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. My desktop in ~2015 was built from 2006-era hardware, with 32GB of ECC DDR2, which felt like a lot at the time.
My "6 years ago" build was with more typical current-gen consumer-grade hardware, because at that point I was on the hook for the electricity bill. I haven't thought about what my next build will look like because it's still going strong (aside from a flakey DIMM... so my next system will have ECC).
Regardless if the market allows consumers access to negative solar prices or not, consumers can attach solar panels to their servers (independent of the grid), so the LLM is there when the sun is shining.
That is expensive. If it makes you feel better, U.S. utilities' published kWh rates don't include a whole bunch of other things that make bills much higher than you'd imagine. For example, I used 280 kWh last month for my apartment, at a nominal rate of either 11 or 13 c/kWh (the rate changed from 13 to 11 partway through the month as it got cooler).
But after all the "sales true ups" and "affordability charges" and "resource adjustments" and "fuel cost charges" and "interim rate adjustments", not to mention the city fees and sales tax, the final bill divided by my usage gave me an effective rate of 23 c/kWh.
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 E5-2670v1 was goated for this back in 2016-2017. You could get them for like 25-50 bucks. I still have one of the supermicro boards I got from work in hardware decommissioning and one of the chinese franken-boards with a modded bios.
Typing this from an Asus X99 WS 3.1 with a E5-2696v4 . I got 256GB of RAM, sees only 128GB but I am sure with some overvoltage and lowering the ram speed it could see all 256GB.
if anybody got a tip, i'd be more than glad to listen, please.
> Typing this from an Asus X99 WS 3.1 with a E5-2696v4.
Yeah the Xeon E5 v4 to me are really an amazing spot. These things, today, are basically free. If you look a bit you can buy stuff like four 20 cores E5 v4 for $60, making them effectively $15 each. Basically free.
And here's the trick: I don't need my Xeon to be up 24/7. 8/7 is sufficient, so I save 2/3rd of the electricity cost. I set up my network so that when I sleep, my main server doesn't need to be on. The services that really need be on 24/7 (say my DNS for when I'm sleeping and my wife/kid need Internet) are running on a Raspberry Pi (which consumes nothing).
And when I need the shitloads of cores / ZFS etc.: I turn the Xeon on.
Now it's still a server in my case: my main machine is a recent AMD.
> if anybody got a tip, i'd be more than glad to listen, please.
Slap 128 GB of the 256 in a $50 used Xeon server and use that has a backup / to run VMs / ZFS / etc.
I firmly believe this shortage is artificially produced and I really hope chinese manufacturers flood the market and make memory as cheap as toilet paper
I don't think that an abundance of any computing resource is a good thing. Cloud, storage, memory: this idea that you can always get lots of it leads to all sorts of undesirable outcomes.
What? All a shortage does is ensure those with deep pockets control the entire ecosystem. Bye bye personal computing. The people with money don’t want you to own anything, they’d rather you rent everything from them. How is that not an undesirable outcome?
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.
Yeah but TBH an old server with DDR3 ECC is still way sufficient to serve something like 99.9% of all the servers out there's jobs.
That's the plain truth: most sites/servers simply serve very very very little and have not anywhere near the need for 256 GB of RAM, let alone 512 GB.
These old servers aren't sufficient for the Amazon/Apple/Microsoft/Meta/Google/Oracle of this world, but for 99.9% of the rest of the world, they're more than plenty.
And the world and technology shall keep on marching: we'll have DDR6 and as soon as that happens, suddenly all the hyperscalers shall consider DDR5 to be oh-so-lame and dumped by the truckloads in landfills.
We may have two more painful years ahead for RAM but we'll then have plenty of used enterprise/datacenters gear on the market.
My old laptop has this exact RAM. Funny thing is that in terms of throughput it's on par with my current one, where I put just one 32GB stick, with one slot left for upgrades.
I still use it occasionally and it's really the old CPU and worn out SSD which slow it down.
And raw bandwidth is a function of how many channels you've got as well. So a threadripper with 8 channels of DDR4 will run just fine even on heavy workloads.
This mentions DDR4, but I used to be in electronic recycling and I have still so much 1GB and 2GB DDR2 and DDR3 RAM. Happy to ship a couple of sticks if you guys could find a use. It’s going to scrap otherwise.
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.
Only a couple of my work machines use DDR4. Most of my own kit, both for work and for play, uses DDR3 which is cheap and plentiful.
I avoid dedicated GPUs which have always been a money-pit. I find modern video games dull and boring, and this is not offset by them being very very pretty. Gaming for me peaked with Quake II and there's been nothing of real interest since Portal and Untitled Goose Game.
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.
The biggest advantage is that the older technology can also produced by Chinese manufacturers like CXMT. They're ramping up production to claim a sizeable portion of the market.
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
Thanks for the tip, I've seen those small e-ink display on sale in Aliexpress, but wasn't sure about their quality. Maybe I'll get one for my next project, I can see many use cases.
I didn’t notice any quality issue. And the crowpanel docs and demo repos make it simple to quickly get results. Though I had troubles getting macOS to establish a serial connection, no problem under Linux and windows
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.
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.
If the trend to disregard performance with ever-increasing CPU power had not stopped, C++ and Rust wouldn't be as popular as they are. Something did change with the end of the free lunch.
What will change is more and more software will be moved over to a cloud based subscription model with the end user device just being a crippled thin client.
And I can already see the shitwank bean counters salivating over this prospect. Imagine the possibilities, we can stuff as much DRM as we want, charge as much as possible monthly, arbitrarily restrict the terms of usage in the future. What will the user do? Run the same heavy duty software on their Intel N150 + 4GB RAM shitbox? Blah.
They are popular among a certain hobbyist community, just as they were in 2024. They are not popular among application developers. Remember how FAANG app developers keep bumping into platform limits, such as the old Android limit of 65k classes in an app, and necessitating workarounds?
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.
I think in a few hundred years the very small number of survivors of humanity will be living in caves and huts in the high Arctic and in a greening slowly-reafforesting Antarctic, they'll be hunter-gatherers with maybe some simple small-scale unmechanised agriculture, and they won't have money. Maybe a barter system for a few.
Among the many other things they won't have is an economic model.
Europeans and Americans choose to make things unsustainable and unprofitable to do in Europe, and chose to make it possible to import things cheaply from places like China and India who use slave labour and destroy the environment … and then blame Capitalism.
As you like … but blaming capitalism is not going to bring industry back, and it won't stop China from using slave labour or India from using their rivers as landfills.
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 just bought a ~10 years old SuperMicro 1U server with 2x 24 cores of Intel's E5. For ... 250 Euros. Really cheap, hehe.
Then I had to buy second-hand 128GB DDR4 ECC for 400 Euro and 4x 3,84 TB Datacenter SSDs for 2000 Euros, second-hand of course.
I mean it somehow still feels cheep, if I watch the prices for new hardware.
But it took me days to create this upper mentioned system from all the different sellers and different sources on eBay. There is no "cheap" one-click solution with included guarantee anymore.
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.
We are getting tossed back a generation, but we are also becoming as rare as chicken teeth. Most people do not own a Desktop PC, most people don't even own a Laptop any longer. To do the most good for the most people requires datacentres at the moment, and it will probably remain like that for the forseeable future.
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.
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.
[1] https://post.m.smzdm.com/talk/p/am9d3zv4/
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. My desktop in ~2015 was built from 2006-era hardware, with 32GB of ECC DDR2, which felt like a lot at the time.
My "6 years ago" build was with more typical current-gen consumer-grade hardware, because at that point I was on the hook for the electricity bill. I haven't thought about what my next build will look like because it's still going strong (aside from a flakey DIMM... so my next system will have ECC).
I've been extremely pleased with my R320 in a NAS role. Idles at 40 watts, is quiet, has ECC, and the drives stay cool.
Maybe that's still too much power for some people, but I'm happy with the tradeoffs.
I imagine those countries have sane energy prices compared to Western Europe.
Regardless if the market allows consumers access to negative solar prices or not, consumers can attach solar panels to their servers (independent of the grid), so the LLM is there when the sun is shining.
Me too.
EU average is just under 29c/kWh (non-contract price) [0]
In the UK I got 27.5c/kWh (+ 58c/day fixed charge) on an 18-month contract a month ago
[0] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
That is expensive. If it makes you feel better, U.S. utilities' published kWh rates don't include a whole bunch of other things that make bills much higher than you'd imagine. For example, I used 280 kWh last month for my apartment, at a nominal rate of either 11 or 13 c/kWh (the rate changed from 13 to 11 partway through the month as it got cooler).
But after all the "sales true ups" and "affordability charges" and "resource adjustments" and "fuel cost charges" and "interim rate adjustments", not to mention the city fees and sales tax, the final bill divided by my usage gave me an effective rate of 23 c/kWh.
My thought was that the EU average can't be that high, but apparently Finland is just the outlier here.
I think in Quebec they've been paying me to use power.
Good for you
Energy is a commodity so the price will be very similar for the same goods. What they tack on as taxes might be different.
Energy means electricity in this case, and the EU prices are about 2-3x those paid in China AFAIK, for both residential and commercial.
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 cheapest price in Europe at best equaling the average price in China sounds like it just proves my point?
Electricity cannot be shipped from one place to another in bulk quantities.
And data can be.
Which is why I suspect most nominal "data centers" are fronts for crypto mining, an activity that seeks out the cheapest energy.
The E5-2670v1 was goated for this back in 2016-2017. You could get them for like 25-50 bucks. I still have one of the supermicro boards I got from work in hardware decommissioning and one of the chinese franken-boards with a modded bios.
Typing this from an Asus X99 WS 3.1 with a E5-2696v4 . I got 256GB of RAM, sees only 128GB but I am sure with some overvoltage and lowering the ram speed it could see all 256GB.
if anybody got a tip, i'd be more than glad to listen, please.
> Typing this from an Asus X99 WS 3.1 with a E5-2696v4.
Yeah the Xeon E5 v4 to me are really an amazing spot. These things, today, are basically free. If you look a bit you can buy stuff like four 20 cores E5 v4 for $60, making them effectively $15 each. Basically free.
And here's the trick: I don't need my Xeon to be up 24/7. 8/7 is sufficient, so I save 2/3rd of the electricity cost. I set up my network so that when I sleep, my main server doesn't need to be on. The services that really need be on 24/7 (say my DNS for when I'm sleeping and my wife/kid need Internet) are running on a Raspberry Pi (which consumes nothing).
And when I need the shitloads of cores / ZFS etc.: I turn the Xeon on.
Now it's still a server in my case: my main machine is a recent AMD.
> if anybody got a tip, i'd be more than glad to listen, please.
Slap 128 GB of the 256 in a $50 used Xeon server and use that has a backup / to run VMs / ZFS / etc.
There are significant performance/energy ratio problems with older hardware, particularly with the rise of ARM.
I firmly believe this shortage is artificially produced and I really hope chinese manufacturers flood the market and make memory as cheap as toilet paper
I don't think that an abundance of any computing resource is a good thing. Cloud, storage, memory: this idea that you can always get lots of it leads to all sorts of undesirable outcomes.
What? All a shortage does is ensure those with deep pockets control the entire ecosystem. Bye bye personal computing. The people with money don’t want you to own anything, they’d rather you rent everything from them. How is that not an undesirable outcome?
How so?
Was expecting the article to go deep into DDR3 land by tone of the title...
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.
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.
Yeah but TBH an old server with DDR3 ECC is still way sufficient to serve something like 99.9% of all the servers out there's jobs.
That's the plain truth: most sites/servers simply serve very very very little and have not anywhere near the need for 256 GB of RAM, let alone 512 GB.
These old servers aren't sufficient for the Amazon/Apple/Microsoft/Meta/Google/Oracle of this world, but for 99.9% of the rest of the world, they're more than plenty.
And the world and technology shall keep on marching: we'll have DDR6 and as soon as that happens, suddenly all the hyperscalers shall consider DDR5 to be oh-so-lame and dumped by the truckloads in landfills.
We may have two more painful years ahead for RAM but we'll then have plenty of used enterprise/datacenters gear on the market.
My old laptop has this exact RAM. Funny thing is that in terms of throughput it's on par with my current one, where I put just one 32GB stick, with one slot left for upgrades.
I still use it occasionally and it's really the old CPU and worn out SSD which slow it down.
That 90% probably also includes computer games. I'm not sure whether those need fast main memory. They certainly need fast VRAM.
Most games do not, unless you want the best graphics. But then you’re out of the 90% use cases
Apparently mainly CPU (rather than GPU) limited games tend to benefit from DDR5: https://www.techspot.com/review/3059-ddr5-vs-ddr4-gaming/
DDR4 have similar latency as DDR5 and that's what matters in all games, while raw bandwidth only matters in some games
And raw bandwidth is a function of how many channels you've got as well. So a threadripper with 8 channels of DDR4 will run just fine even on heavy workloads.
This mentions DDR4, but I used to be in electronic recycling and I have still so much 1GB and 2GB DDR2 and DDR3 RAM. Happy to ship a couple of sticks if you guys could find a use. It’s going to scrap otherwise.
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…)
Currently 128GB of normal non-ECC DDR5 as a 2x64 set is around 2000 euro and increasing...
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.
No end in sight.
2x16GB costs around $190 right now, or closer to $375 if you want ECC.
Not much cheaper than DDR5.
Don’t call it a comeback, I’ve been here for years!
Only a couple of my work machines use DDR4. Most of my own kit, both for work and for play, uses DDR3 which is cheap and plentiful.
I avoid dedicated GPUs which have always been a money-pit. I find modern video games dull and boring, and this is not offset by them being very very pretty. Gaming for me peaked with Quake II and there's been nothing of real interest since Portal and Untitled Goose Game.
Not even DDR4... Things are this bad:
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.
The biggest advantage is that the older technology can also produced by Chinese manufacturers like CXMT. They're ramping up production to claim a sizeable portion of the market.
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.
This is interesting. Maybe add a couple examples of generated stories.
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
Thanks for the tip, I've seen those small e-ink display on sale in Aliexpress, but wasn't sure about their quality. Maybe I'll get one for my next project, I can see many use cases.
I didn’t notice any quality issue. And the crowpanel docs and demo repos make it simple to quickly get results. Though I had troubles getting macOS to establish a serial connection, no problem under Linux and windows
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.
Also making old hardware unaffordable too.
> That too sounds like an actually good development all things considered
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.
Please. There are so many human stories out there—read those.
unlesss it's for children, just read books.
and if it is for your child, read them books.
Please don't raise your kids on AI slop. They'll grow up without knowing anything else.
https://archive.org/details/Infinity_v01n04_1956-08/page/n25...
https://archive.is/yrGeb
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.
Maybe more efficient code will make a comeback.
I have bridge to sell you if you think that is likely.
If the trend to disregard performance with ever-increasing CPU power had not stopped, C++ and Rust wouldn't be as popular as they are. Something did change with the end of the free lunch.
What will change is more and more software will be moved over to a cloud based subscription model with the end user device just being a crippled thin client.
And I can already see the shitwank bean counters salivating over this prospect. Imagine the possibilities, we can stuff as much DRM as we want, charge as much as possible monthly, arbitrarily restrict the terms of usage in the future. What will the user do? Run the same heavy duty software on their Intel N150 + 4GB RAM shitbox? Blah.
They are popular among a certain hobbyist community, just as they were in 2024. They are not popular among application developers. Remember how FAANG app developers keep bumping into platform limits, such as the old Android limit of 65k classes in an app, and necessitating workarounds?
We can get refurbished phones with 8 GB LPDDR5 for less than regular DDR5 modules.
LPDDR5 is slower but maybe a small cluster could be useful?
The wages of the West's deliberate deindustrialization and deliberate dependence on Asian manufacturing.
30 refineries were closed in Europe in the past 15 years about, and that is just a small example of a pathological situation.
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.
Well capitalism is responsible for that.
I think in a few hundred years we'll have learnt what a disgusting, poisonous system it is.
I think in a few hundred years the very small number of survivors of humanity will be living in caves and huts in the high Arctic and in a greening slowly-reafforesting Antarctic, they'll be hunter-gatherers with maybe some simple small-scale unmechanised agriculture, and they won't have money. Maybe a barter system for a few.
Among the many other things they won't have is an economic model.
Europeans and Americans choose to make things unsustainable and unprofitable to do in Europe, and chose to make it possible to import things cheaply from places like China and India who use slave labour and destroy the environment … and then blame Capitalism.
As you like … but blaming capitalism is not going to bring industry back, and it won't stop China from using slave labour or India from using their rivers as landfills.
I mean arguably, this is good.
The amount of waste produced due to phones not receiving new batteries and software updates was utterly insane, given what goes into making them.
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.)
https://archive.ph/yrGeb
As an owner of a 1700 socket mainboard and 64GB of DDR4 (recently acquired a second 32GB kit on eBay), I am very pleased to see this.
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
Back in the day 1080 was top of the line. For couple of generations now it's xx90 lineup.
You could say that there was Titan but in practice they were not seriously considered. At least for gaming.
I don’t see that at all obvious.
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 just bought a ~10 years old SuperMicro 1U server with 2x 24 cores of Intel's E5. For ... 250 Euros. Really cheap, hehe. Then I had to buy second-hand 128GB DDR4 ECC for 400 Euro and 4x 3,84 TB Datacenter SSDs for 2000 Euros, second-hand of course.
I mean it somehow still feels cheep, if I watch the prices for new hardware.
But it took me days to create this upper mentioned system from all the different sellers and different sources on eBay. There is no "cheap" one-click solution with included guarantee anymore.
It is not just DDR4; I know of at least one supplier sampling units with DDR3 for their ONTs.
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)
This will drive linux adoption like nothing else.
https://archive.is/yrGeb
Love the link preview tagline. Thanks TheVerge
"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.
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.
row, row, row your hammer, gently down the bit flip stream...
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.
Not GPUs. AI chips. no benefit to the customer
I just sold 4x8GB of DDR4 that I wasn't using for $200 on Ebay so this article is quite timely
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.
We are getting tossed back a generation, but we are also becoming as rare as chicken teeth. Most people do not own a Desktop PC, most people don't even own a Laptop any longer. To do the most good for the most people requires datacentres at the moment, and it will probably remain like that for the forseeable future.
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.