Chip stocks just suffered one of their ugliest stretches on record, and a political shift in Washington may be to blame. History offers a surprising clue about what happens next, but a November 17 earnings report could rewrite it.
If there are piles of unused data center inventory laying around for super cheap, a market for them being repurposed for consumer use will happen somehow.
I’m not so sure. I’m involved in power, cooling, HVAC of data centers as an electrician. Some of these server racks are all liquid cooled and not like an AIO you slap in a desktop, it needs to handle tens of thousands of kw of heat per rack. They don’t run on typical home power, often running on high voltage like 700v DC as a source, are loud and power hungry, relying on industrial grade UPSes and power distribution units or diesel generators in the event of loss of power. They’re built for hundreds of gigabits per second networking via fibers.
I’m not involved in the nitty gritty of what every motherboard or GPU is like but these places absolutely design high level industrial enterprise gear that is specific to doing the task they need. It would take some massive redesign to be able to re-use boards but anything’s possible I guess if a company had a method of taking decommissioned gear.
The problem is they say “we will buy out your entire production capability for the next 4-5 years” to RAM and GPU and chips manufacturers, so consumer grade equipment is kind of an afterthought and thus they scale it back and jack up the prices
The key part of your energy dissipation requirement is that it’s per rack. A home user wouldn’t need an entire rack of compute, so a case built for only one or two boards would have nowhere near the same cooling requirements.
Also designing a different power supply is very trivial. The silicon itself is only running at 1-2v, it’s not like they’re passing 700vdc through the actual compute boards.
The hardware can’t really be repurposed, it is build for an very specific use case.
The AI accelerators for example can’t be just used as graphic card, even if they use lots of the same parts, but the whole layout and interfaces are completely different. We are speaking of highly integrated hardware with extremely specified firmware that is guarded by sophisticated encryption layers.
Even if some hardware hackers find ways to crack, modify and repurpose some of it, then nothing on the large scale will change. Such modifications would be extremely difficult and time consuming (aka expensive) and only a very small percentage of people have the skill, knowledge and/or the equipment do do something like that.
We are far away from the 80s where it was easy to tinker with hardware.
If there are piles of unused data center inventory laying around for super cheap, a market for them being repurposed for consumer use will happen somehow.
I’m not so sure. I’m involved in power, cooling, HVAC of data centers as an electrician. Some of these server racks are all liquid cooled and not like an AIO you slap in a desktop, it needs to handle tens of thousands of kw of heat per rack. They don’t run on typical home power, often running on high voltage like 700v DC as a source, are loud and power hungry, relying on industrial grade UPSes and power distribution units or diesel generators in the event of loss of power. They’re built for hundreds of gigabits per second networking via fibers.
I’m not involved in the nitty gritty of what every motherboard or GPU is like but these places absolutely design high level industrial enterprise gear that is specific to doing the task they need. It would take some massive redesign to be able to re-use boards but anything’s possible I guess if a company had a method of taking decommissioned gear.
The problem is they say “we will buy out your entire production capability for the next 4-5 years” to RAM and GPU and chips manufacturers, so consumer grade equipment is kind of an afterthought and thus they scale it back and jack up the prices
The key part of your energy dissipation requirement is that it’s per rack. A home user wouldn’t need an entire rack of compute, so a case built for only one or two boards would have nowhere near the same cooling requirements.
Also designing a different power supply is very trivial. The silicon itself is only running at 1-2v, it’s not like they’re passing 700vdc through the actual compute boards.
The hardware can’t really be repurposed, it is build for an very specific use case. The AI accelerators for example can’t be just used as graphic card, even if they use lots of the same parts, but the whole layout and interfaces are completely different. We are speaking of highly integrated hardware with extremely specified firmware that is guarded by sophisticated encryption layers.
Even if some hardware hackers find ways to crack, modify and repurpose some of it, then nothing on the large scale will change. Such modifications would be extremely difficult and time consuming (aka expensive) and only a very small percentage of people have the skill, knowledge and/or the equipment do do something like that.
We are far away from the 80s where it was easy to tinker with hardware.
Lol, peak lemmy…
“destroy everyone’s retirement funds and take all the AI accelerators to use in gaming PCs!!” +20 upvotes and cheering…
“AI accelerators can’t be used for gaming… they dont even have HDMI/DP outputs.” -3 downvotes
Lol