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by bpye 883 days ago
I could get over the perf but the power consumption is rough.

It seems strange that the USB hub is using so much power. From a (leaked?) data sheet I don’t see any way to disable it - but it does have firmware which can be updated? There is also a 5V-3.3V LDO built in so I wonder if that may be what is dissipating so much power.

The AMS1153 looks like a similar story…

3 comments

Yup, something is strange there. There are 14in x86 laptops that consume 7W or 8W in idle (with the screen turned on but on minimal brightness).
USB 3.0 can eat alot of power due to high speed, if it's always active...
USB 3.0 host controllers and hubs do not need to consume large amounts of power nor do they need to always be active, if designed well. USB 3.0 has LPM (link power management) and Microsoft wrote up a nice overview: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/u...
IIRC pi4 also had VIA USB hub power issues early on.