I was lucky enough to buy three 64GB DDR4 3200 kits last year in February, for €120 each, as well as a 128GB DDR4 2600 kit for another 120€, and another 64GB 2400 kit for my two X99 motherboards, 32GB DDR4 3200 for my laptop, for 140€, and 16GB DDR3L for my mini PC router. As well as five 512GB NVMe SSDs and one 1TB NVMe SSD. It was a year of upgrading RAM and storage, and I can’t believe how lucky I was. Now, I’m worried that something might go wrong, because here, they also refund the original price. With current prices, it would be impossible for me.
It was normal for me to buy something at one price, only to see it cheaper the next day. This is the first time I see what's happening now, even in 2011 with the floods, the HDD prices didn't climb like they did nowadays.

We've all seen spikes before due to natural disasters, temporary shortages or similar, but this is the first time I've seen an effect of this magnitude across so many different sectors all because of the insane claims from one strand of technology.... the incredible cost of all the equipment and power driving this hype machine isn't covering its costs according to any report that I've seen. Most services are running on venture capital and investor funding... but no-one appears to be actually covering their costs and or indeed making any money from this if those sources of income are excluded.

We're seeing costs of some workstations and high end equipment double or triple in the space of 3-6 months... not component prices, but entire systems.... and at the bottom end, if you're not willing to swallow the huge cost rises, then your entry level laptops and desktops are now like reading manufacturer specs from 10 or 15 years ago. That's going to be great for productivity.

It is all certifiably insane.

megatron-uk wrote on Today, 18:00:

Most services are running on venture capital and investor funding... but no-one appears to be actually covering their costs and or indeed making any money from this if those sources of income are excluded.

It feels like the dot-com boom all over again.

This is hypothetical... I don't actually think this is going to happen... but what if this bubble burst SO BADLY that nearly all "AI" focused hardware was immediately rendered obsolete and functionally worthless? Imagine the crazy things people would come up with to do with that hardware as it ended up in various places around the world (E-waste, harvesting chips to make homebrew hardware, etc.).

I have seen the kind of ridiculous stuff that lands on scrap or second hand markets when businesses fold and have to liquidate immediately.

It kind of makes me ill to think about it, but last year some time I saw a scrap seller on a popular selling platform selling multiple piles of very large server CPUs that had the heat spreaders popped off. I almost had a heart attack because I knew what they were based on their distinctive pad layout on the bottom... and I knew because earlier that year I had found a single one of them (with heat spreader) by chance and sold it for $500 as-is... they regularly sold for $900+ in working condition and sold new for thousands of dollars each just a couple years before that. This seller had - HUNDREDS - of them being sold for scrap prices... delidded of course. It was easily half a million dollars worth of high end ARM-based server processors. I contacted him to see if he still had the heat spreaders somewhere but he was completely unresponsive. Around that time the seller ended a bunch of his listings and then later replied to me saying he no longer had them. I was... disappointed. But, hey, they weren't mine. I hope he got something out of them.

Anyway... I think if this bubble bursts in the worst way possible, there is a slight chance we could see crazy things like this ending up on the junk markets. Imagine having several TB of high end VRAM and dozens of 5090-level GPU cores just laying in heaps attached to now-useless proprietary boards waiting to be repurposed into gaming hardware by people with the tools and skills needed to cobble them into something useful.

... again, this very likely won't happen, but it is fun to think about.

Ozzuneoj wrote on Today, 18:40:

This is hypothetical... I don't actually think this is going to happen... but what if this bubble burst SO BADLY that nearly all […]
Show full quote

This is hypothetical... I don't actually think this is going to happen... but what if this bubble burst SO BADLY that nearly all "AI" focused hardware was immediately rendered obsolete and functionally worthless? Imagine the crazy things people would come up with to do with that hardware as it ended up in various places around the world (E-waste, harvesting chips to make homebrew hardware, etc.).

I have seen the kind of ridiculous stuff that lands on scrap or second hand markets when businesses fold and have to liquidate immediately.

It kind of makes me ill to think about it, but last year some time I saw a scrap seller on a popular selling platform selling multiple piles of very large server CPUs that had the heat spreaders popped off. I almost had a heart attack because I knew what they were based on their distinctive pad layout on the bottom... and I knew because earlier that year I had found a single one of them (with heat spreader) by chance and sold it for $500 as-is... they regularly sold for $900+ in working condition and sold new for thousands of dollars each just a couple years before that. This seller had - HUNDREDS - of them being sold for scrap prices... delidded of course. It was easily half a million dollars worth of high end ARM-based server processors. I contacted him to see if he still had the heat spreaders somewhere but he was completely unresponsive. Around that time the seller ended a bunch of his listings and then later replied to me saying he no longer had them. I was... disappointed. But, hey, they weren't mine. I hope he got something out of them.

Anyway... I think if this bubble bursts in the worst way possible, there is a slight chance we could see crazy things like this ending up on the junk markets. Imagine having several TB of high end VRAM and dozens of 5090-level GPU cores just laying in heaps attached to now-useless proprietary boards waiting to be repurposed into gaming hardware by people with the tools and skills needed to cobble them into something useful.

... again, this very likely won't happen, but it is fun to think about.

Using your gpus memory to supplement system ram over x16 would be interesting to say the least.

rmay635703 wrote on Today, 19:03:

Ozzuneoj wrote on Today, 18:40:

This is hypothetical... I don't actually think this is going to happen... but what if this bubble burst SO BADLY that nearly all […]
Show full quote

This is hypothetical... I don't actually think this is going to happen... but what if this bubble burst SO BADLY that nearly all "AI" focused hardware was immediately rendered obsolete and functionally worthless? Imagine the crazy things people would come up with to do with that hardware as it ended up in various places around the world (E-waste, harvesting chips to make homebrew hardware, etc.).

I have seen the kind of ridiculous stuff that lands on scrap or second hand markets when businesses fold and have to liquidate immediately.

It kind of makes me ill to think about it, but last year some time I saw a scrap seller on a popular selling platform selling multiple piles of very large server CPUs that had the heat spreaders popped off. I almost had a heart attack because I knew what they were based on their distinctive pad layout on the bottom... and I knew because earlier that year I had found a single one of them (with heat spreader) by chance and sold it for $500 as-is... they regularly sold for $900+ in working condition and sold new for thousands of dollars each just a couple years before that. This seller had - HUNDREDS - of them being sold for scrap prices... delidded of course. It was easily half a million dollars worth of high end ARM-based server processors. I contacted him to see if he still had the heat spreaders somewhere but he was completely unresponsive. Around that time the seller ended a bunch of his listings and then later replied to me saying he no longer had them. I was... disappointed. But, hey, they weren't mine. I hope he got something out of them.

Anyway... I think if this bubble bursts in the worst way possible, there is a slight chance we could see crazy things like this ending up on the junk markets. Imagine having several TB of high end VRAM and dozens of 5090-level GPU cores just laying in heaps attached to now-useless proprietary boards waiting to be repurposed into gaming hardware by people with the tools and skills needed to cobble them into something useful.

... again, this very likely won't happen, but it is fun to think about.

Using your gpus memory to supplement system ram over x16 would be interesting to say the least.

I keep picturing all the goofy things that have turned up on Chinese markets in recent years... like Mobile RX 6600 GPUs soldered onto discrete PCI-E cards for bargain prices when GPUs were super expensive. Or, ATX\ITX motherboards with integrated high end laptop\mini-PC CPUs. Or even something as simple as mass produced adapters to make standard hardware work with proprietary stuff.

How about motherboards with a bunch of onboard high speed GPU focused memory to act as an L4 cache of sorts? Or even put it on a removable module to make it expandable\replaceable. That would be slick.

It all sounds far fetched, but... the industry has never seen anything like this before with the sheer volume of high end silicon being produced. It is hard to even comprehend the amount of absurdly fast memory and the millions of ludicrously powerful GPUs being pumped out for "AI" datacenters. I have read that some of these places are being set up with 100,000+ GB200 units. As far as I understand it, a GB200 incorporates dual G200 GPU dies, 1 Grace CPU and as much as 864GB of HBM3e total (not unified) with 8TB/sec of bandwidth available to each GPU. That means a datacenter like this could have over 86 Petabytes of HBM3e. Sadly, I think most or all of it is actually part of the GPU\CPU die\package itself so it cannot be separated from it.

Yet, consumers can't even get nvidia to sell a current generation GPU with more than 8GB of mid range peasant GDDR7 for under $429 MSRP (actually $550+ right now).

If the bubble burst and no one wanted this stuff, there's probably enough HBM3e out in the wild right now (attached to GPUs... 🤣) to replace all the system RAM and VRAM that all of the home computing\gaming users in the world could conceivably use for at least the next decade. (Again, I know this isn't how it works, it's just funny to think about.)

I was lucky that I built my new PC right before the prices went up. Though I only got 32 gigs of ddr 5 , i now wish i got 64
I hope this PC lasts a good long time its an i9 14900KF , Asus z790 , RTX 580 , 32 gigs and 4 TB M.2
I hate hearing about 60 series cards because it reminds me how fast cards become obsolete