smart people should be able to recognize there's a chronic problem and address it. For example, relatively simple patterns like Era Name (like "Core"), Generation Number, Model Number - Speed and then a two digit sub-signifier for all the technical variants. Just two digits of upper case letters and digits 1-9 is enough to encode >1200 sub-variants within each Era/Gen/Model/Speed.
The maddening part is that they not only change the classifiers, they also sometimes change the number and/or hierarchy of classifiers, which eliminates any hope of simply mapping the old taxonomy to the new.
Of course it’s only a solution if you are buying. If you writing low-level software for these outside userspace, I suppose you’ll have to follow the development of CPUs.
The next motherboard (should RAM ever cease being the tulip du jour) will not be an ASRock, for that and other reasons.
For the love of everything though, just increment the model number.
With Intel's confusing socket naming, you can buy a CPU that doesn't fit the socket.
With USB, the physical connection is very clearly the first part of the name. You cannot get it wrong. Yeah, the names aren't the most logical or consistent, but USB C or A or Micro USB all mean specific things and are clearly visibly different. The worst possible scenario is that the data/power standard supported by the physical connection isn't optimal. But it will always work.
The actual names for each data transfer level are an absolute mess.
1.x has Low Speed and Full Speed 2.0 added High Speed 3.0 is SuperSpeed (yes no space this time) 3.1 renamed 3.0 to 3.1 Gen 1 and added SuperSpeedPlus 3.2 bumped the 3.1 version numbers again and renamed all the SuperSpeeds to SuperSpeed USB xxGbps And finally they renamed them again removing the SuperSpeed and making them just USB xxGbps
USB-IF are the prime examples of "don't let engineers name things, they can't"
While not disagreeing, I'd ask for a proof it's not a marketing department's fun. Just to be sure.
Engineers love consistency. Marketing is on the opposite side of this spectra.
Engineers don't make names that are nice for marketing team.
But they absolutely do make consistent ones. The engineer wouldn't name it superspeed, the engineer would encode the speed in the name
But sometimes the extra power or extra data transfer is not an option. For charging a laptop for instance, you typically need 20V, if your charger doesn't support that, you can't charge at all. And then there is Thunderbolt, DisplayPort, Oculink, where the devices that use these features won't work at all in an incompatible port. And I am not aware of device that strictly requires one of the many flavors of USB 3 or 4, but I can imagine a video capture card needing that. Raw video requires a lot of bandwidth.
Consumer oriented sockets(LGA115x) has different notches and pin counts to prevent this issue - actually, some of "different" sockets in consumer oriented sockets with "different" chipsets are actually identical, and sometimes you see Chinese bastardized boards that use discarded server-marked chips and pins-fudged hacker builds online that should not be possible according to marketing materials, so there is their own rabbit hole there.
Not at all. If you want to charge your phone, it might "always work", but if you want to use your monitor with USB hub and pass power to your MacBook, you're gonna have a hard time.
I don't know what "always work" means here but I feel like I've had USB cables that transmit zero data because they're only for power, as well as ones that don't charge the device at all when the device expects more power than it can provide. The only thing I haven't seen is cables that transmit zero data on some devices but nonzero data on others.
You can maybe blame USB consortium for creating a hard spec, but usually it's just people saving $0.0001 on the BOM by omitting a resistor.
I can't find a USB-C PD adapter for a laptop that uses less than 100W. As a result, I can't charge a 65W laptop from a 65W port because the adapter doesn't even work unless the port is at least 100W.
It does not always work.
It seems totally random, and you cannot rely on watts anymore.
So a 100 watt GAN charger might be able to deliver only 65 watts from it's main "laptop" port, but it has two other ports that can do 25 and 10 watts each. Still 100 watts in total, but your laptop will never get it's 100 watts.
Not every brand is as transparent about this, sometimes it's only visible in product marketing images instead of real specs. Real shady.
That might not necessarily be the right conclusion. My understanding is: almost all USB-C power cables you will enounter day to day support a max current of at most 3A (the most that a cable can signal support for without an emarker). That means that, technically, the highest power USB-PD profile they support is 60W (3A at 20V), and the charger should detect that and not offer the 65W profile, which requires 3.25A.
Maybe some chargers ignore that and offer it anyway, since 3.25A isn't that much more than 3A. For ones that don't and degrade to offering 60W, if a laptop strictly wants 65W, it won't charge off of them.
So it's worth acquiring a cable that specifically supports 5A to try, which is needed for every profile above 60W (and such a cable should support all profiles up to the 240W one, which is 5A*48V).
(I might be mistaken about some of that, it's just what I cobbled together while trying to figure out what chargers work with my extremely-picky-about-power lenovo x1e)
And wow, I'll keep away from Dell, thanks.
The ones I use most are 20W and 40W, just stuff I ordered from AliExpress (Baseus brand I think).
How polite. It can be useless, not "not optimal". Especially since usb-c can burn you on a combination of power and speed, not only speed.
looking at you USB 3.0 (or USB 3.1 Gen 1 (or USB 3.2 Gen 1))
But if you think that's bad, you haven't seen the name change shenanigans Microsoft pulls in Azure.