Thursday, June 1st 2023
ASMedia's Delayed USB4 Host Controller is Nearly Here
Regular readers of TPU might remember our in-depth USB4 article that we posted almost a year ago, but since then, very little has happened and ASMedia has as yet to make its ASM4242 USB4 host controller available to its partners and then ASM2464 USB4 to PCIe 4.0 bridge was suffering the same fate until May this year, when it was released to ASMedia's customers. It turns out most of it is related to USB-IF certification and the USB4 design documentation, as the certification wasn't quite ready for a third party host controller and the design documents were—shall we say—less than complete and relied too heavily on the Thunderbolt 3 spec. This meant that ASMedia had to retest and redo a lot of work they had done, due to a certain spec donator having assumed that other companies knew how it had designed its Thunderbolt products.
The good news is that we should see the ASM4242 in the market before the end of this year and ASMedia is busy testing it and its ASM2464 with a wide range of products to make sure compatibility is as good as possible. In the company suite at Computex, ASMedia was showing the ASM2464 connected to Apple's M2 silicon, as well as Intel's latest CPUs with integrated Thunderbolt 4 support. There had been some performance related issues from Apple's side, but this has apparently been resolved in a recent update from Apple. As far as Intel is concerned, there are no compatibility issues with the 13th and possibly 12th gen mobile chips, but older Thunderbolt hardware might require a firmware update, which may or may not exist. Older Intel hardware also doesn't perform as well as its most recent solutions, but it doesn't mean there will be compatibility issues outright. As for AMD, ASMedia informed TPU that there were no issues, since AMD has a USB4 implementation in its mobile products that follow the USB-IF spec.ASMedia was also showing that its ASM2464 is suitable for use in docking stations, where PCIe peripheral ICs can be used, just as in a Thunderbolt docking station. The company also demoed DP Alt mode working on the ASM4242, but unfortunately, this is limited to DP1.4a, so 8K support is not on the table here. ASMedia was also demoing its new ASM3074 USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 (20 Gbps) hub, which works somewhat differently to what you'd expect. It has one 20 Gbps "passthrough" port, for a fast storage device or similar and then up to three 5 or 10 Gbps USB 3.2 ports. It's intended mainly for docking stations and it's ASMedia's first USB hub to offer speed faster than 5 Gbps.
The good news is that we should see the ASM4242 in the market before the end of this year and ASMedia is busy testing it and its ASM2464 with a wide range of products to make sure compatibility is as good as possible. In the company suite at Computex, ASMedia was showing the ASM2464 connected to Apple's M2 silicon, as well as Intel's latest CPUs with integrated Thunderbolt 4 support. There had been some performance related issues from Apple's side, but this has apparently been resolved in a recent update from Apple. As far as Intel is concerned, there are no compatibility issues with the 13th and possibly 12th gen mobile chips, but older Thunderbolt hardware might require a firmware update, which may or may not exist. Older Intel hardware also doesn't perform as well as its most recent solutions, but it doesn't mean there will be compatibility issues outright. As for AMD, ASMedia informed TPU that there were no issues, since AMD has a USB4 implementation in its mobile products that follow the USB-IF spec.ASMedia was also showing that its ASM2464 is suitable for use in docking stations, where PCIe peripheral ICs can be used, just as in a Thunderbolt docking station. The company also demoed DP Alt mode working on the ASM4242, but unfortunately, this is limited to DP1.4a, so 8K support is not on the table here. ASMedia was also demoing its new ASM3074 USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 (20 Gbps) hub, which works somewhat differently to what you'd expect. It has one 20 Gbps "passthrough" port, for a fast storage device or similar and then up to three 5 or 10 Gbps USB 3.2 ports. It's intended mainly for docking stations and it's ASMedia's first USB hub to offer speed faster than 5 Gbps.