The new Minisforum MS-S1 Max AI desktop is a mini-tower desktop powered by a mobile-on-desktop (MoDT) mainboard featuring an AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 "Strix Halo" processor. Perhaps the most interesting feature about the product flyer is the desktop's implementation of 80 Gbps USB4 V2 ports, which is probably the industry's first, at least in the client segment. The USB4 specification was originally drafted in 2019 for three bandwidth tiers—20 Gbps, 40 Gbps, and 80 Gbps, the latter coming out with the 2022 standardization of USB4 v2.0.

USB4 v2.0 isn't just PCIe Gen 4 physical with a USB link layer, but implements a new PAM3 coding scheme over an existing pin-count, and is designed to be compatible with "passive" 40 Gbps-capable USB4 cables for a fixed 80 Gbps per-direction bandwidth. The standard also proposes a new active cable design that enables asymmetric bandwidth distribution between the Tx and Rx lanes, allowing the host and guest to have 120 Gbps of bandwidth in one direction, and 40 Gbps in the other, which could prove useful in certain scenarios such as heavy data transfers from portable SSDs or eGPU enclosures. Sounds familiar? That's because this is exactly what Thunderbolt 5 offers with its Bandwidth Boost feature Intel innovated. These aside, the MS-S1 max is a fairly straightforward MoDT implementation of the "Strix Halo."

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