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 with 512GB in it), they have significantly gained in value over the past 12-18 months. Things are really that bad.
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.
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.
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 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.
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…)
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.
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 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.
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 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 requires 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.)
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.
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.
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 with 512GB in it), they have significantly gained in value over the past 12-18 months. Things are really that bad.
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.
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.
> 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.
I just sold 4x8GB of DDR4 that I wasn't using for $200 on Ebay so this article is quite timely
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.
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.
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…)
2x16GB costs around $190 right now, or closer to $375 if you want ECC.
Not much cheaper than DDR5.
Currently 128GB of normal non-ECC DDR5 as a 2x64 set is around 2000 euro and increasing...
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.
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 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!
https://archive.ph/yrGeb
row, row, row your hammer, gently down the bit flip stream...
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.
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 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 requires 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.)
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.
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.