> I already have home sever rack, and would recommend it for other people.

I just want to warn people who haven't heard server-grade hardware in-person before: this is only for people who can put a server rack somewhere unpopulated like a garage or basement. Servers will make you think "wow, leafblowers sure are quiet". They are not suitable for apartment dwellers such as myself. When I was setting up my 1U before shipping it off to a colo, I wrote scripts and had detailed plans of the things I needed to run so I could minimize the time it was making my ears bleed.

> PC is the last major open platform.

In the whole history of computing PC is the only platform where buying a computer means crazy number of options and configuration mixes to choose from and expect it to work! And warranty would support it too! You can run any OS of your choice on it and that's also reasonable expectation.

Any other platform (SUN, Be, Amiga, NeXT, Apple) it was always buying it from one company only from its list of products. And even running with a different version of OS means warranty doesn't cover it.

Assuming this trend continues, I think people are going to start re-using older hardware rather than turning to server-grade hardware (which is often not convenient for the average residential situation).

At least, that's what I hope happens. What will probably happen is people will continue to migrate away from the PC platform and towards closed platforms for the convenience, if history is any indication.

Why would most people need a home server rack? That's a lot of noise, space, and electrical usage. For what most people would need a home "server" for a NUC PC or Mac Mini would do the job.

Contrary take: I believe we will see an expanded market for capable PCs that can be sanely put in a living space. By extension of the gaming PC niche to local AI. Both NVidia and AMD are developing product lines in that direction (DGX Spark, Ryzen AI Max). And Linux will be more prominent than ever, due to several independent reasons: MS dropping the ball hard on Windows, SteamOS making Linux attractive for gamers, 'digital sovereignty' as a trend, and Linux being the de facto standard for hosting AI (or anything really).

Wouldn’t recommend a home server rack in an apartment. For high wife approval factor, you can put Epyc hardware with Noctuas in a bigger case. I’ve got one at home. Runs my blog and a bunch of other things. Home is at 32 dB right now.

Realistically a Mac Mini will probably blow a lot of things out of the water on price / performance. Even an older one.

This will surely bring new energy into opening these platforms, as it did in days before

For most people, I’d recommend a NuC or a NAS with an unlocked bootloader (so you can put Linux on) for a home server.

Most home users need a small amount of compute, and are sensitive to noise and power use.

And flying pugs gonna fall from teh sky too.

Buy steam deck, and steam box.

> ... or they are pushed towards server grade components. I already have home sever rack, and would recommend it for other people.

An actual rack with noisy 1U or 2U servers may be a bit overkill but on the plus side there's a guaranteed endless supply of such used servers.

Now there's a happy middle ground: used workstations with ECC memory, that you then use as servers.

People would be really wise to not underestimate what a 12 years old dual-Xeon, 14 cores each, 56 threads in total can do, for example. And such a complete workstation can basically be found for less than what it takes to fill my car's gas tank (granted it's got a big tank and it's fancy car whose manufacturer recommends to only use 98+ octane).

A single Xeon workstation with shitload of memory in a tower form factor is basically silent. Mine is. Dead quiet, next to the vaccuum cleaner and the cat's foot in a tiny room. I use it as a headless server.

And that's with the default PSU and fans. There are, of course, people modding these with adapters for regular consumer PSUs and then putting ultra-quiet PSUs in those. Same with Noctua fans etc.

And as for the usual complain: "but a server that is on 24/7 consumes too much electricity"... I only turn on my servers at home when I begin to work: I don't need these to be on 24/7.

So yeah: "Server CPU + ECC" doesn't imply noise. And "Server CPU + ECC" doesn't imply it has to be on 24/7 neither.

> While other platforms like Android and becoming less open

ok....

> PC in general is becoming more open than it's been in a long time as heavy MacOS/Android/iOS competition is creating a focus on open standards ...

I'm so confused by what you're trying to say here.

I've been replacing older systems with last gen hardware off ebay. I'm typing this on a Thinkpad T14 i5-1250p 512GB 32GB WWAN I picked up last week for $370 all in.

Since this mess started, I've bought dozens of unused and like-new systems for clients. All with modern hardware - in the $250-$600 range.

> Motherboards used to be $100, $200 for the high end. Now they want $300+

Entry level motherboards are still $100.

$300+ is a very high end motherboard.

The existence of very high end products is confusing because it can give the impression that you have to buy a $300 motherboard because it exists. If you compare features side by side you're rarely missing anything important for the entry level motherboards.

Some people really want the best of the best and feel the need to buy motherboards with Thunderbolt 4 and other future-proofing measures just in case they might need them, but it's premium and luxury territory.

Buying whole 2020 era PCs here for around $200 mark. As long as you don't need crazy CPU or GPU grunt, which is most people, they are almost indistinguishable from a new one.

Windows 10 LTSC + Firefox + uBlock Origin on an i5-9400 feels faster than my M4 Pro MBP. Probably same or better on Linux.

My parents bought a mid-tier PC for $3,000 (in 1995 dollars) and there was still a thriving PC industry at those prices! While things are getting more expensive now (and that sucks) we have had it really good for a long time.

I mean, if you think about all the motherboard does, and how many layers the PCB has to support all the features such that for a vast majority of users, the only things you need besides the motherboard is a CPU, some RAM, storage (either in M.2 or SATA) and maybe a dGPU, it's wild that it is often the cheapest item in the PC.

I don't really agree with this. Motherboard prices haven't been moved at all by AI.

I would also say that most consumers, who are almost exclusively buying gaming-oriented boards, do not need anything high end. They can pretty much buy the cheapest board available.

I am shopping around for a mini ITX board and the difference between something at $180 and something at $400 is basically one to two faster USB ports, which are pretty much irrelevant on desktop computers, and a few minor conveniences that I imagine most people can do without.

The higher-end chipsets add no discernible advantage and there are no CPUs that are unsupported by the lower end chipsets (on the AMD side, at least).

The high end stuff is just available for people with a lot of money.

I should have upgraded my GTX 1060 6GB last year.

Last year I said I should have upgraded my 1060 last year.

I bought it second hand 7 years ago and it is still the same price.

I don't do much gaming, and it runs Immich / etc light inference just fine. One thing I don't regret is getting 32GB of DDR4 when I built the system around the time of the GPU upgrade.

I invested quite a bit in enterprises level homelab equipment 2020 to 2025 (about 10k). Happy I made it before the big bang. Eg. my SAS he8 drives will last at least till 2035. But what then? I want my children to be free, too.

What's wild is with all this craziness going on, it is sounding like AMD is bringing back the 5800X3D for another kick at the can. AM4 has got to be one of the greatest platforms to ever exist.

> and the 'realism' of video games plateauing.

I used to think the plateau was here when the Xbox 360 and PS3 came out.

Agreed. I build a system every ten years and I've got 6 years to go. AM4 works great, and I've managed to hoard enough ram and drives to hopefully cover any concerns for the next 4 years. Things work, they are stable, and I feel super lucky for that.

I wanted to build a Threadripper 9965WX and the math worked out until DDR5 prices come in to play. Instead I got a used Lenovo P620 5975WX and still had to buy DDR4 from Shenzhen to get anything remotely affordable. The IPC of the Zen5 is a meaningful uplift especially for single thread but it is out of reach.

Is there an industry newsletter or source where one can read up on this? All I can find is a single article from Reuters.

Is anything not in a shortage?

...no. If anything the GPU situation would cause it to ease up as less low-middle end gets even build

At current prices, Chinese companies could even produce everything possible (~anything but current gen CPUs and GPUs) on slightly older nodes and make a stonking profit while lowering market prices.

It's an active attack on the Hobbyist space. Qualcomm buying Arduino solidified this idea in my head. They literally want us to own nothing.

After the recent run-up, where are prices on a per-performance basis? Back to 2019?

Computers were incredibly more expensive when I was growing up. People bought them anyway.

Is a computer that lasts 5-8 really productive years (and is still serviceable for another 5-7) and costs $1500 really a deal-breaker just because it was $1000 and on sale for $850 a year ago? Even if it doubled again, it still doesn’t price normal people out, IMO.

And currently the US government is actively trying to ban chinese hardware from the consumer market [1]. So gonna be real fun.

Maybe we'll get a chinese hardware black market.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...

It’s the ultimate NIMBYism. The idea is fine but nobody actually wants it when they’re the sulphur breather.

If you really want to see a radical shakeup that would have some very exciting effects, could I interest you in a little Total Atomic Anihilation?

Great analogy! Unfortunately we are the sulfur breathers.

Let's shake up AI by taxing it's profits to ensure nobody in our country goes homeless.

hope you're handy with a soldering iron (reflow station?) because eventually the passive components are going to start failing and I don't imagine you'll be able to plug off the shelf components into a Dell

Ironically the few people not scamming you for cache reads are Deepseek.

Everyone else charges a ridiculous amount but Deepseeks API is $0.003625 / M tok.

I'm surprised no one talks about this because of how significant it is. GPT 5.5 for example costs a ridiculous $0.50 / M tok cached. It's literally almost 140 times cheaper which matters a lot for tool calls.

The only way to profitable serve AI is to have large batch sizes - run 500 requests at the same time.

If you serve a single user you'll never get your electricity price back, nevermind hardware costs.

Would you mind sharing the napkin maths?

Why don't I need to build a PC? I wanna run some stuff in it.

There are probably multiple goals of AI investment. It's entirely possible that they are deliberately killing the affordability of how personal electronics like home computers are made and will instead replace them with terminals that stream everything to the cloud. You can make a lot more money off consumers if you can turn their entire computing experience into a utility.

What’s the feedback loop that leads to a total financial collapse? This looks much more like dotcom bubble. Everyone knows where the exposure is.

We are, it's just very unevenly distributed.

That’s the issue: ram suppliers have not started building new fabs, which means they expect this demand to be temporary and they’re just going to make a killing on it while they can. It takes years to get a fab up, and they think demand will be gone by then. So that means ridiculous prices now, and if demand doesn’t drop, ridiculous prices until someone thinks the demand will continue for four more years after that moment. Whatever the moment, building for four years out is a risk. So this could last forever.

It takes 5 months for a newly-hatched chicken to start laying eggs. It takes 5 years after breaking ground on a new fab to start producing chips.

This will happen eventually but there is a much longer lag for hardware supply than for egg supply so I wouldn’t expect a ton of improvement until late 2027 or even 2028.

ASrock have created a "HUDIMM", which is basically a half bandwidth DDR5 DIMM. Basically half the number of chips per DIMM. So kinda a modern day 386SX with its 16 bit bus. Presumably hoping you'll be able get fewer, higher capacity DRAM dice for a competitive price versus a normal DIMM.

On modern systems (all 64 bit AMD, and Intel Core "i" onwards, so quite old now) the memory controller is integrated into the CPU, so what the CPU supports is what you get, and the latest CPUs are DDR5 only. Intel did have a transitional phase of CPUs that can do both DDR4 or 5 depending on motherboard, but AMD it's AM4 = DDR4, AM5 = DDR5.

It's sad when our best hope is that the pumped economy dumps and tanks all the other industries so we can buy computers again.

Smaller manufacturers will fold, and larger ones will leave the consumer market (like Micron/Crucial did), before the market has a chance to bounce back. If and when it does recover, it will be a market of much fewer choices.

hard to tell.

even if volume and hype decreases from the general pop there doesn't seem to be much of a cap on model requirements -- so at least one sector will be pushed into purchases one way or another.

15 months ago I saw writing on the wall on several fronts. I suggested my community commit to their buys/builds ASAP and be forward-looking, before things changed.

My high-end HEDT would now be +$2300 to build mostly due to memory and SSD pricing. 96GB of memory going from $430 -> $1800 is wild. One community member literally wouldn’t be able to buy their Mac Mini configuration anymore, plus the self-upgrade SSD would be price hiked.

Where I blanche most is my storage server running TrueNAS. Built it 3.5 years ago, future-proofing in mind. Strong SSD cache layer, plus two spare HDDs as spares. It wasn’t cheap then, but I think between disks, storage, ECC memory, etc. it’s +$7000 now to rebuild it again, +$9000-$10000 on last generation hardware.

Sarcasm aside, yep. There will be three classes: the owned, the owners and the unownable. I aim to be unownable.

I kinda felt like this was coming so mid last year I built a local rig with the top of the line parts I could afford at the time lol (rtx5090/ryzen9 etc) now I just need to build out my inference setup (sadly m3 ultras r insanely expensive now) - I have a feeling they will try to lock down usage of open source LLMs too. I don’t get how token moat can exist if local inference rigs can be built out and serve open source models locally for nothing (besides power cost).

It's unfortunate but personal general-purpose computing has being under attack for a long time, this is only another nail in the coffin.

I'm sure this makes the billionaire class happy but there are some legit economics involved. We all want frontier class models running on our home PC but that takes 100x or 1000x the computer we've been running. The market isn't going to instantly adapt and make that kind of machine for the same price we've been paying for 1% of it, so that we can leave it sitting idle 99% of the day.

On HN it's not always clear when sarcasm is in use. Especially given that I have seen AI bros basically cheering this on.

PCs are also made by corporations, together with PC parts. The reason computing became so cheap during the last 50 years was competition between said corporations. Competition that is also pushing the AI token price down and also encouraging - corporations - to come up with models that can run on user hardware.

So what are you ranting against?!

> Own nothing and be happy.

Ah, here it is. Only governments can confiscate our property and force us into that. Governments and politicians that keep telling us how evil corporations are…

You sound like a useless-eater manager. Just the kind of roles we'll be happy to have in our future Utopia. The people will be happy to be led by such visionaries such as yourself.

Because he killed the Open part of openai and the PEs went nuts

If China keeps releasing decent copies of SOTA models that only take 20% of the resources, then we may get some relief when those models become "good-enough"

That does seem to be where this is headed. Especially after googles last announcement possibly bricking 99% of the phones from accessing the internet

This looks like a consumer choice and producers are following up with the demand.

I think it's possible (10-15%) that the AI bubble pops and we all live without 50M token/day OpenClaw installs and running Opus to do things that should have been done by a shell script to the point that it causes a dip in total compute demand. I think it's likely (75% likely if the AI bubble pop causes a dip in compute demand) that this dip extends longer than the median lifespan of the hardware currently being installed in datacenter.

Of course in 20 years we'll be using more compute than today (99% likely).

EDIT: Of course cryptocurrencies provide a floor compute pricing.

It would be equally "trivial" to say no to personal compute as well. So maybe the problem is manufactured by all of us.

I can't speak to it now, but it used to be the go to source of CPU and 3D card benchmarking.