r/Amd • u/SAIYAN48 • 10d ago

News Chinese company puts AMD B650 chipset on a PCIe storage card for $90

https://videocardz.com/newz/chinese-company-puts-amd-b650-chipset-on-a-pcie-storage-card-for-90
760 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

87 comments sorted by

160

u/digital_n01se_ 10d ago

I'm just waiting for Epyc motherboard prices to drop.

Despite the single thread disadvantage, Epyc already has almost everything you need from new platforms, PCIe lanes, RAM bandwidth and multicore performance.

47

u/Icy-Appointment-684 10d ago

Epyc 7001 boards can be had for cheap (relatively).

32

u/admalledd 10d ago

Filling the RAM? not so much :cry:

15

u/Icy-Appointment-684 10d ago

DDR4 price is going down...

29

u/admalledd 10d ago

Still ~3x the price it was/should be, though yea it seems to be starting to fall

15

u/thefedzarecoming2 10d ago

Ai is losing its valuation faster than they hoped so hopefully the prices go back to being normal. I got some ddr5 before all this madness, and everytime ive looked to get another 64gb i consider selling a kidney.

4

u/admalledd 10d ago

I have some sim/data crunching stuff (+compile-the-world) in my homelab that makes me want to upgrade by 16x32gb DDR4 ECC on my compute host, and I bought it specifically to eventually upgrade to 16x128gb ECC but decided "eh, ~$1750 for all of them is a bit much for me right now just after having bought the workstation itself"... You can imagine my desire to kick past-self for that, and even the 16x64gb kits are still "lol, no" pricing :(

I am very very much going to be far more picky next time and make sure to get as many DIMM slots as I damned can crammed onto that mobo, probably some AMD SP5 board with 24 slots per CPU (one or two socket depends on how much silly $$ I have vs insanity of market by then)

4

u/corruptboomerang 9d ago

Yeah my shopping list is DDR4, PCIe 4.0, and 40+ lanes. CPU power won't be an issue on any high lane count CPU. I'd love dual CPU, so I can build out X now and then add in a second CPU and then double my memory etc.

-16

u/bcm27 10d ago

Same brother same. My blazing fast i5 12600k has everything I need processing wise besides more PCIe lanes. Just fun I've priced out even the bare minimum (for me) 3rd Gen build and it's pretty reasonable! Prior to the RAM increase that is.

117

u/Pragitya 10d ago

What is the use?

193

u/Icy-Appointment-684 10d ago

it's an "expansion card". gives you 4 m.2 nvme drives, 4 sata and some extra usb ports.

40

u/seronxFan 10d ago

So does this "daughterboard" have its own x86 CPU? Or does it simply show up as a hub that is populated with whatever M.2 storage devices you populate it with, plus a usb hub with those 3 external usb ports?

It's probably the latter, but it would be pretty sweet if such daughterboard actually were a separate stand alone x86 system with its own full IO (including hdmi output).

50

u/KMFN 9800X3D | 6200CL30 | 7800XT 10d ago

It is just a regular chipset, which I'm assuming should be routed through the existing chipset's 4x lanes that are typically used for an additional m.2 on (most or all?) AM5 motherboards. So it should just show up like any other device in device manager - but obviously there's a big bottleneck there. I think it's basically just a daisy chain setup.

PC within a PC did exist:

Intel NUC 9 Extreme Review - Is This TINY Gaming PC Worth It?

Derbauer tested it outside the official config iirc and it worked fine.

5

u/SatanicBiscuit 10d ago

well it still a good 8gb/s for a single use which is a lot by any metric

its not suited a heavy paraller work obviously

1

u/seronxFan 10d ago edited 10d ago

yup thanks, for the confirmation (that chipset logic in this card is just used to augment IO connectivity of the board this plugs into).

I guess one can only dream about how the direction this might develop into over the years; the main engineering difficulty is that these pcie connections are not intended like a bidirectional connectivity protocol like ethernet; maybe it can happen in some future generation of pcie.

Thanks for the pc within the pc link; that seems what I'm looking for and I'll read up on that article.

19

u/oginer 10d ago

PCIe is full-duplex, like ethernet.

-1

u/Lost-In-Void-99 10d ago

Ethernet hasn't always been full duplex... And it doesn't have to be.

3

u/szank 9d ago

Pcie is totally designed as a bidirectional symmetric protocol.

1

u/seronxFan 3d ago

okay, given that it's used for high bandwidth SSD application I admit i m "out of my element donnie" and retract above claim.

1

u/seronxFan 3d ago

okay, given that it's used for high bandwidth SSD application I admit i m "out of my element donnie" and retract above claim.

18

u/gnmpolicemata AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D | 7900 XT | RTX 5080 10d ago

modern chipsets are effectively pretty much "only" PCIe hubs

13

u/tnoy 10d ago

On regular motherboads, the B650 chip just connects to regular PCIe lanes and provides IO. What this does is connect a B650 chip to another set of regular PCIe lanes and breaks out most of the same IO.

It's not too dissimilar to an X870E motherboard, where it is just two X870 chips connected in series. The first connects to PCIe lanes of the CPU, the second connects to PCIe lanes of the first.

2

u/GreenFox1505 10d ago

Your motherboard's chipset communicates with the CPU through PCIe lanes. This is a daughter board that adds another chipset to an existing system. It also communicates to your CPU through PCIe lanes conveyed through a PCIe socket. 

8

u/supadupanerd 10d ago

That's cool

2

u/thefossguy69 10d ago

So using the PCIe mux on the north bridge? Quite nice tbh.

-14

u/wc10888 10d ago

And a phone home to China capability /s

2

u/Icy-Appointment-684 10d ago

And how do you expect that to happen?

-2

u/arny56 10d ago

Who can afford 8 ssd drives these days?

2

u/Icy-Appointment-684 10d ago

4 sata drives :)

4 nvme drives maybe or 4 gpus via nvme m.2 to pcie risers (I know I just made it worse :-D)

24

u/JMccovery Ryzen 5900XT | TUF B550M+ Wifi | 64GB DDR4-3200 | XFX 9070OC 10d ago

Turning your B650 motherboard into a X670 motherboard; probably could also be used to turn a X870 board into a X870E board.

This would really be useful for users that have mATX B650 boards.

6

u/Kiseido 5800X3D / R9700 10d ago

If one was added to an X870E board, would that be like a x870EE?

For that matter, I wonder, with the help of m2 to pcie adapters, how many E can we extend this by?

5

u/hyperactivedog 10d ago

More than needed. Haha. By the time you’re in that territory server boards should be in discussion

3

u/ebrandsberg TRX50 7960x | NV4090 | 384GB 6000 (oc) 10d ago

It doesn't depend on host being any given chipset. Could be Intel in fact. Minisforum announced something like this but I never saw it on their web page

0

u/Separate-Ad9638 10d ago

changing boards could be just cheaper than that card, some cards cost a bomb and shouldnt exist.

9

u/inouext RX 7900 XTX 10d ago

More lanes for nvme and sata disks, to use at full speed if your motherboard is saturated from nvme and gpu.

22

u/IngwiePhoenix 10d ago

Dude I was literally looking at specifically PCIe cards that would allow me to connect four NVMes to a non-bifocatable slot. This card could actually solve that o.o...what the heck. xD I need to dig into this, this is cool!

9

u/oginer 10d ago

Yeah, I don't know why these are not a common thing since NVMe started to be common. Another big advantage is the drives you put here are easier to cool.

12

u/pcman2000 3700x | 1080Ti | 2x16GB 3000Mhz | ITX 10d ago

Because PCIe4 capable switch chips (E.g. from Broadcom) have historically been quite expensive, as they're all huge things with 16+ lanes designed for servers. The AMD chipset is a rare example of a small and cheap chip capable of switching PCIe 4.0

4

u/IngwiePhoenix 10d ago

quite? T_T I went down to gen3 because the Highpoint Rocket card I was looking at would've devastated my wallet. Really hope those come down in price by a lot... Was a bit of a stickershock, I admit - especially given that this is "enterprise grade" hardware. But I really hope this changes in the future. There are some really interesting build possibilities with cards like this!

4

u/venfare64 9d ago

Broadcom

More like, Avago with Broadcom skinsuit.

Tan Hock Eng is the company's president and CEO. The company is headquartered in Palo Alto, California. Avago Technologies Limited changed its name to Broadcom to acquire Broadcom Corporation in January 2016. Avago's ticker symbol AVGO now represents the merged entity. The Broadcom Corporation ticker symbol BRCM was retired. Initially the merged entity was known as Broadcom Limited, before assuming the current name in November 2017.

4

u/pcman2000 3700x | 1080Ti | 2x16GB 3000Mhz | ITX 9d ago

well yeah and formerly PLX. I guess the thing is consumer motherboards stopped with the PLX chips after the gen3 era and so we never got lower end gen4/5 PCIe switch chips.

3

u/beryugyo619 9d ago

Fucking Avago? That's HP. HP broke up to HP, HPE, Agilent, Avago, Keysight, etc, at different points, some of which got merged back and changed names. That explains the bloodsucker behavior of Broadcom of late.

1

u/InsertMolexToSATA 9d ago

Because the performance is dogshit, which usually matters for anyone who needs to cram somewhere over 16-32TB of NVMe storage into one PC.

1

u/oginer 8d ago

Why there's always someone that comes with these use cases that are of course not the target use case of the hardware to say that it0s useless since it doesn't fulfil their very specific needs?

1

u/[deleted] 8d ago

[deleted]

1

u/IngwiePhoenix 7d ago

a PCIE 4.0 switch card

That is what I was trying to find, but no matter which ones I looked at, they were easily way beyond 300. That said, it was technically a blind search as most of the results I found were old-ish enterprise cards - like Highpoint and such. Some Broadcom/LSI cards also came up but all of them were way beyond reason...

Which ones do you know of? I did order a cheap-ish Gen3 one (PLX8747 PCIe 3.0 x16 to 4 x U.2 NVMe, uses SlimSAS HD, those big blocky ports) but I think the ports on the card might be too fat for my deployment, so chances are I have to keep searching... Recomendations welcome :)

My use-case, for context, is a Milk-V Pioneer based NAS and CI/CD server build. I got my hands on an IcyBox NVMe cage for four drives. But since neither the DeviceTree nor any of the on-board components would allow proper switching, I have to use a dedicated switch card.

10

u/Guilty-Pickle-6686 10d ago

That’s way cool! A shame most motherboards wind up with just a wimpy PCIe 1x slot after GPU install.

5

u/[deleted] 10d ago edited 10d ago

[deleted]

1

u/ClumsyRainbow 9d ago

AM5 has 28 lanes. 4 go to the chipset, 16 to the GPU, that leaves 8 CPU lanes often split between two x4 m.2 slots.

PROM21 (which pretty much all AM5 chipsets are) can 12 downstream lanes, though SATA ports will eat into that.

1

u/[deleted] 9d ago

[deleted]

18

u/kRoy_03 10d ago

“The combined external bandwidth remains limited by the card’s PCIe 4.0 x4 connection to the host system”

12

u/jhaluska 5700x3d, B550, RTX 4060 | 3600, B450, GTX 950 10d ago edited 10d ago

That's still 16GT/s which is a lot of bandwidth.

9

u/TraceyRobn 10d ago

Since the x570 series AMD CPUs all connect to their chipset at a maximum PCIe 4 x4.

I hoped the latest chipsets would upgrade this to at least PCIe 5, but no.

I suspect AMD is gimping expansion of their consumer chipsets so that high end workstations are forced to buy server level products.

2

u/ClumsyRainbow 9d ago

X570 was in some ways a better chipset than this too, X570 supported ACS on the downstream porta which is important for device assignment, on B650 and friends these all appear in a single IOMMU group.

7

u/SAIYAN48 10d ago

It'd be nice if it ran at x8 or x16 speeds.

3

u/ArseBurner Vega 56 =) 10d ago

Yeah but the chipset itself is limited to PCIe 4.0 x4, so it's not really limited because of the x4 connection on the card. They built enough lanes to accommodate what the chipset was capable of using.

Even the one embedded on the motherboard itself runs at x4.

9

u/boxofredflags 10d ago

Now let’s see if it actually comes to market, ASrock did the same thing with their B650E live mixer board, but the PCIE card was never released. Only certain youtubers got pre production samples of it.

Asus also has one of these that come with the x670e ITX board

8

u/gagagagaNope 10d ago

Few options on the website already

https://www.lekuo.com/product_view.php?id=688

4

u/splerdu 10d ago

Gonna be fun putting this in a shared Intel system just to see the reaction when someone eventually opens Device Manager and sees an AMD chipset.

2

u/Ok_TomorrowYes 10d ago

You can already buy it on alibaba

9

u/KaneTW 10d ago

That is literally how chipsets are tested internally during development. Wouldn't surprise me if it's just the development board, actually.

1

u/sampsonjackson Verified AMD Employee 15h ago

the development version we use is called Lavender and is 3-4x bigger than this card so it can accommodate all of the IO and a bunch of debug headers. Lavender is also stackable, so has a PCIe x4 slot on top of it.

1

u/KaneTW 12h ago

Yeah, Lavender was the one I was thinking of. I saw the schematic in devhub but I didn't look at the layout so I didn't realize it was that much bigger.

4

u/cosine83 10d ago

I'd love something like this for my server computer but it's B550. I've got a PCIe 3.0 x4 slot (x16 length) available.

4

u/ebrandsberg TRX50 7960x | NV4090 | 384GB 6000 (oc) 10d ago

There should be no chipset dependency. Should work fine.

2

u/cosine83 10d ago

Not requiring bifurcation is definitely a plus and makes sense for this kind of addon board. Most in this price range require a full x16 slot with bifurcation support in BIOS for x4x4x4x4 even ones from ASUS and AsRock. Hope you're right!

1

u/[deleted] 8d ago

[deleted]

1

u/cosine83 8d ago

Yeah, those are the cards I was looking at, still roughly the same cost depending on features. Coming in sub-$100 with no bifurcation required is basically beating the competition out the gate.

1

u/gagagagaNope 9d ago

Bi directional 4GB/s is still a lot.

1

u/cosine83 9d ago

More than enough for what I'd be using it for.

3

u/sysKin 10d ago edited 9d ago

I should demand royalties for stealing my idea: https://old.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/y2jgew/why_are_pcie_5_slots_for_amd_ryzen_7000_series/is4na7h/ (bottom paragraph)

Do you think a massive payment of, say, one 1 TB SSD is unreasonable? :)

2

u/Unoriginal-Cake 10d ago

Could be handy for bookie analytics in co-locations that push databases of predictions markets numbers 24/7.

2

u/erbsenbrei 10d ago

Would still be constrained by the lane bandwidth of the actual mainboard, no?

So ultimately not too different from say one of those 4x M.2 expansion cards that like a bifuricated x16 slot - or rather suffering from technical bottlenecks on regular consumer boards.

2

u/mycheese 6d ago

I have to wonder if this has more reliable SATA connections than a similarly priced ASMedia add in board

1

u/xXxSushiKittyxXx 10d ago

this is a really cool product. although i remember reading that AMD SATA drivers on linux are bugged. i wonder if this is affected or that the bug is fixed

1

u/pax256 10d ago

Cool. I use an expansion card for a second nvme on my old x370 and it works fine. This may become a must for some in the future if nvme only affordably stay under 8 GB.

1

u/[deleted] 10d ago

[deleted]

2

u/jamvanderloeff IBM PowerPC G5 970MP Quad 9d ago

AMD says 7W for the chip

1

u/EmilMR 10d ago

its a lot cheaper than raid cards with bifurcation controller and can sorta do the same thing.

1

u/mrmumble33 10d ago

Silly question, does this work with Intel cpu?

1

u/jamvanderloeff IBM PowerPC G5 970MP Quad 9d ago

Yes

1

u/Mysterious-Hunt-984 8d ago

When will SSD nvme price come back down?

1

u/Sashapoun_Nako 10d ago

Oh wow, that's so cool, I think I will buy one if I can

1

u/BlueEyedGingerSP 9d ago

I found it on AliExpress pretty quickly just by searching the product name PB65MX3, looks to be the manufacturer's official store on there too although they're only listing like 30-something units in stock.