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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

#181

Post by craftkiller »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #169
craftkiller wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> my 1U 1Us have the most compromised ventilation and compensate with loud fans running at high speeds.

Yeah, it certainly wasn't the quietest choice for form-factor, but the fact remains: all server grade hardware are not optimizing for noise. They are meant to be running in datacenters, not livingrooms, so noise was never a concern for them. A nice thing about consumer-grade hardware is they are optimizing for both sound and power consumption because those devices are designed to be around humans. So I certainly hope consumer-grade hardware survives.

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

#182

Post by yndoendo »

tayo42 wrote: post #41
iFred wrote: post #24

High end resins and epoxies are in a critical supply shortage right now. I suspect that there are going to be some serious resource driven PCB shortages in the very near future.

Is anything not in a shortage?

Authoritarianism

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

#184

Post by dist-epoch »

lowbloodsugar wrote: post #163
foobar1274278 wrote: post #151

Reminds me of how ever since egg prices went to the moon we've all had to give up dessert and subsist on thin gruel for breakfast. What's that? Egg prices are back down after suppliers cranked up their output? Surely nothing like that is possible with hardware... Personal computing is dead forever...

That’s the issue: ram suppliers have not started building new fabs, which means they expect this demand to be temporary and they’re just going to make a killing on it while they can. It takes years to get a fab up, and they think demand will be gone by then. So that means ridiculous prices now, and if demand doesn’t drop, ridiculous prices until someone thinks the demand will continue for four more years after that m…

> SK Hynix to invest about $13 bln in a new South Korea plant to meet AI memory demand

https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/sk-hynix-invest-a...

> SK Hynix has reportedly broken ground on a new advanced memory packaging facility in West Lafayette, Indiana, that should boost the supply of US-made high-bandwidth memory (HBM)

https://www.theregister.com/on-prem/2026/04/22/sk-hynix-brea...

> Samsung to advance mega-fab expansion by 6 months to get ahead in capacity race; SK Hynix follows suit

https://www.kedglobal.com/korean-chipmakers/newsView/ked2026...

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

#185

Post by SoftTalker »

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…

Why would most people need a home server rack? That's a lot of noise, space, and electrical usage. For what most people would need a home "server" for a NUC PC or Mac Mini would do the job.

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

#186

Post by donmcronald »

ericd wrote: post #157
ButyTh0 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because they own nothing but make believe stocks and life works great for them. The mega-rich are 100% decoupled from physical reality. May as well treat them more like tribal shaman, priests, preachers, and rabbis. Just parroting memes the likewise idiot politicians believe are the magic chants that keep gravity itself pulling together the Earth. "Omg he said the thing! Cut his taxes! Give him welfare!" Our generati…

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 one falling off the bottom rung of the ladder.

Is it really shocking that people are upset to see the supply of resources being cornered and hoarded by the ultra rich with the most likely outcome being the only way to get access to those goods will be to pay forever?

The possibility of AI becoming a must-have knowledge repository or memory assistant is scary if you couple it with the idea of never being able to own it. How much is your memory worth? What if you can't compete in terms of productivity without having access to AI? What about the people that can't afford the "first month of rent"?

People come in and make angry posts like the GP because they know they're getting disenfranchised and don't have the power to do anything to change it.

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

#187

Post by dessimus »

post_break wrote: post #116

Motherboards used to be $100, $200 for the high end. Now they want $300+, ram is crazy, storage, video cards, etc. I'm not surprised sales for these components is hitting a wall.

I mean, if you think about all the motherboard does, and how many layers the PCB has to support all the features such that for a vast majority of users, the only things you need besides the motherboard is a CPU, some RAM, storage (either in M.2 or SATA) and maybe a dGPU, it's wild that it is often the cheapest item in the PC.

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

#188

Post by SoftTalker »

b00ty4breakfast wrote: post #167
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…

Assuming this trend continues, I think people are going to start re-using older hardware rather than turning to server-grade hardware (which is often not convenient for the average residential situation). At least, that's what I hope happens. What will probably happen is people will continue to migrate away from the PC platform and towards closed platforms for the convenience, if history is any indication.

That's what I've been doing for years. I buy (or get for free) enterprise PCs coming off lifecycle at surplus sales. Nothing I do at home needs a cutting edge CPU. Unless you're a hard-core gamer or serious hobbiest/tinkerer a 5 year old or even older PC running linux is very adequate.

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

#189

Post by dist-epoch »

himata4113 wrote: post #55

I was looking into self-hosting deekseek v4 pro since frankly cache reads are an absolute scam and they're 90% of the cost, but then I looked at the ROI and it will never pay off fast enough because the hardware will become obsolete faster even if you were running 10 token generation streams 24/7. The napkin math resulted that renting is around 27 times cheaper than owning (not including power). I think we're really…

The only way to profitable serve AI is to have large batch sizes - run 500 requests at the same time.

If you serve a single user you'll never get your electricity price back, nevermind hardware costs.

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

#190

Post by Kirby64 »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #172
jolmg wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and the 'realism' of video games plateauing. I used to think the plateau was here when the Xbox 360 and PS3 came out.

I still think it pretty much was the last major generational upgrade in graphics. An early PS3 game looked night and day better than a late PS2 game. Meanwhile, an early PS4 game looked only marginally better than a late PS3 game, and most PS5 games don't look noticeably better than a PS4 game. I don't mind that graphics have plateaued, because they aren't the important bit. If anything, I would rather that devs stop…

> Meanwhile, an early PS4 game looked only marginally better than a late PS3 game, and most PS5 games don't look noticeably better than a PS4 game.

Partially this is because there was usually an overlap in sales for early PS4 and late PS3, etc. if you have to support both console generations, it won’t truly be able to take advantage of the newer gen stuff.

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