Adjadent to the article, there are some interesting builds with pulled parts from decommissioned servers in places where hardware is expensive or heavily taxed.
There's an entire parallel ecosystem around Chinese X79 and X99 boards [1](brands like Huananzhi and Machinist). They exist almost entirely to soak up scrap-tier Xeons and decommissioned server DDR3 and DDR4 ECC RAM that get pulled from datacenters for next to nothing. You see them online in Russian/Chinese/SE Asian online communities as budget builds, so nearly all the BIOS mods and documentation are in Russian or Chinese.
I think in NA we'd tend to write this hardware off as e-waste unless you're a homelabber (though I know Kimsufi still includes DDR3 builds in their catalogue). But in emerging markets, people have been squeezing real utility out of discarded enterprise silicon for a long time out of pure economic necessity. I've been tempted to do my own build but I already seek to have collected an overwhelmingly unnecessary amount of 2012-era workstations that I'm not sure my partner would appreciate an addition to.
Until about 6 years ago I also mostly used ex-server "ewaste" hardware, because it's always been cheaper, except for electricity use which I wasn't paying for myself at the time. My desktop in ~2015 was built from 2006-era hardware, with 32GB of ECC DDR2, which felt like a lot at the time.
EU is big and prices vary. (Transfer capacity is limited)
Afaik electricity is around 7c/kWh in China. I got 8c/kWh 2y contract a couple weeks ago here in Finland. Though have to add 4c/kWh for transfer to that (no clue if the Chinese prices I could find include that). Commercial prices are less then that (no VAT and possibly lower power tax bracket. The 8c includes all taxes/fees)
The article doesn't go into detail about it, but if you go to eBay and find a really old Dell rack server that that does use DDR3 ECC Registered (such as an R910 or R920 with 512GB in it), they have significantly gained in value over the past 12-18 months. Or like an R720 with 256 or 512GB in it. Also major price jump in resale value. That's what we have come to now.
It's quite preposterous to think that an old 256GB RAM DDR3-using dual xeon server (128GB per NUMA node) that I had sitting around on a shelf gathering dust significantly appreciated in value over the past 12 months. But it's factually correct, looking at what comparables sell for for on eBay.
I recently reactivated a 10 years old Kindle as an AI-Story-Generator (https://github.com/donmb1/ai-story-generator). Old hardware is valueable and with AI you can do great things with it.
Thanks for sharing, maybe it's time to buy some more old Kindles... I use bunch as smart paintings (with changing pictures generated locally with stable diffusion), and of course Home Assistant dashboard. They are awesome little machines.
Look at CrowPanel, you can get nice e-ink devices made for development, at a reasonable price. I have a small 2.13in esp32 board, I spent some time yesterday making it into a pocket flashcard device for my German courses. The energy consumption is minimal, small form factor, easy to flash via esptool or arduino utils
So LLMs are simultaneously making new hardware unaffordable, while also making old hardware usable again.
That too sounds like an actually good development all things considered. For the planet, anyway. And with the big caveat of that cloud tether, though just for scaffolding.
Old e-readers were already usable. Generating extruded story-like product on them when they're already perfectly capable of displaying the vast majority of human literature doesn't make them any more usable.
A friend and I bought RAM for our aging servers at eBay in 2024. That was 512GB (16x32GB -- we split it equally) of DDR4 ECC 2133MHz, registered. For… $536.86 plus shipping.
Somehow it feels like we got a pretty good deal, in retrospect. (My server has been since replaced, and I can tell you, 256GB of DDR5 ECC was more than that! There's been a further doubling or two of prices since I bought, though. I think I could maybe sell half the RAM and finance the entire server…)
One would think just some classes and forms of RAM increased in price. I have 128 GB (2 x 64GB DDR5 SO-DIMM) in my home NAS. Home NAS. Those nice ugreen DXP8800 Plus thingamabobs. It'd be over 2k euros for RAM alone now. Ridiculous. Add to that two SN850X 4TB SSDs, and 8 (+1 unpacked spare) IronWolves Pro and it's now a serious worth.
Fact is that performance intensive code, games or whatever, has always optimised locality and so RAM speed shouldn't usually be a 1:1 impact on performance. Using older generations of slower RAM will be acceptable for many games and workloads.
I think in upcoming days everything gonna be making comeback previously like one or two years ago I was thinking the mobile price are so dropped that mobile phones gonna be like as cheap as possible but now after the AI their price are going as high as possible and same with the computers and laptops and all.
I was reading that oil from the Middle East had to go to South Korea to be refined before being shipped as diesel to Australia.
Cost of hiring an oil tanker has ballooned massively (like 40 fold) since America decided to bomb its supply chain, so these long supply chains are massively expensive.
The Republican Party has decided that running a world of global free trade was no longer desired. America wont pay the price for another decade or two, but it will.
100% agree. This is generally a good news story. The e-waste issue is one of the darker aspects of tech which is mostly ignored.
We should promote brands like Fairphone and Framework that are trying to make a difference here. Reuse more of your kit!
It's good if you're a tech guy in silicon valley with a good salary who used to upgrade every year to the latest pro max.
It's terrible if you're a labourer in India who buys phones under 10k INR (~100 USD) when your salary is 20k INR per month.
Unfortunately there are way more in the latter category than the former, and most of them won't know what ram is. They'll just be paying more and getting less going forward for a few years.
(Source, the salaries and phones I've seen of the staff at office. And we're in a major region you've likely heard of, not some tiny rural village.)
I have a laptop with soldered RAM.
The motherboard upgrade to a 16GB variant was 120 EUR. Same price as the RAM soldered on it.
It came with a CPU upgrade as well. I'm happy.
It was obvious AI would further stratify the haves and have-nots, but I was too naive to realize the tech of the have-nots could literally just regress. Has such a thing ever happened before in tech?
Sorta, kinda. For a long time, a new PC tended to be built with new parts. New motherboard, new storage, new CPU, new graphics card. New.
During every mining crunch that made GPUs very expensive, we sometimes went backwards on parts of new builds. A used GPU from years ago was often a more-viable choice than a new model in any kind of condition.
edit to add: A lot of folks in 3D printing like to have a small computer driving the machine, especially with tinkerer-friendly hobbyist printers of yore. That often meant some manner of Raspberry Pi because it was inexpensive-enough, small, and a known quantity that was simple to deal with in an appliance-like way.
During the covid-era chip shortages, Pi hardware was expensive, hard to find, or often both. So folks started driving their printers with things like old cell phones or cheap Android TV boxes instead.
I remember getting a Radeon card on sale for about $180AUD in 2012ish. And 4 years later looking for an upgrade and discovering the cheapest higher performing card was at least $300 Aud.
I eventually upgraded to an RX 570 in 2018, and hit the same problem 5 years later.
So as far as loe to mid range cards are concerned you can wait 5 years and still have to pay more to replace it for an upgrade.
Yes, the previous fad (crypto) killed consumer GPU prices for good. I don't believe anything has compared on price-performance to a 1080 in the 10 years since.
Also the enshittification of software might count? You used to own Photoshop for life, now you're expected to pay a subscription for life. And legal onslaught, too. Encryption and consumer VPNs are on the chopping block in much of the world at the rate things are going. The end goal of governments and corporations alike is to remove the ability of consumers to own hardware they control. We are rapidly moving towards a future where you will only be able to access the internet and government services with a "trusted device", which will be a thin client with a TPM, biometric verification, telemetry of everything you do on it, and which will require paying an ongoing subscription to use.
As far as I can tell, in terms of MSRP, 980ti was $649 at launch. 1080 and 1080ti were both $699 when they hit the market.
$699 in 2015 (when the 1080 was new) is ~$975 today, adjusted for inflation.
$975 is pretty close to the launch MSRP of a 5080, which is "just" $999. (We can't actually buy them for $999, of course, but we couldn't usually get 1080 cards at MSRP during the mining frenzy a decade ago either.)
The big difference here is that by the time the 2080 had saturated the market, you could regularly find a 1080 for ~$300 (I paid $275 for an EVGA B-stock model).
Whereas today, with the 5000 series in the market for quite a while already, a 4080 is still well over MSRP
Businesses are competing like crazy to make algorithms that are in high demand. AI could theoretically let people and create new things that they would never be able to otherwise.
It is entitled to thing that people wanting GPUs and new PCs for gaming and hobbies is a more valid use. And if someone values it, all they have to do is pay the market price.
I would be interested to see a comparison of the inflation caused by the AI rollout versus the actual value generated by the use of AI. I really wouldn’t be surprised if the later is dwarfed by the former (that’s assuming integrating AI in a company generates significant economic value in the first place, which is still speculative as far as I’m aware)
Besides that, wasn't DDR4 good enough for everything we did, anyway?
At least I did not notice all that much of a difference when migrating to my current DDR5 system other than the CPU being massively more performant. Though I am sure that the memory did play some role there.
Clanker claims that the felt absolute latency between decent DDR4 and DDR5 should be similar, while bandwidth might be lower, apparently? Something something CAS latency.
For daily office use there is much more benefit in having more memory than having faster memory. Because apps all started using more memory. Especially anything Google Chrome related.
If you have some unused extra memory it will be used as disk cache, which also helps in the responsiveness of a desktop. Waiting for the disk is orders of magnitude slower than reading from memory cache.
The crazy thing is knowing so many of the produced GPUs are just sitting in storage collecting dust because they don't have anywhere to plug them in and even where they have space do not have the power to run them. So basically the whole RAM situation is driven by things that are sitting dark in storage.
My Home PC is from 2019, it has DDR4, it gets most things done, and I have never felt it was sluggish or anything. Maybe not the best gaming rig, but I get by.
I built my current home pc on the cusp of the transition of ddr4 to ddr5 and ddr5 was at the time out of my budget so I went with ddr4 and I can still play modern games fine with 32gb even at 2k.
I might not max out everything but that was never a priority for me. Usually besides resolution I seldom touch the graphical settings if the game is running ok.
In fact the only thing I upgraded one it until now was my GPU since that was a holdover from my previous one.
Home server also runs ddr4 and does ok, but that has been hitting more cpu bottlenecks now rather than memory.
That said its kinda sad personal users are getting tossed back a generation due to current generation ram being almost all gobbled up for AI.
I am still using the machine I built in 2017.. Prices for GPUs have been consistently insane since shortly after then, (NFT-idiots, crypto-bros, now AI-twats) and now ram.. My work setup uses 100% of my ram now though. I'd like to double my ram by getting 2 more of the same sticks I have in it.. But the exact same sticks of DDR4 now cost more than they did in 2017.
Please consider being more civil when you post, you’ll probably find it more enjoyable in the long run.
The archive link was posted [1] long before you posted. Also from the HN FAQ [2]:
> Are paywalls ok?
It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds.
In comments, it's ok to ask how to read an article and to help other users do so. But please don't post complaints about paywalls. Those are off topic.
There's an entire parallel ecosystem around Chinese X79 and X99 boards [1](brands like Huananzhi and Machinist). They exist almost entirely to soak up scrap-tier Xeons and decommissioned server DDR3 and DDR4 ECC RAM that get pulled from datacenters for next to nothing. You see them online in Russian/Chinese/SE Asian online communities as budget builds, so nearly all the BIOS mods and documentation are in Russian or Chinese.
I think in NA we'd tend to write this hardware off as e-waste unless you're a homelabber (though I know Kimsufi still includes DDR3 builds in their catalogue). But in emerging markets, people have been squeezing real utility out of discarded enterprise silicon for a long time out of pure economic necessity. I've been tempted to do my own build but I already seek to have collected an overwhelmingly unnecessary amount of 2012-era workstations that I'm not sure my partner would appreciate an addition to.
[1] https://post.m.smzdm.com/talk/p/am9d3zv4/
Afaik electricity is around 7c/kWh in China. I got 8c/kWh 2y contract a couple weeks ago here in Finland. Though have to add 4c/kWh for transfer to that (no clue if the Chinese prices I could find include that). Commercial prices are less then that (no VAT and possibly lower power tax bracket. The 8c includes all taxes/fees)
Something like 3200mhz DDR4 is still perfectly fine for 90% of consumer use. You really don't need more to look at cat pictures on facebook.
It's quite preposterous to think that an old 256GB RAM DDR3-using dual xeon server (128GB per NUMA node) that I had sitting around on a shelf gathering dust significantly appreciated in value over the past 12 months. But it's factually correct, looking at what comparables sell for for on eBay.
That too sounds like an actually good development all things considered. For the planet, anyway. And with the big caveat of that cloud tether, though just for scaffolding.
It would be good if we would use less resources.
But we are not.
It's just that some people don't get the newer resources.
Somehow it feels like we got a pretty good deal, in retrospect. (My server has been since replaced, and I can tell you, 256GB of DDR5 ECC was more than that! There's been a further doubling or two of prices since I bought, though. I think I could maybe sell half the RAM and finance the entire server…)
No end in sight.
Not much cheaper than DDR5.
LPDDR5 is slower but maybe a small cluster could be useful?
30 refineries were closed in Europe in the past 15 years about, and that is just a small example of a pathological situation.
Cost of hiring an oil tanker has ballooned massively (like 40 fold) since America decided to bomb its supply chain, so these long supply chains are massively expensive.
The Republican Party has decided that running a world of global free trade was no longer desired. America wont pay the price for another decade or two, but it will.
I think in a few hundred years we'll have learnt what a disgusting, poisonous system it is.
The amount of waste produced due to phones not receiving new batteries and software updates was utterly insane, given what goes into making them.
It's terrible if you're a labourer in India who buys phones under 10k INR (~100 USD) when your salary is 20k INR per month.
Unfortunately there are way more in the latter category than the former, and most of them won't know what ram is. They'll just be paying more and getting less going forward for a few years.
(Source, the salaries and phones I've seen of the staff at office. And we're in a major region you've likely heard of, not some tiny rural village.)
During every mining crunch that made GPUs very expensive, we sometimes went backwards on parts of new builds. A used GPU from years ago was often a more-viable choice than a new model in any kind of condition.
edit to add: A lot of folks in 3D printing like to have a small computer driving the machine, especially with tinkerer-friendly hobbyist printers of yore. That often meant some manner of Raspberry Pi because it was inexpensive-enough, small, and a known quantity that was simple to deal with in an appliance-like way.
During the covid-era chip shortages, Pi hardware was expensive, hard to find, or often both. So folks started driving their printers with things like old cell phones or cheap Android TV boxes instead.
I eventually upgraded to an RX 570 in 2018, and hit the same problem 5 years later.
So as far as loe to mid range cards are concerned you can wait 5 years and still have to pay more to replace it for an upgrade.
Also the enshittification of software might count? You used to own Photoshop for life, now you're expected to pay a subscription for life. And legal onslaught, too. Encryption and consumer VPNs are on the chopping block in much of the world at the rate things are going. The end goal of governments and corporations alike is to remove the ability of consumers to own hardware they control. We are rapidly moving towards a future where you will only be able to access the internet and government services with a "trusted device", which will be a thin client with a TPM, biometric verification, telemetry of everything you do on it, and which will require paying an ongoing subscription to use.
$699 in 2015 (when the 1080 was new) is ~$975 today, adjusted for inflation.
$975 is pretty close to the launch MSRP of a 5080, which is "just" $999. (We can't actually buy them for $999, of course, but we couldn't usually get 1080 cards at MSRP during the mining frenzy a decade ago either.)
You could say that there was Titan but in practice they were not seriously considered. At least for gaming.
Whereas today, with the 5000 series in the market for quite a while already, a 4080 is still well over MSRP
Businesses are competing like crazy to make algorithms that are in high demand. AI could theoretically let people and create new things that they would never be able to otherwise.
It is entitled to thing that people wanting GPUs and new PCs for gaming and hobbies is a more valid use. And if someone values it, all they have to do is pay the market price.
"Somehow, DDR4 has returned."
__
Besides that, wasn't DDR4 good enough for everything we did, anyway?
At least I did not notice all that much of a difference when migrating to my current DDR5 system other than the CPU being massively more performant. Though I am sure that the memory did play some role there.
Clanker claims that the felt absolute latency between decent DDR4 and DDR5 should be similar, while bandwidth might be lower, apparently? Something something CAS latency.
If you have some unused extra memory it will be used as disk cache, which also helps in the responsiveness of a desktop. Waiting for the disk is orders of magnitude slower than reading from memory cache.
Home server also runs ddr4 and does ok, but that has been hitting more cpu bottlenecks now rather than memory.
That said its kinda sad personal users are getting tossed back a generation due to current generation ram being almost all gobbled up for AI.
The archive link was posted [1] long before you posted. Also from the HN FAQ [2]:
> Are paywalls ok?
It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds.
In comments, it's ok to ask how to read an article and to help other users do so. But please don't post complaints about paywalls. Those are off topic.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50040452
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html