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I'm sad. I'm a software guy, not much of a hardware expert, so please bear with me if I"m too pessimistic. However, I feel that if trends like this continue,

by linguae 10mo ago

I'm sad. I'm a software guy, not much of a hardware expert, so please bear with me if I"m too pessimistic. However, I feel that if trends like this continue, it might be the end of enthusiast-level personal computing as we know it. No more being able to head down to the electronics store and purchase RAM, motherboards, processors, GPUs, storage, and other components. We're going to be limited to locked-down terminals connected to cloud services, both of which provided by a small number of multinational corporations. If we're lucky, we might still have USB peripherals. The sad thing is that we enthusiasts are a small market compared to the overwhelming majority of computer users who don't mind locked-down devices, or at least until they've been bitten by the restrictions, but if there are no alternatives other than retrocomputing, then it's too late. For decades we enthusiasts have been able to benefit from other markets with overlapping needs such as gaming, workstations, and corporate servers. However, many on-premise servers have been replaced by cloud services, the workstation market has been subsumed by the broader PC market, and PC gaming has faced challenges, from a push toward locked-down consoles to challenges in the GPU market due to competition with cryptocurrency mining and now AI. One of the things I'm increasingly disappointed with is the dominance of large corporations in computing. It seems harder for small players to survive in this ecosystem. Software has to deal with network effects and large companies owning major platforms, and building your own hardware requires tons of capital. I wonder if it's possible even for a company to make even 1980s-era electronics without massive capital expenditures? How feasible is it for a small company to manufacture the equivalent of a Motorola 68000 or Intel 386? I'd like to see a market for hobbyist computing by hobbyist computer shops, but I'm not sure it's economically feasible.

axiolite 10mo ago
I've seen things going the opposite way. It's only recently that an average person could jump on eBay and get assembled low-level electronic module/boards for cheap, and assemble into their project. Yes, you'll probably have difficulty walking into a STORE to buy PC components, but only because online shopping has been killing local shops for decades now. You'll find it easy to get that stuff online, for better prices. PCs, since the very start, have been going through a process of being ever more integrated each generation. Not too many people install sound cards, IDE controllers, etc., anymore. CPUs, GPUs, and RAM are about the only holdouts not integrated on the motherboard these days. It's possible that could change, if CPUs and GPUs becomes fast enough for 99% of people, and RAM gets cheap enough that manufacturers can put more on-board than 99% of people will need. And while you might not be happy about that kind of integration, it comes with big price reductions that help everyone. But we're not there yet, and I can't say how long down the road that might be.
- tharkun__ 10mo ago
  Not my experience. I've been able to go to a local store to buy PC components for more than 35 years now and last did to upgrade the RAM in the laptop to be eligible for Win11. Online only was not cheaper and local store had it available same day. Local store does have online presence and is a chain tho. Mouse replacement on a weekend coz old one broke same story (button smashed in and not usable at all any longer). Online not cheaper, no same day available at any price, Amazon delivery without Prime no next day either. Local chain store had it for immediate pickup and I was gaming again in 30 minutes.
  - mh- 10mo ago
    I'm curious where you live. Anecdotally, this is the opposite to the experience of everyone I know.
    - linguae 10mo ago
      I'm not the parent poster, but in my experience it depends on the location. I live in the Bay Area. We had Fry's Electronics before it closed, and when Fry's closed I shifted to Central Computers. We finally have a Micro Center in Santa Clara now! I find Central Computers and Micro Center to have reasonable prices that are competitive with online stores. However, it can sometimes be a difficult drive through traffic getting to these stores, and so it's often more convenient for me to order something online. I've had nothing but good experiences shopping from Newegg. When I was an undergrad at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo 20 years ago, I relied heavily on Newegg, since there were no large electronics stores in San Luis Obispo back then for computer enthusiasts. Best Buy today has come a long way and is now a great place for PC enthusiasts, but this wasn't the case 20 years ago; it had much more of a consumer electronics focus back then. Four years ago I was visiting Cal Poly friends in Santa Maria; we were building my PC together. I bought the wrong power supply online, and so we ended up going to Best Buy in Santa Maria, where I was able to find the correct power supply for a good price! Even with Best Buy's improved selection, nothing beats Micro Center in either Silicon Valley or Irvine, but if you're in neither location and Best Buy doesn't stock what you need, then you have to order online. As much as I love Micro Center, though, nothing beats Yodobashi Camera in Akihabara, Tokyo. That store is electronics heaven, at least for new components. For used components, I peruse Akihabara's alleys, which are filled with small shops specializing in used and retro gear.
6r17 10mo ago
At this point it's getting ridiculously easy to justify the acquisition of such manufactory - I wonder if there are existing players in other categories (be it hardware or even software) that are considering about trying to get into this field. I mean - I get it that someone like OVH may not have the caps yet to handle something like this - but I wouldn't be surprised if they could find a good company to partner with - same is for pretty much everywhere. I'm really wondering about hardware as well but today's tech is surprising in it's scale and requirements - I wouldn't be surprised if we could do mid 70's tech as hobbyist today - but further than that...
rietta 10mo ago
I too am very sad. This has been my brand of ram for a long time. I’m also more of a software guy than hardware, but I appreciate being able to have high-performance gaming class systems for my work. It runs circles around much of the stuff my colleagues run, including in deployment in various cloud environments.
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
Aurornis 10mo ago
It’s never been easier to be a hobbyist or a small electronics company. Honestly I don’t know what you’re talking about. Micron is exiting this business because it’s a commodity. It’s everywhere. There are numerous companies producing parts in this space. Their investments are better spent on other things. > I wonder if it's possible even for a company to make even 1980s-era electronics without massive capital expenditures? How feasible is it for a small company to manufacture the equivalent of a Motorola 68000 or Intel 386? I don’t know what your threshold is for massive capital expenditure, but you could get a tapeout for a 68000 clone easier than at any point in history. There are now even takeout services that will let you get a little piece of a shared wafer for experimenting with making your own chips for very low prices. There are even accessible tools available now. The hobby and small scale situation is better now than at any point in history. I don’t know how anyone can be sad about it unless they’re ignoring reality and only speculating based on the most cynical online takes about how the future is going to do a complete 180.
- khhu2bnn 10mo ago
  > Micron is exiting this business because it’s a commodity. It’s everywhere. There are numerous companies producing parts in this space. Their investments are better spent on other things. Numerous as in plenty? Or basically three? Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron make up over 90% of the market share of DRAM. Micron saying goodbye to the consumer market basically leaves us with yet another duopoly.
  - dchftcs 10mo ago
    Micron cuts off the business because there is a much more profitable place to deploy their capacity. The real reason Micron has a resource crunch that forces them to exit a steady business is that enterprise now places a huge premium on things didn't use to be that important. This massive tide floats all boats and there will be smaller players filling the gap. With slightly worse chips at first yes, but historically DRAM had been a cyclical businesss where new manufacturing capabilities were brought online en masse after a boom.
  - donflamenco 10mo ago
toomim 10mo ago
It's like the loss of Radio Shack, all over again.
seanmcdirmid 10mo ago
Apple CPUs come with their own GPUs on die and RAM in the chip package now. How much more is going to be put on the chip and assembled in increasingly fine grained processes?
- AnthonyMouse 10mo ago
  Apple puts the RAM in the chip package because they integrate the GPU, and then they want to be able to have multiple channels to feed the GPU without having that many slots. (Their entry level models also don't have any more memory bandwidth than normal PC laptops and there is no real reason they couldn't use a pair of SODIMMs.) But low end iGPUs don't need a lot of memory bandwidth (again witness Apple's entry level CPUs) and integrating high end GPUs makes you thermally limited. There is a reason that Apple's fastest (integrated) GPUs are slower than Nvidia and AMD's fastest consumer discrete GPUs. And even if you are going to integrate all the memory, as might be more justifiable if you're using HBM or GDDR, that only makes it easier to not integrate the CPU itself. Because now your socket needs fewer pins since you're not running memory channels through it. Alternatively, there is some value in doing both. Suppose you have a consumer CPU socket with the usual pair of memory channels through it. Now the entry level CPU uses that for its memory. The midrange CPU has 8GB of HBM on the package and the high end one has 32GB, which it can use as the system's only RAM or as an L4 cache while the memory slots let you add more (less expensive, ordinary) RAM on top of that, all while using the same socket as the entry level CPU. And let's apply some business logic to this: Who wants soldered RAM? Only the device OEMs, who want to save eleven cents worth of slots and, more importantly, overcharge for RAM and force you to buy a new device when all you want is a RAM upgrade. The consumer and, more than that, the memory manufacturers prefer slots, because they want you to be able to upgrade (i.e. to give them your money). So the only time you get soldered RAM is when either the device manufacturer has you by the short hairs (i.e. Apple if you want a Mac) or the consumers who aren't paying attention and accidentally buy a laptop with soldered RAM when their competitors are offering similar ones for similar prices but with upgradable slots. So as usual, the thing preventing you from getting screwed is competition and that's what you need to preserve if you don't want to get screwed.
  - 10mo ago
tianqi 10mo ago
This is a classic slippery slope fallacy. Micron's reversible exit from one of its businesses is clearly does not signify the end of the PC era. As long as the demand for DIY PCs persists, there will be suppliers providing the products needed. If you follow the industrial memory market, you probably know that it is currently experiencing a severe supply shortage. I think Micron's decision simply reflects the current market situation.
- Ygg2 10mo ago
  > Micron's reversible exit from one of its businesses is clearly does not signify the end of the PC era. No one is saying that it's the sole culprit. But when average PCs start costing $3000+ from now on, it seems like the end of an era.
AndrewKemendo 10mo ago
It’s not going away it’s shifting to robotics You should look into what’s happening with DIY robotics because it looks eerily similar to what I experienced in the early to mid 90s with PC hardware and software And you can do way more than just host a bbs with robots
throwaway2037 10mo ago
It is interesting that your comment made no mention of single board computers (SBC) like Raspberry Pi. These are the more likely future of hobbyist computing as the price to develop custom PCBs is lower than ever. Yes, you need to buy the components, but it will come a day where you shop by parts then some LLM arranges the parts on an SBC. Finally, you review the the PCB layout, and click a button to place an order with PCBWay or a competitor. X days later a tiny board appears at your house exactly built to spec and runs Linux. The coolest part: The cost is so low that millions and millions of more (young) people can join the hobbyist computing party.
throwup238 10mo ago
> I wonder if it's possible even for a company to make even 1980s-era electronics without massive capital expenditures? How feasible is it for a small company to manufacture the equivalent of a Motorola 68000 or Intel 386? Very feasible but it would have to be redesigned around the cell libraries used in newer nodes since the i386 was manufactured on >1um size nodes. Prototypes would cost around $1-2k per sq mm at 130nm and $10k per sq mm at 28nm (min order usually around 9 sq mm). Legacy nodes are surprisingly cheap, so non-recurring engineering will generally be the bulk of the cost. The i386 was originally >104 sq mm but at 1um, so you could probably fit the entirety of a i386 clone in 1-2 sq mm of a 130nm chip. Packaging it in the original footprint and the lead times on prototypes would probably be more annoying than anything.
PaulRobinson 10mo ago
I'm more optimistic as I think about SBC manufacturers, plenty of other manufacturers wanting to service this market, and companies like Framework (warts and all - I don't think they're perfect) didn't really exist a couple of decades ago. I'm actually a big fan of Apple hardware (when you crunch the numbers for base spec machine and when you're able to get discounts, the price/performance for the half-life you get is incredible), but I'm also planning to get back into home-brew builds a bit more over the next year: I need to build a NAS, a home lab, I might look at a gaming rig... and I'm far from alone. So yes, it's a niche market, but a profitable one for a lot of players, and one that Micron will be glad is still available to them when the data centre bubble bursts.
gjvc 10mo ago
I'd like to see a market for hobbyist computing by hobbyist computer shops, but I'm not sure it's economically feasible. Jump in the DeLorean and head to the 1980s / 1990s
hbarka 10mo ago
I still have a sense of melancholy and cultural loss from the closing of Fry’s Electronics.
dominicrose 10mo ago
We will still ba able to buy Raspberry Pis, install Linux and self-hosted solutions. We don't have to do what everyone else is doing.
- freedomben 10mo ago
  I don't think any SBCs will be a replacement for quite some time. At what point will there be a raspberry pi with 128 GB of RAM and a 16/32 core? That's what I'm running right now, and I really hope I don't have to downgrade in the future.
  - dominicrose 10mo ago
    Yes I guess we've reached a point where it's harder for individuals to grow their hardware or even maintain it. I'm not sure the huge investment in servers for AI is going to be good for companies either. We're honestly in a science-fiction novel right now, I have no idea what's going to happen politicaly with AI. I don't really believe in AGI if that's what they're going for, but hey they'll get something close to that.
M95D 10mo ago
I think you should split the problem into hardware and software parts: - Hardware We won't have any hardware without secure boot and we won't have the signing keys. Signed firmware is required for everything x86, everything Apple, everything mobile, probably everything ARM too. Rockchip ARM could still boot without signed firmware last time I checked a few years ago, but I'm not sure about the newer CPUs. [ Short story: I have an Asus Tinkerboard S. It came with an unprovisioned emmc onboard. Just empty. A few years ago I made the mistake of trying the official OS from Asus. It automatically set up the CPU to boot from emmc first and provisioned the emmc with boot0, boot1 and rpmb. These partitions can't be written and can't be removed. Their creation is a one-way operation according to emmc standards. Now I have to keep the emmc masked because it won't boot otherwise. So beware of any devices with emmc. ] You can, of course, use MCUs for general computing today. ESP32 is pretty powerful - it's probably 4 times faster than a 486, certainly more powerful than an i386 or a 68000 you suggested. The big problem here is memory, graphics and software. No MMU requires a completely new OS. Linux (uclinux) could boot at some point without a MMU, but it won't fit in 540KB memory. MCUs can access external memory (PSRAM), but via slow buses and it's paged. Also there are no hi-speed buses for graphics. There is some hope coming from the chinese CPUs. AFAIK, they don't support secure boot at all. I'm planning on getting one as soon as their proprietary firmware/UEFI/ACPI and be replaced by uboot. - Software It's useless to make a i386 or 68000 today. There's nothing but old software for them. Not even linux has i386 support anymore. This is an even bigger problem than hardware. Much, much bigger. To have any hope of a minimally useful computing platform, we need a working browser on that platform. This is an absolute requirement. There's no way around this. I had to abandon Win98, then WinXP, and soon Win7 because of no working browser. Linux is generally usable today, but as soon as Linus retires, it's going to fall into the same user-lockdown like all others. The basic infrastructure is all in place: secure boot, root login basically deprecated, access rights and security settings administered by the distro and package manager, not the user, no per-program firewall rules, automatic updates as standard, surveillance infrastructure via udev (hardware events), dbus (software events) and gtk accessibility (input events), etc. Linus fought hard to keep them outside the kernel, but he won't live forever. To have any hope of privacy and/or freedom our personal computers we need to turn the security paradigm completely on it's head: users are not the threat - programs are. The user should login as root (or system account in Windows) and every program, including services, should run under their own limited accounts with no access to the rest of the system, especially user's files. Of all OSs today, Gentoo portage is probably the easiest package manager to tweak into creating accounts and groups for programs instead of users and Gobo Linux has the best separation of programs in it's filesystem. I'd love to see a merger of these two. Hobbyist computing? Ha! First get a browser working.
hyghjiyhu 10mo ago
I think this is an incorrect zero-sum mindset. Yes in the short term there is a fixed amount of GPUs, ram etc. But in the long run the money from ai and crypto is invested in building factories, researching new nodes etc. These investments will lead to better and cheaper products trickling down to everyone.
deleted 10mo ago
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skirge 10mo ago
not going to happen as long as business hardware != consumer hardware
barrkel 10mo ago
I feel this vibe. It's part of the reason I invested in a monster home workstation - threadripper 9995wx, 768gb ecc ram, 96gb Blackwell pro. I expect it may easily be the last proper home PC I buy that is scaled in line with the scaling that I grew up with in the 80s and 90s. Increasingly, what we have are mobile terminals - possibly with a dock for monitor connections - for remote big iron. And the continuous push from governments for more control - seemingly synchronous demands for age gating (i.e. requiring IDs) and chat snooping - males me think this remote hardware won't really be yours before long. Windows, caught up in the LLM mania, is to be left by the wayside too.
- jack_tripper 10mo ago
  The Terry Davis tinfoil-hat version of me has a theory that this wider industry trend of pushing away consumers from general purpose home computers towards only using remote datacenters from locked down mobile/thin edge devices, is supported by both industries and governments because: Number one, you become a recurring subscription instead of a one and done deal, making it incredibly profitable for industry And number two, the government can more easily snoop on your data when it's all in the cloud versus a HDD box in your closet. Granted, I think we're far away from that future, but I do feel that's the future the powers that be desire and they can use various mechanism to force that behavior, like convenience, and pricing, like for example making PC parts too expensive for consumers and subsidizing cloud and mobile devices to accelerate the move, and once enough consumers only know how to use Apple or Google devices they'll be less inclined to spend more money to build a PC and learn what a Linux is.
  - Retric 10mo ago
    My suspicion is it’s mostly a result of the slowing pace of computing growth. When computers go obsolete in 2 years nobody wants them on their balance sheets, when they last 6 sales go down and you get more years of profit from owning them. This hasn’t been an instantaneous transition, but a low shift in how the industry operates.
  - vladvasiliu 10mo ago
    I'm cynical enough to not argue against your number two theory. But the first one? I'm less convinced. I think the underlying assumption is that companies look to make the most money off consumers. I can get behind that. But just the other day I was looking at a new GPU and considered running a local LLM. I was looking at spending no more than 1000 €. That would get a me 5070 TI 16 GB. Not enough to reasonably run anything interesting. I'm not looking to "tinker with things", I want to actually use them, mostly for coding. A JetBrains subscription would run less than 10 € per month [0], and keep me up to date with the evolution of things. My 5070 would be stuck at its mostly useless level forever, since I don't see requirements going down any time soon. If prices didn't change, I'd need more than 100 months, or 8 years, to break even. And during these 8 years, I'd never have a decent LLM experience by buying it outright. Sure, this would be a capable GPU for other uses. But in my case, it would just sit around under my desk heating up my room. --- [0] You'd get a 20 € discount if paying for a whole year upfront (10/month, 100/year). I'm also excluding VAT, since I'd buy this for work and have a VAT registered company.
matheusmoreira 10mo ago
It's not just market forces. Computers are actually too subversive for the powers that be to allow mere citizens to have them. Give citizens computers and they have encryption. This alone gives them a fighting chance against police, judges, three letter agencies, militaries. Give citizens computers and they can wipe out entire sectors of the economy via the sheer power of unrestricted copying. The future is bleak. Computer freedom is dying. Everything then word "hacker" ever stood for is dying. Soon we will no longer have our own systems, we will have no control, we will be mere users of corporation and government systems. Hacking will go extinct, like phreaking. This fact brings me a profound sadness, like something beautiful is about to perish from this earth. We used to be free...
- jama211 10mo ago
  Alright this might be taking things a little too far… the free software movement is stronger than it’s ever been and hardware is also more accessible than it’s ever been. Losing this one company is simply not a death bell of the entire enthusiast computing market.
saurik 10mo ago
This isn't "we are only going to sell products to big companies" nor is it "we are only going to make products that are locked down appliances"... the "consumer" versions of these products are just cheaper unreliable parts that lack the error correction or power loss protection of the enterprise parts, and in a world where we routinely have disks with tens of terabytes of storage in computers with a terabyte of memory, the argument for why "consumer" grade parts can even make sense to exist is pretty weak. It maybe sucks that, in the very short term, there will be a quick uptick in prices, but focusing on the better parts will also help bring their prices down... and, fwiw, they really aren't that bad to begin with: you can build a micro-ATX machine with a Xeon or an EPYC in it for what feels like a pretty reasonable price.
Sheriya 10mo ago
[dead]

by linguae 10mo ago

axiolite 10mo ago

I've seen things going the opposite way. It's only recently that an average person could jump on eBay and get assembled low-level electronic module/boards for cheap, and assemble into their project. Yes, you'll probably have difficulty walking into a STORE to buy PC components, but only because online shopping has been killing local shops for decades now. You'll find it easy to get that stuff online, for better prices. PCs, since the very start, have been going through a process of being ever more integrated each generation. Not too many people install sound cards, IDE controllers, etc., anymore. CPUs, GPUs, and RAM are about the only holdouts not integrated on the motherboard these days. It's possible that could change, if CPUs and GPUs becomes fast enough for 99% of people, and RAM gets cheap enough that manufacturers can put more on-board than 99% of people will need. And while you might not be happy about that kind of integration, it comes with big price reductions that help everyone. But we're not there yet, and I can't say how long down the road that might be.

tharkun__ 10mo ago
Not my experience. I've been able to go to a local store to buy PC components for more than 35 years now and last did to upgrade the RAM in the laptop to be eligible for Win11. Online only was not cheaper and local store had it available same day. Local store does have online presence and is a chain tho. Mouse replacement on a weekend coz old one broke same story (button smashed in and not usable at all any longer). Online not cheaper, no same day available at any price, Amazon delivery without Prime no next day either. Local chain store had it for immediate pickup and I was gaming again in 30 minutes.
- mh- 10mo ago
  I'm curious where you live. Anecdotally, this is the opposite to the experience of everyone I know.
  - linguae 10mo ago
    I'm not the parent poster, but in my experience it depends on the location. I live in the Bay Area. We had Fry's Electronics before it closed, and when Fry's closed I shifted to Central Computers. We finally have a Micro Center in Santa Clara now! I find Central Computers and Micro Center to have reasonable prices that are competitive with online stores. However, it can sometimes be a difficult drive through traffic getting to these stores, and so it's often more convenient for me to order something online. I've had nothing but good experiences shopping from Newegg. When I was an undergrad at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo 20 years ago, I relied heavily on Newegg, since there were no large electronics stores in San Luis Obispo back then for computer enthusiasts. Best Buy today has come a long way and is now a great place for PC enthusiasts, but this wasn't the case 20 years ago; it had much more of a consumer electronics focus back then. Four years ago I was visiting Cal Poly friends in Santa Maria; we were building my PC together. I bought the wrong power supply online, and so we ended up going to Best Buy in Santa Maria, where I was able to find the correct power supply for a good price! Even with Best Buy's improved selection, nothing beats Micro Center in either Silicon Valley or Irvine, but if you're in neither location and Best Buy doesn't stock what you need, then you have to order online. As much as I love Micro Center, though, nothing beats Yodobashi Camera in Akihabara, Tokyo. That store is electronics heaven, at least for new components. For used components, I peruse Akihabara's alleys, which are filled with small shops specializing in used and retro gear.

6r17 10mo ago

At this point it's getting ridiculously easy to justify the acquisition of such manufactory - I wonder if there are existing players in other categories (be it hardware or even software) that are considering about trying to get into this field. I mean - I get it that someone like OVH may not have the caps yet to handle something like this - but I wouldn't be surprised if they could find a good company to partner with - same is for pretty much everywhere. I'm really wondering about hardware as well but today's tech is surprising in it's scale and requirements - I wouldn't be surprised if we could do mid 70's tech as hobbyist today - but further than that...

rietta 10mo ago

I too am very sad. This has been my brand of ram for a long time. I’m also more of a software guy than hardware, but I appreciate being able to have high-performance gaming class systems for my work. It runs circles around much of the stuff my colleagues run, including in deployment in various cloud environments.

deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]

Aurornis 10mo ago

It’s never been easier to be a hobbyist or a small electronics company. Honestly I don’t know what you’re talking about. Micron is exiting this business because it’s a commodity. It’s everywhere. There are numerous companies producing parts in this space. Their investments are better spent on other things. > I wonder if it's possible even for a company to make even 1980s-era electronics without massive capital expenditures? How feasible is it for a small company to manufacture the equivalent of a Motorola 68000 or Intel 386? I don’t know what your threshold is for massive capital expenditure, but you could get a tapeout for a 68000 clone easier than at any point in history. There are now even takeout services that will let you get a little piece of a shared wafer for experimenting with making your own chips for very low prices. There are even accessible tools available now. The hobby and small scale situation is better now than at any point in history. I don’t know how anyone can be sad about it unless they’re ignoring reality and only speculating based on the most cynical online takes about how the future is going to do a complete 180.

khhu2bnn 10mo ago
> Micron is exiting this business because it’s a commodity. It’s everywhere. There are numerous companies producing parts in this space. Their investments are better spent on other things. Numerous as in plenty? Or basically three? Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron make up over 90% of the market share of DRAM. Micron saying goodbye to the consumer market basically leaves us with yet another duopoly.
- dchftcs 10mo ago
  Micron cuts off the business because there is a much more profitable place to deploy their capacity. The real reason Micron has a resource crunch that forces them to exit a steady business is that enterprise now places a huge premium on things didn't use to be that important. This massive tide floats all boats and there will be smaller players filling the gap. With slightly worse chips at first yes, but historically DRAM had been a cyclical businesss where new manufacturing capabilities were brought online en masse after a boom.
- donflamenco 10mo ago

toomim 10mo ago

It's like the loss of Radio Shack, all over again.

seanmcdirmid 10mo ago

Apple CPUs come with their own GPUs on die and RAM in the chip package now. How much more is going to be put on the chip and assembled in increasingly fine grained processes?

AnthonyMouse 10mo ago
Apple puts the RAM in the chip package because they integrate the GPU, and then they want to be able to have multiple channels to feed the GPU without having that many slots. (Their entry level models also don't have any more memory bandwidth than normal PC laptops and there is no real reason they couldn't use a pair of SODIMMs.) But low end iGPUs don't need a lot of memory bandwidth (again witness Apple's entry level CPUs) and integrating high end GPUs makes you thermally limited. There is a reason that Apple's fastest (integrated) GPUs are slower than Nvidia and AMD's fastest consumer discrete GPUs. And even if you are going to integrate all the memory, as might be more justifiable if you're using HBM or GDDR, that only makes it easier to not integrate the CPU itself. Because now your socket needs fewer pins since you're not running memory channels through it. Alternatively, there is some value in doing both. Suppose you have a consumer CPU socket with the usual pair of memory channels through it. Now the entry level CPU uses that for its memory. The midrange CPU has 8GB of HBM on the package and the high end one has 32GB, which it can use as the system's only RAM or as an L4 cache while the memory slots let you add more (less expensive, ordinary) RAM on top of that, all while using the same socket as the entry level CPU. And let's apply some business logic to this: Who wants soldered RAM? Only the device OEMs, who want to save eleven cents worth of slots and, more importantly, overcharge for RAM and force you to buy a new device when all you want is a RAM upgrade. The consumer and, more than that, the memory manufacturers prefer slots, because they want you to be able to upgrade (i.e. to give them your money). So the only time you get soldered RAM is when either the device manufacturer has you by the short hairs (i.e. Apple if you want a Mac) or the consumers who aren't paying attention and accidentally buy a laptop with soldered RAM when their competitors are offering similar ones for similar prices but with upgradable slots. So as usual, the thing preventing you from getting screwed is competition and that's what you need to preserve if you don't want to get screwed.
- 10mo ago

tianqi 10mo ago

This is a classic slippery slope fallacy. Micron's reversible exit from one of its businesses is clearly does not signify the end of the PC era. As long as the demand for DIY PCs persists, there will be suppliers providing the products needed. If you follow the industrial memory market, you probably know that it is currently experiencing a severe supply shortage. I think Micron's decision simply reflects the current market situation.

Ygg2 10mo ago
> Micron's reversible exit from one of its businesses is clearly does not signify the end of the PC era. No one is saying that it's the sole culprit. But when average PCs start costing $3000+ from now on, it seems like the end of an era.

AndrewKemendo 10mo ago

It’s not going away it’s shifting to robotics You should look into what’s happening with DIY robotics because it looks eerily similar to what I experienced in the early to mid 90s with PC hardware and software And you can do way more than just host a bbs with robots

throwaway2037 10mo ago

It is interesting that your comment made no mention of single board computers (SBC) like Raspberry Pi. These are the more likely future of hobbyist computing as the price to develop custom PCBs is lower than ever. Yes, you need to buy the components, but it will come a day where you shop by parts then some LLM arranges the parts on an SBC. Finally, you review the the PCB layout, and click a button to place an order with PCBWay or a competitor. X days later a tiny board appears at your house exactly built to spec and runs Linux. The coolest part: The cost is so low that millions and millions of more (young) people can join the hobbyist computing party.

throwup238 10mo ago

> I wonder if it's possible even for a company to make even 1980s-era electronics without massive capital expenditures? How feasible is it for a small company to manufacture the equivalent of a Motorola 68000 or Intel 386? Very feasible but it would have to be redesigned around the cell libraries used in newer nodes since the i386 was manufactured on >1um size nodes. Prototypes would cost around $1-2k per sq mm at 130nm and $10k per sq mm at 28nm (min order usually around 9 sq mm). Legacy nodes are surprisingly cheap, so non-recurring engineering will generally be the bulk of the cost. The i386 was originally >104 sq mm but at 1um, so you could probably fit the entirety of a i386 clone in 1-2 sq mm of a 130nm chip. Packaging it in the original footprint and the lead times on prototypes would probably be more annoying than anything.

PaulRobinson 10mo ago

I'm more optimistic as I think about SBC manufacturers, plenty of other manufacturers wanting to service this market, and companies like Framework (warts and all - I don't think they're perfect) didn't really exist a couple of decades ago. I'm actually a big fan of Apple hardware (when you crunch the numbers for base spec machine and when you're able to get discounts, the price/performance for the half-life you get is incredible), but I'm also planning to get back into home-brew builds a bit more over the next year: I need to build a NAS, a home lab, I might look at a gaming rig... and I'm far from alone. So yes, it's a niche market, but a profitable one for a lot of players, and one that Micron will be glad is still available to them when the data centre bubble bursts.

gjvc 10mo ago

I'd like to see a market for hobbyist computing by hobbyist computer shops, but I'm not sure it's economically feasible. Jump in the DeLorean and head to the 1980s / 1990s

hbarka 10mo ago

I still have a sense of melancholy and cultural loss from the closing of Fry’s Electronics.

dominicrose 10mo ago

We will still ba able to buy Raspberry Pis, install Linux and self-hosted solutions. We don't have to do what everyone else is doing.

freedomben 10mo ago
I don't think any SBCs will be a replacement for quite some time. At what point will there be a raspberry pi with 128 GB of RAM and a 16/32 core? That's what I'm running right now, and I really hope I don't have to downgrade in the future.
- dominicrose 10mo ago
  Yes I guess we've reached a point where it's harder for individuals to grow their hardware or even maintain it. I'm not sure the huge investment in servers for AI is going to be good for companies either. We're honestly in a science-fiction novel right now, I have no idea what's going to happen politicaly with AI. I don't really believe in AGI if that's what they're going for, but hey they'll get something close to that.

M95D 10mo ago

I think you should split the problem into hardware and software parts: - Hardware We won't have any hardware without secure boot and we won't have the signing keys. Signed firmware is required for everything x86, everything Apple, everything mobile, probably everything ARM too. Rockchip ARM could still boot without signed firmware last time I checked a few years ago, but I'm not sure about the newer CPUs. [ Short story: I have an Asus Tinkerboard S. It came with an unprovisioned emmc onboard. Just empty. A few years ago I made the mistake of trying the official OS from Asus. It automatically set up the CPU to boot from emmc first and provisioned the emmc with boot0, boot1 and rpmb. These partitions can't be written and can't be removed. Their creation is a one-way operation according to emmc standards. Now I have to keep the emmc masked because it won't boot otherwise. So beware of any devices with emmc. ] You can, of course, use MCUs for general computing today. ESP32 is pretty powerful - it's probably 4 times faster than a 486, certainly more powerful than an i386 or a 68000 you suggested. The big problem here is memory, graphics and software. No MMU requires a completely new OS. Linux (uclinux) could boot at some point without a MMU, but it won't fit in 540KB memory. MCUs can access external memory (PSRAM), but via slow buses and it's paged. Also there are no hi-speed buses for graphics. There is some hope coming from the chinese CPUs. AFAIK, they don't support secure boot at all. I'm planning on getting one as soon as their proprietary firmware/UEFI/ACPI and be replaced by uboot. - Software It's useless to make a i386 or 68000 today. There's nothing but old software for them. Not even linux has i386 support anymore. This is an even bigger problem than hardware. Much, much bigger. To have any hope of a minimally useful computing platform, we need a working browser on that platform. This is an absolute requirement. There's no way around this. I had to abandon Win98, then WinXP, and soon Win7 because of no working browser. Linux is generally usable today, but as soon as Linus retires, it's going to fall into the same user-lockdown like all others. The basic infrastructure is all in place: secure boot, root login basically deprecated, access rights and security settings administered by the distro and package manager, not the user, no per-program firewall rules, automatic updates as standard, surveillance infrastructure via udev (hardware events), dbus (software events) and gtk accessibility (input events), etc. Linus fought hard to keep them outside the kernel, but he won't live forever. To have any hope of privacy and/or freedom our personal computers we need to turn the security paradigm completely on it's head: users are not the threat - programs are. The user should login as root (or system account in Windows) and every program, including services, should run under their own limited accounts with no access to the rest of the system, especially user's files. Of all OSs today, Gentoo portage is probably the easiest package manager to tweak into creating accounts and groups for programs instead of users and Gobo Linux has the best separation of programs in it's filesystem. I'd love to see a merger of these two. Hobbyist computing? Ha! First get a browser working.

hyghjiyhu 10mo ago

I think this is an incorrect zero-sum mindset. Yes in the short term there is a fixed amount of GPUs, ram etc. But in the long run the money from ai and crypto is invested in building factories, researching new nodes etc. These investments will lead to better and cheaper products trickling down to everyone.

deleted 10mo ago

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skirge 10mo ago

not going to happen as long as business hardware != consumer hardware

barrkel 10mo ago

I feel this vibe. It's part of the reason I invested in a monster home workstation - threadripper 9995wx, 768gb ecc ram, 96gb Blackwell pro. I expect it may easily be the last proper home PC I buy that is scaled in line with the scaling that I grew up with in the 80s and 90s. Increasingly, what we have are mobile terminals - possibly with a dock for monitor connections - for remote big iron. And the continuous push from governments for more control - seemingly synchronous demands for age gating (i.e. requiring IDs) and chat snooping - males me think this remote hardware won't really be yours before long. Windows, caught up in the LLM mania, is to be left by the wayside too.

jack_tripper 10mo ago
The Terry Davis tinfoil-hat version of me has a theory that this wider industry trend of pushing away consumers from general purpose home computers towards only using remote datacenters from locked down mobile/thin edge devices, is supported by both industries and governments because: Number one, you become a recurring subscription instead of a one and done deal, making it incredibly profitable for industry And number two, the government can more easily snoop on your data when it's all in the cloud versus a HDD box in your closet. Granted, I think we're far away from that future, but I do feel that's the future the powers that be desire and they can use various mechanism to force that behavior, like convenience, and pricing, like for example making PC parts too expensive for consumers and subsidizing cloud and mobile devices to accelerate the move, and once enough consumers only know how to use Apple or Google devices they'll be less inclined to spend more money to build a PC and learn what a Linux is.
- Retric 10mo ago
  My suspicion is it’s mostly a result of the slowing pace of computing growth. When computers go obsolete in 2 years nobody wants them on their balance sheets, when they last 6 sales go down and you get more years of profit from owning them. This hasn’t been an instantaneous transition, but a low shift in how the industry operates.
- vladvasiliu 10mo ago
  I'm cynical enough to not argue against your number two theory. But the first one? I'm less convinced. I think the underlying assumption is that companies look to make the most money off consumers. I can get behind that. But just the other day I was looking at a new GPU and considered running a local LLM. I was looking at spending no more than 1000 €. That would get a me 5070 TI 16 GB. Not enough to reasonably run anything interesting. I'm not looking to "tinker with things", I want to actually use them, mostly for coding. A JetBrains subscription would run less than 10 € per month [0], and keep me up to date with the evolution of things. My 5070 would be stuck at its mostly useless level forever, since I don't see requirements going down any time soon. If prices didn't change, I'd need more than 100 months, or 8 years, to break even. And during these 8 years, I'd never have a decent LLM experience by buying it outright. Sure, this would be a capable GPU for other uses. But in my case, it would just sit around under my desk heating up my room. --- [0] You'd get a 20 € discount if paying for a whole year upfront (10/month, 100/year). I'm also excluding VAT, since I'd buy this for work and have a VAT registered company.

matheusmoreira 10mo ago

It's not just market forces. Computers are actually too subversive for the powers that be to allow mere citizens to have them. Give citizens computers and they have encryption. This alone gives them a fighting chance against police, judges, three letter agencies, militaries. Give citizens computers and they can wipe out entire sectors of the economy via the sheer power of unrestricted copying. The future is bleak. Computer freedom is dying. Everything then word "hacker" ever stood for is dying. Soon we will no longer have our own systems, we will have no control, we will be mere users of corporation and government systems. Hacking will go extinct, like phreaking. This fact brings me a profound sadness, like something beautiful is about to perish from this earth. We used to be free...

jama211 10mo ago
Alright this might be taking things a little too far… the free software movement is stronger than it’s ever been and hardware is also more accessible than it’s ever been. Losing this one company is simply not a death bell of the entire enthusiast computing market.

saurik 10mo ago

This isn't "we are only going to sell products to big companies" nor is it "we are only going to make products that are locked down appliances"... the "consumer" versions of these products are just cheaper unreliable parts that lack the error correction or power loss protection of the enterprise parts, and in a world where we routinely have disks with tens of terabytes of storage in computers with a terabyte of memory, the argument for why "consumer" grade parts can even make sense to exist is pretty weak. It maybe sucks that, in the very short term, there will be a quick uptick in prices, but focusing on the better parts will also help bring their prices down... and, fwiw, they really aren't that bad to begin with: you can build a micro-ATX machine with a Xeon or an EPYC in it for what feels like a pretty reasonable price.

Sheriya 10mo ago

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