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Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

the other side of the AI bubble are a huge amount of 2nd hand parts of all kinds going to come onto the market?

Waiting for all my out of use 4, 8, and 16GB DDR3 DIMMs that I have somewhere in a drawer to become the new gold standard first.

I'm finding that getting an LGA socket to give me two reliable memory channels is far more valuable than the sticks that go into them. I've got at least two motherboards in use at my home right now with only one working channel of memory. There are sticks just sitting around.

My pile of worthless 512MB DDR1 sticks has bad news for you

Memory chips are divertied to registered server RAM and those will not fit most workstations

Nothing stops you building an EPYC based workstation. For the last socket you could even get mATX boards from Asrock Rack which were kind of ridiculous - I was very tempted to build my PC around one.

Unless it drags on for years so that the parts are old by the time everything gets liquidated.

Yeah though expecting that to A) take years still and B) the gear will be old AF

Bit like you could get NVIDIA Server cards before things went crazy but they’re on ancient cuda etc so not exactly as glorious as one would imagine

A lot of the goods won't be essily repurposible for consumer or small business work loads.

Imagine if auto manufacturers all refitted their factories and supply chains to produce military vehicles for a war effort. New family cars would run dry, and when the war ended, some folks would figure out make clever use of some surplus military vehicles for street travel and commerce, but most of the surplus would just be shifted to other military markets and family car production would take some time to resume.

You can buy old rackmount servers on ebay for relatively cheap and used them as desktop PCs AFAIK (though they can be on the noisier side).

... and paying it back in power use

Use it during colder months for heating.

You don't want to be in the same room as these when they're running.

AliExpress has been selling 2010 or whatever Intel xeons in dual socket desktop board kits for gaming. they are fairly affordable and hold up to almost modern games so people that can't afford new gen systems.

These products are fascinating. When I looked at them it seemed like they pulled old chipsets from server boards or maybe they found stock somewhere and then combined them with south bridges from things like Z77 boards. All to make use of obsolete server CPUs that were cheap and available. Amazing and wonderful.

Meanwhile you've got OpenAI buying up all the DRAM and maybe just piling it in a warehouse so no one else can have it or they figure out what to do with it. Microsoft recently said they don't even have a power source to plug the ton of GPUs they just bought into so they're also just sitting around collecting dust. What is even happening?

All in a pretty bad state of wear, I imagine.

At least with ECC memory it's very obvious when its failing as you'll see reported correctable errors.

I would snag up every possible H100 and H200 if the AI bubble burst and their prices went into steep decline.

Why? Doesn’t that suggest that demand justifies the “bubble”?

to make cheap and fast password hash cracking rigs

No, they'll be shipped off to developing nations to be dissolved for rare earths for the next boom cycle.

Memory chips don't contain rare earths, and e-waste recyclers pay a tiny fraction of what used-hardware buyers do.

My point was not to litigate the precise method of e-waste disposal.

Your point was to post nonsense without caring about whether it was true or false in order to troll someone into responding. Please don't do that again.

And your point was to nitpick a rhetorical statement and miss the point entirely. Feel free to disengage.

I don't think you should comment on this site again if you aren't willing to comment in good faith. I pointed out that your original statement was completely false, and rather than thanking me for the correction, you responded defensively and then attacked me. This shows that you don't care whether what you posted was true or not. That's corrosive to the presumption of good faith we employ here. If you aren't willing to behave properly, you shouldn't be here.

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