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Motherboard sales 'collapse' amid unprecedented shortages fueled by AI

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Re: Motherboard sales 'collapse' amid unprecedented shortages fueled by AI

#251

Post by zahlman »

toasty228 wrote: post #209
cryo32 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Buying whole 2020 era PCs here for around $200 mark. As long as you don't need crazy CPU or GPU grunt, which is most people, they are almost indistinguishable from a new one. Windows 10 LTSC + Firefox + uBlock Origin on an i5-9400 feels faster than my M4 Pro MBP. Probably same or better on Linux.

Upgrade my cpu the other day, got a ryzen 5 5600 for ~$100 new, can't complain. Still on my rtx 2060, can't complain either. As long as you don't fall for the 120hz and 4k memes you can easily get by with 2020 hardware indeed.

I am "easily getting by" with 2014 hardware.

Re: Motherboard sales 'collapse' amid unprecedented shortages fueled by AI

#252

Post by mikestew »

treyd wrote: post #229
johndhi wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why? I'm interested to know, WHY is PC so open? what led to that?

Agreement IBM had to make with the DoJ/etc in the 80s to open the PC platform to avoid antitrust prosecution. That was the key event.

I would argue that the key event was Columbia Data Products’s clean room implementation of the BIOS.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_Data_Products

That, and I’m pretty sure the DOJ had ended the antitrust suit (which was about bundling) by the time the PC was released.

Re: Motherboard sales 'collapse' amid unprecedented shortages fueled by AI

#253

Post by himata4113 »

kingstnap wrote: post #142
himata4113 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's a temporary promo, deepseek will return to only 10x cheaper after.

Yes Deepseek V4 pro is currently on discount. > The deepseek-v4-pro model is currently offered at a 75% discount, extended until 2026/05/31 15:59 UTC. However even when the discount ends its still very cheap. It will go back to $0.0145 / M cache hit. That's still 34x cheaper than GPT 5.5.

doesn't matter when subscriptions get cache reads for free, it is only really worth it if it's x340 cheaper otherwise I'd be paying $120 a day, 90% of the cost being cache reads for any top level opensource model.

Re: Motherboard sales 'collapse' amid unprecedented shortages fueled by AI

#254

Post by ericd »

donmcronald wrote: post #186
ericd wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it that new accounts these days always seem to come out swinging about politics, class warfare, etc?

It might just be frustrated young people. They're getting squeezed real hard by a system that was set up to put them on an impossible trajectory before they were even born. You can see the divide everywhere. People with lots of money think supply and demand, congestion pricing, etc. are great tools because it doesn't impact them at all compared to people on the bottom. Those are only good solutions if you're not the…

I think it’s probably mostly what your sibling comment said, it’s very cheap to sow division and discord now.

I get what you’re saying, and there definitely are people who are angry about the US slipping, and standards of living reverting to the mean a bit, and looking to blame someone. The True Believer came out in the aftermath of WW2 and tried to analyze why it happened, and laid out that the most dangerous group of people aren’t the ones who’ve been poor for a long time, but those who were recently poor, who remembered a more prosperous time. Those people get tremendously angry about it, and represent fertile ground for politicians and motivated groups to plant the seeds of hate.

People need to have some perspective. You’re not permanently locked out of useful AI models, it’s within reach of most who can save a bit to go get a pair of used 3090s on eBay and run some pretty useful models.

Re: Motherboard sales 'collapse' amid unprecedented shortages fueled by AI

#255

Post by jrockway »

craftkiller wrote: post #158
hx8 wrote: post #59

PC is the last major open platform. While other platforms like Android and becoming less open, PC in general is becoming more open than it's been in a long time as heavy MacOS/Android/iOS competition is creating a focus on open standards and all-time high strong Linux support gives people a place to land and tinker/hack to their heart's content. I think we will see an abandonment of consumer grade PC components and i…

> I already have home sever rack, and would recommend it for other people. I just want to warn people who haven't heard server-grade hardware in-person before: this is only for people who can put a server rack somewhere unpopulated like a garage or basement. Servers will make you think "wow, leafblowers sure are quiet". They are not suitable for apartment dwellers such as myself. When I was setting up my 1U before sh…

Kind of a random aside, but I never realized how obnoxious LEDs were until I got a studio apartment and started sleeping in the same room as my homelab / workstation / networking hardware. Electrical tape saved me, but wow. You sure can produce a lot of light with a milliwatt of electricity :)

(And yes, my workstation has a clear case and LED RAM. Yes, I'm an idiot. Whenever Windows applies an update late at night, I wake up if it turns back on. I don't know what I was thinking when I built that thing, but never again.)

Re: Motherboard sales 'collapse' amid unprecedented shortages fueled by AI

#256

Post by c7b »

hx8 wrote: post #239
c7b wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Contrary take: I believe we will see an expanded market for capable PCs that can be sanely put in a living space. By extension of the gaming PC niche to local AI. Both NVidia and AMD are developing product lines in that direction (DGX Spark, Ryzen AI Max). And Linux will be more prominent than ever, due to several independent reasons: MS dropping the ball hard on Windows, SteamOS making Linux attractive for gamers, '…

Great take, but if the market is expanding for capable PCs why are motherboard sales decreasing?

Well, the two chips I mentioned (DGX Spark uses the GB-10) are both a SoC, so no motherboard needed there. I don't know if that's the full explanation, but it could be a factor.

The SoC design with unified memory is generally well suited for residential use because it's quite energy-efficient, quiet and small (compared to traditional GPU-powered gaming rigs). Great performance-per-annoyance, so to say.

Re: Motherboard sales 'collapse' amid unprecedented shortages fueled by AI

#257

Post by zrm »

craftkiller wrote: post #158
hx8 wrote: post #59

PC is the last major open platform. While other platforms like Android and becoming less open, PC in general is becoming more open than it's been in a long time as heavy MacOS/Android/iOS competition is creating a focus on open standards and all-time high strong Linux support gives people a place to land and tinker/hack to their heart's content. I think we will see an abandonment of consumer grade PC components and i…

> I already have home sever rack, and would recommend it for other people. I just want to warn people who haven't heard server-grade hardware in-person before: this is only for people who can put a server rack somewhere unpopulated like a garage or basement. Servers will make you think "wow, leafblowers sure are quiet". They are not suitable for apartment dwellers such as myself. When I was setting up my 1U before sh…

The noise problem is pretty easy to mitigate by choosing 2U servers instead of 1U. The latter are forced by the form factor to use smaller, higher speed fans.

A bigger issue for enterprise hardware is that it's optimized for performance per watt under load, not idle power consumption. Running a mostly-idle rack server 24/7 can result in a pretty sizable electric bill. This also depends heavily on the model. Some will idle at ~50 watts, others at ~300, but both of these are significantly higher than a Raspberry Pi or an old laptop which for personal use will generally do the job.

Business class desktops are also a good alternative here. Many models have pretty reasonable idle power consumption (check this for yourself, I've seen 6W but also 60W) and then you get a couple of drive bays and PCIe slots and expandable RAM which you don't get from a Raspberry Pi.

Re: Motherboard sales 'collapse' amid unprecedented shortages fueled by AI

#258

Post by lofaszvanitt »

hx8 wrote: post #59

PC is the last major open platform. While other platforms like Android and becoming less open, PC in general is becoming more open than it's been in a long time as heavy MacOS/Android/iOS competition is creating a focus on open standards and all-time high strong Linux support gives people a place to land and tinker/hack to their heart's content. I think we will see an abandonment of consumer grade PC components and i…

And flying pugs gonna fall from teh sky too.

Re: Motherboard sales 'collapse' amid unprecedented shortages fueled by AI

#259

Post by ghaff »

craftkiller wrote: post #158
hx8 wrote: post #59

PC is the last major open platform. While other platforms like Android and becoming less open, PC in general is becoming more open than it's been in a long time as heavy MacOS/Android/iOS competition is creating a focus on open standards and all-time high strong Linux support gives people a place to land and tinker/hack to their heart's content. I think we will see an abandonment of consumer grade PC components and i…

> I already have home sever rack, and would recommend it for other people. I just want to warn people who haven't heard server-grade hardware in-person before: this is only for people who can put a server rack somewhere unpopulated like a garage or basement. Servers will make you think "wow, leafblowers sure are quiet". They are not suitable for apartment dwellers such as myself. When I was setting up my 1U before sh…

I built PCs for a number of years and then I shifted to some combinations of RPis, MacBooks, and (maybe) Mac Minis. It was a (long) phase that involved quite a bit of money as well as frustration oftentimes but almost certainly not going to do it again.
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