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.
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.
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.
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.
I bought an SLI pair of 9800GTs in ~2008. I found SLI wasn't worth the difficulty (and neither was a dedicated PhysX processor), so I eventually gave one of them away to a friend who wanted a video card.
My old man was scooping up scrap metal in 2015 and found a Radeon card (I forget which exact model) that was faster than the SLI 9800GTs ever were, and which had twice the RAM. It was on top of pile of trash at the curb on a small town's annual collection day. It worked great, though my PSU only had a bunch of 6-pin power connectors and this one required 8-pin (a problem that I patched around with a soldering iron).
Shortly after, in 2016, I also upgraded to an i3 and DDR4 because it was cheap at the time. One core of that was faster than all 4 cores of the once-beastly Q6600 it replaced. It was an awesome upgrade.
I wrote on Reddit about some problem or other with getting X going on the thing, and some well-meaning individual noticed the Radeon card. They asked me why I was even bothering with that, and opined that the i3's built-in iGPU was probably actually-better, maybe-faster, and definitely better-supported than the dedicated GPU -- while just sipping power.
They were right: It was faster, better, and cheaper. Out came the Radeon GPU and things got better after that.
Around that time, Rockstar was in the process of abandoning GTA:V on ye olde PS3 and was giving away the PC version of the game to PS3 users, along with account transfers. It was such an amazing visual upgrade to play it in this way that I fed an HDMI cable through the wall of my apartment into the living room and bought a wireless Xbox 360 controller so I could keep playing it while sitting on my sofa, as is the right and proper way to play GTA. ;)
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I don't know what the point of all that is, except: At times when there's things like slip and mobility in the market, then it seems that some really cool stuff can happen. (And I do feel very strongly that we'll get back to that kind of thing, but it won't be for some time.)
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 nearly 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 moving to a future where you will only be able to access the internet and government services with a trusted device, which will probably be a thin client with a TPM and biometric verification that requires paying a 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.
This is the crux of a lot of the anti-AI sentiment especially in the gaming market. They feel entitled to access to the latest chips at a subsidized price below what industry is willing to pay. Many of them then take it a step further and claim some conspiracy (like a few commenters here).
I get why they're upset (it's not fun to be crowded out) but it's a fundamentally selfish position.
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.
I know the only producer of such 64GB modules: Crucial (Micron), but Micron doesn't sell new chips to Crucial, thus almost no chance to get them anymore (though few months ago there were some). Kingston (using Micron, Hynix and Samsung) still does not have 64GB.
Soon Zen 6 should become available (well, or not so soon). With 7200 MTs memory controller? I haven't seen such JEDEC modules at all. Are they possible without the additional clock driver (like on 6400 CUDIMMs)?
Interesting, that explains why getting 4x48 = 192gb is around 2400 euros, so 1.2x the price for 1.5x the capacity.
Speed has indeed decreased for the modules you can actually buy, while historically you would get faster and faster modules at lower prices in the years after the introduction is a new DDR standard.
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 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.
The free trade you are referring to is just American hegemony, the Americans spoke, and the rest of the western nations stepped in line.
Almost all western countries made themselves vassals of the Americans, by choice, and then decided to no answer the call of their patron, and also decided at the same time they will do everything possible to disadvantage America while constantly saying how much they hate America.
The whole concept of international law has always just been American benevolence, and the Americans got shit in return. You can suggest the Americans should just eat shit while the rest of the world benefits, but the Americans don't think so, and they won't keep doing it.
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.
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.
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?
There is a lot of embedded software where hardware cost or energy consumption matters. Occasionally, time and money are wasted on fast software running on slow, cheap hardware made in low numbers. Other times, when hardware is made by the millions, investing more in software absolutely pays off.
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.
I mean you could always vibe code a replacement in 30 minutes. Thankfully I don’t see DRM being a problem when you can’t DRM an idea. They will try, but how is that going for the games industry currently?
How many prompts include "make it as efficient as possible"? Or will efficiency clash with shipping as many features as possible(not even humanly anymore).
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
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
I use a mix of both. We have tons of books at home. Sometimes I am jusst tired of reading the same books over and over. This is a fun way of letting them participate.
I have a laptop with soldered RAM.
The motherboard upgrade to a 16GB variant was 120 EUR. Cheaper than the RAM soldered on it.
It came with a CPU upgrade as well. I'm happy.
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.
Actually, because it is absolute fine DDR4 prices are also rising. The only thing I found I could find for a decent price is unbuffered server ram or laptop ram.
I think the reason why those processors are produced are because it rather makes sense to upgrade your old rig with them. Seems to be the only way actually to increase CPU sales beyond laptops ans smart phones.
I don't see more DDR4 ram being produced. Chinese brands are already starting to produce DDR5 and soon HBM. 'Bringing back DDR4' is IMHO a too bold claim.
I actually recently bought DDR3 memory: $150 for 32GB for an older computer. The price is so much cheaper than what I expected. (My expectation of current RAM price is probably pretty out of whack due to market conditions.)
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.
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.
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.
My homeserver is essentially a top of line gaming PC from 2012 with a Quadro RTX 4000 from 2018. It was not top of the line in 2013 when I bought everything on sale but after many inexpensive ebay upgrades, it's now what I wish I could have afforded back then. Most of the time, it's perfectly fine since it's main job is jellyfin. I'm sure I could be saving some electricity with newer hardware but with the current market, it's just not worth it. I'm missing AVX2 support which Claude Code has recently made a requirement but now I just have Claude ssh into it from another PC that is a few years newer.
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.
Thanks for this! Your post inspired me to look at my X99-UD4 system that was put in a closet some years ago. The board currently has a 5960x CPU, and I did not know I could put an E5-2697v4 CPUs in it. I have a couple of these v4 CPUs and tons of DDR4 modules from a recent data center decomm event. Time to hack again - it may revive my old PC!
I just bought a Xeon E5-2690 v4 for $16 and a Sparkle A770 for like $350. Going to try some local models on there. I think it will be plenty good for my use cases.
Yeah, I have an old X99 old asrock Fatality (lol) board, micro ATX with a Xeon E5 2640 and 128GB of ECC DDR4 running 24/7 as a Truenas server with 80TB of storage in it. It seemed like an overkill when I put it together two years ago when I replaced my 5820 CPU that had been my daily desktop but now with storage and everything prices exploding it has turned into a very useful thing. I still don't like the fact that it sits at around 130 watts. But given that it has so many hard drives in it, it's not that bad. My whole basement cloud now feeds into it.
I end up with B sometimes because I use iPhone double-space to get a period and accidentally triple space but I miss the third and hit B. Maybe V is the same.
About six years ago (as a holdover until I went full homelab, which I never did) I built a machine with some spare parts, a $40 Xeon E5-2650v2 (8 core Ivy Bridge), and one of those Machinist motherboards.
Initially it was just for home server stuff (ZFS array for storage/backups, Plex, Vaultwarden, etc) but then I wanted to experiment with a remote dev environment using LXC/LXD.
I now do all my web development (mostly back-end, Python and C#) on that machine via tmux and VS Code remote SSH. I'm sure if I was running my browser on it it might painful given the slow single-core performance, but honestly I've felt zero need to upgrade it. Once the RAM-pocalypse is over I'll probably look at doing so just for reliability's sake.
I have one of these Machinist boards sitting in my closet, which I haven’t set up mostly out of laziness. What I really want is a PCI-E card that can take DDR3 RAM to be used as a RAM disk for containers that do a heavy amount of heavy I/O.
One or two DDR3 ramdisk cards were produced but they’re basically non-existent today. There are DDR4/5 ones (CXL), but they they’re restricted to specific enterprise motherboards.
The Rmatamini P99S is sold in the US and has been out for less than a year but uses a Xeon E5-2698 v3 that was discontinued in 2021. TechRadar says it uses a recycled CPU, but the listing on NewEgg doesn't seem to mention that anywhere.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 23.3 ms ] thread"Somehow, DDR4 has returned."
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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.
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.
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.
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.
I bought an SLI pair of 9800GTs in ~2008. I found SLI wasn't worth the difficulty (and neither was a dedicated PhysX processor), so I eventually gave one of them away to a friend who wanted a video card.
My old man was scooping up scrap metal in 2015 and found a Radeon card (I forget which exact model) that was faster than the SLI 9800GTs ever were, and which had twice the RAM. It was on top of pile of trash at the curb on a small town's annual collection day. It worked great, though my PSU only had a bunch of 6-pin power connectors and this one required 8-pin (a problem that I patched around with a soldering iron).
Shortly after, in 2016, I also upgraded to an i3 and DDR4 because it was cheap at the time. One core of that was faster than all 4 cores of the once-beastly Q6600 it replaced. It was an awesome upgrade.
I wrote on Reddit about some problem or other with getting X going on the thing, and some well-meaning individual noticed the Radeon card. They asked me why I was even bothering with that, and opined that the i3's built-in iGPU was probably actually-better, maybe-faster, and definitely better-supported than the dedicated GPU -- while just sipping power.
They were right: It was faster, better, and cheaper. Out came the Radeon GPU and things got better after that.
Around that time, Rockstar was in the process of abandoning GTA:V on ye olde PS3 and was giving away the PC version of the game to PS3 users, along with account transfers. It was such an amazing visual upgrade to play it in this way that I fed an HDMI cable through the wall of my apartment into the living room and bought a wireless Xbox 360 controller so I could keep playing it while sitting on my sofa, as is the right and proper way to play GTA. ;)
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I don't know what the point of all that is, except: At times when there's things like slip and mobility in the market, then it seems that some really cool stuff can happen. (And I do feel very strongly that we'll get back to that kind of thing, but it won't be for some time.)
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 moving to a future where you will only be able to access the internet and government services with a trusted device, which will probably be a thin client with a TPM and biometric verification that requires paying a 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.)
Whereas today, with the 5000 series in the market for quite a while already, a 4080 is still well over MSRP
You could say that there was Titan but in practice they were not seriously considered. At least for gaming.
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 get why they're upset (it's not fun to be crowded out) but it's a fundamentally selfish position.
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.
Soon Zen 6 should become available (well, or not so soon). With 7200 MTs memory controller? I haven't seen such JEDEC modules at all. Are they possible without the additional clock driver (like on 6400 CUDIMMs)?
Speed has indeed decreased for the modules you can actually buy, while historically you would get faster and faster modules at lower prices in the years after the introduction is a new DDR standard.
Not much cheaper than DDR5.
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.
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.
Europe can easily be more dominant than the Americans if we chose it.
That has come to an end. The impact so far on the US is nothing compared to the next 20 years.
Almost all western countries made themselves vassals of the Americans, by choice, and then decided to no answer the call of their patron, and also decided at the same time they will do everything possible to disadvantage America while constantly saying how much they hate America.
The whole concept of international law has always just been American benevolence, and the Americans got shit in return. You can suggest the Americans should just eat shit while the rest of the world benefits, but the Americans don't think so, and they won't keep doing it.
I think in a few hundred years we'll have learnt what a disgusting, poisonous system it is.
Among the many other things they won't have is an economic model.
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.
LPDDR5 is slower but maybe a small cluster could be useful?
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.
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.
and if it is for your child, read them books.
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.
I still use it occasionally and it's really the old CPU and worn out SSD which slow it down.
I think the reason why those processors are produced are because it rather makes sense to upgrade your old rig with them. Seems to be the only way actually to increase CPU sales beyond laptops ans smart phones.
I don't see more DDR4 ram being produced. Chinese brands are already starting to produce DDR5 and soon HBM. 'Bringing back DDR4' is IMHO a too bold claim.
Sorry.
EDIT: and $120 for the Kingston ones, albeit LP variant.
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/
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.
Maybe that's still too much power for some people, but I'm happy with the tradeoffs.
if anybody got a tip, i'd be more than glad to listen, please.
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.
At about $350 each, I had to try them. Everything else was double.
Only thing I can say so far is, they boot linux on second hand EPYC 7002 series CPU's.
Haven't put them through their paces yet. V
Now that everyone has bitmap emojis, not so much.
Initially it was just for home server stuff (ZFS array for storage/backups, Plex, Vaultwarden, etc) but then I wanted to experiment with a remote dev environment using LXC/LXD.
I now do all my web development (mostly back-end, Python and C#) on that machine via tmux and VS Code remote SSH. I'm sure if I was running my browser on it it might painful given the slow single-core performance, but honestly I've felt zero need to upgrade it. Once the RAM-pocalypse is over I'll probably look at doing so just for reliability's sake.
The specs page (at least for the board I tried) noted the board "Accepts" DDR4 ECC RDIMMS, but nothing I tried indicated ECC was actually functioning.
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.
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.