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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

#351

Post by dangus »

post_break wrote: post #286
chainingsolid wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My advice to anyone doing motherboard shopping is to read the manual off the manufacture's site before deciding. The pcie lane tradeoffs tend to be in the block diagram next to the contents page.

This is exactly why my comment goes over the head of people who cry just get the basic boards. No, this is why the basic boards for $100 don't cut it. You now need to dive into the technical data and realize that the $100 board seems like a deal for a reason, and suddenly the $300+ category is your only option if you want to get a PC that doesn't run on fake specs.

I'm just struggling to figure out how many people actually need the PCIe lanes for anything more than GPUs and storage, though.

Like, what are you actually connecting your desktop to?

The only reason laptops depend on Thunderbolt is because they have limited internal expansion and need high performance external I/O.

If you need more things than gaming boards offer then obviously you have very advanced needs and can go pay for a workstation board, something like an sTR5 socket Threadripper board.

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

#352

Post by dangus »

kasabali wrote: post #332
dangus wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really agree with this. Motherboard prices haven't been moved at all by AI. I would also say that most consumers, who are almost exclusively buying gaming-oriented boards, do not need anything high end. They can pretty much buy the cheapest board available. I am shopping around for a mini ITX board and the difference between something at $180 and something at $400 is basically one to two faster USB ports, whi…

$180 for a basic motherboard is damn expensive though.

It's really not. It's time to accept that inflation has happened and that we aren't going back to the past.

We can talk all day long about how my mom waited tables for $2/hour and her first car cost $5,000 brand new, it's not relevant anymore.

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

#353

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#354

Post by c7b »

justincormack wrote: post #336
c7b wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Mini PCs (NUC-ish form factor) are selling a lot now too, small, quiet, most people don't need expansion over what you can get from eg USB4.

Yeah, the DGX Spark could qualify as a mini PC too. The AMD chip is sold as a laptop chip I believe, but I've mostly seen it in mini PCs. And the Framework Desktop. A brand that probably carries a lot of trust among the kind of tinkerers who would consider buying a barebone motherboard in the first place.

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

#355

Post by vkou »

andrekandre wrote: post #305
vkou wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah. The first two thirds of the 20th century was the science and information world. Man gained mastery of the skies, the depths of the sea, the void of space, the atom. We were taming diseases and found a way to end hunger. We started building thinking machines. We were playing with the fire of the gods. Science was working miracles on the daily. It still is, but nobody gives a shit anymore, we are in the financiali…

> we are in the financialization and rent-seeker world now sometimes i wonder if this is what happens when organic growth stops/slows; when (for lack of a better word) desperate people just start looking for any alternative to keep the growth train running...

It's just what happens when you give the rich all the political power in your society.

All of them come from the 'make money from other people's labour' background, and they will, of course, use that political power to optimize that wealth extraction.

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

#356

Post by TheRealPomax »

groby_b wrote: post #94
TheRealPomax wrote: post #22

"Fueled by greed". It would be trivial to say no to AI companies because dollars are dollars, it doesn't matter who pays them, and prioritizing literally all of humanity instead of "five companies" is a choice that every single supplier could make, but decided not to. This problem was 100% manufactured by suppliers.

It would be equally "trivial" to say no to personal compute as well. So maybe the problem is manufactured by all of us.

A dollar is a dollar, and suppliers chose to screw over the world for not-even-profits: they would have sold the exact same number of chips if they changed how they prioritized delivery while making sure everyone got chips instead of just a handful of industries.

So, no: it's nothing like what you replied with and that was a rather dumb thing to say.

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

#357

Post by longitudinal93 »

pseudohadamard wrote: post #321
jrockway wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Even worse are phone chargers, intended to be used next to your bed, that light up like a Christmas tree when running. Black electrical tape is great for the worst of it, but you still need a few things available to tell you the operational status, if only they'd dim them a bit.

One of the best investments I ever made was in ordering a set of dimming LED stickers from Lightdims.com

I went throught my whole house adding them to powerbars, routers, toothbrushes, smoke detectors, etc. I even found the exact of location to put one over the motion detector on my Ecobee thermostats so they wouldn't light up everytime you walked by. I swear my house is about 1000% calmer than it would be without them.

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

#358

Post by dangus »

greycol wrote: post #313
_factor wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They exist to partition capability so that enterprises can’t connect all of their peripherals and some ECC memory to get the same functionality for 1/10 the price. It’s not a physical limitation.

Obviously market tiering is part of it and you can play tricks with north and south bridge and pcie switches (which adds cost), but a ryzen board that advertises a pcie 5.0 x16 gpu slot and 5.0 x4 m2 slot only has 4 lanes left to work with from the cpu (i.e the cpus only have 24 usable lanes). Which while you can play with generations to get more lanes it's effectively still 16gb/s. That needs to cover network, extra…

I think the biggest aspect is that there’s so little demand for the configuration that you’re looking for.

Most people only need the PCI lanes for graphics cards and storage. There aren’t many other internally installed devices out there that actually need that kind of bandwidth, and a lot of those use cases are already covered by alternatives like Ethernet or USB, or they’re already on your board (m.2 slots, fast Ethernet ports).

The 6x16 slots with 1.0x1 bandwidth are there so that people can plug in stuff like sound cards and other random stuff that generally has pretty light bandwidth needs.

If I just search for “PCIe card” on Newegg most of the resulting products max out at x4, and most of the ones that do are already on the board (m.2 cards, additional USB/Thunderbolt).

The one use case that seemed useful and unusual in my search results was a quad port HD video capture card which seemed to require x4 bandwidth.

If you had a scenario like you describe where there isn’t a single x16 slot, you’ve instantly annoyed 95% of the market that needs that full bandwidth for a GPU, whether it be for gaming or for professional applications.

Some solutions that avoid expensive workstation boards and CPUs include getting a higher end chipset to get gaming boards that come with 2x x16 slots, or you can use accessories and adapters that just plug into m.2 slots.

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

#359

Post by pseudohadamard »

longitudinal93 wrote: post #357
pseudohadamard wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even worse are phone chargers, intended to be used next to your bed, that light up like a Christmas tree when running. Black electrical tape is great for the worst of it, but you still need a few things available to tell you the operational status, if only they'd dim them a bit.

One of the best investments I ever made was in ordering a set of dimming LED stickers from Lightdims.com I went throught my whole house adding them to powerbars, routers, toothbrushes, smoke detectors, etc. I even found the exact of location to put one over the motion detector on my Ecobee thermostats so they wouldn't light up everytime you walked by. I swear my house is about 1000% calmer than it would be without th…

Very nice, thanks! I was thinking of gluing baking paper over the most annoying LEDs as diffusers but these are much less of a kludge.

For anyone else seeing this, they ship to most countries for 99 cents so it's not the usual $29.95 for Fedex shipping on a packet of stickers. I'd seen similar ones on Aliexpress in the past but they're just light-blocking dots, not dimming ones.

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

#360

Post by coldtea »

pseudohadamard wrote: post #322
coldtea wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Atom-based Not exacty enterprise grade servers then?

And do you need a full-on enterprise-grade server? Given the choice between a 1U server whose fans even at minimal utilisation can still be heard three doors away and something with a low-power/laptop-grade CPU that does the same job silently and with little power use, I'll take the latter.

>And do you need a full-on enterprise-grade server?

I might not, but this subthread was about them, wasn't it?

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