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It's sad to see what's happened to SuperMicro. They were one of the few vendors of server-grade hardware fitting standard ATX, mATX, and ITX form factors. In my
by evanjrowley 7mo ago
It's sad to see what's happened to SuperMicro. They were one of the few vendors of server-grade hardware fitting standard ATX, mATX, and ITX form factors. In my experience their hardware was always better than the others who attempted to do the same (Gigabyte, Asus, ASRock). These days, motherboards with the features I want are going to be on AliExpress. Ironic considering this latest news is about putting trade barriers between the US and mainland China.
- cobertos 7mo agoHow do you even find motherboards on AliExpress properly? Do you have a methodology to split the chaff from the wheat?
- segmondy 7mo agowhat chaff? Just search, find what you want and buy. It's like ebay.
- Aurornis 7mo agoBeing like eBay is why it's full of chaff. There's a lot of really bad hardware on Aliexpress. You either take a gamble on something and hope it's good, or try to buy the same thing that someone else bought and reviewed.
- timschmidt 7mo agoI always figured that was the trade-off for paying 1/3 the price. Having to buy 3x as many to find a good one. :P
- dessimus 7mo ago"Another Slot A motherboard :(, maybe the 4th one I buy from AliExpress will finally be that X870 motherboard I want!"
- timschmidt 7mo agoI've never received something other than what I've ordered. At worst the documentation is scant or missing entirely. Specifically with respect to motherboards, most of the aliexpress specials I've interacted with have had completely unlocked BIOSes. Which are easy to get yourself into trouble with, but kind of nice to have when you need them.
- kube-system 7mo agoI think most of them just don't customize their bios and use the default fully-wide-open implementations from the upstream bios vendor.
- killingtime74 7mo agoHave you heard of paying with PayPal/credit card?
- genewitch 7mo agowhile possibly too sneery for this site, paypal and a real credit card will have buyer protections. Debit cards, and basically anything else will not.
- nebula8804 7mo agoYou either become an Apple or you eventually circle the drain competing to zero margins which forces 'other methods' of generating growth.
- deepsun 7mo agoAnd ideal effective market must have a zero margins. That's normal, what the economy strives for, what customers want. If some market has large margins, it means it has some inefficiencies.
- lazide 7mo agoIt is impossible to have (actual) zero margins.
- 6510 7mo agoIt isn't, you can do things as a side project. I thought about quite often while visiting a pub owned by the land lord renting out 150 rooms above. Each floor had a large industrial shared kitchen, shared bathrooms, toilets and a large shared living room. If people had 1-2 guests they would stay in their room, if they had 2-10 guests they would use the shared space, if they had 4-80 guests they would take the elevator to the pub. When one was bored with the guests or didn't have time they were left in the pub. Technically people had bar shifts in their rent contract (that you could buy your way out of) but there were plenty who enjoyed running the bar for free. Drinks were at cost. If you tried to tip or didn't take your change they left it on the counter and it would sit there for a day or two. The problem of the pinball machine earnings they solved with rounds of free drinks and chips. When asked the owner said exploiting a bar was entirely to much work. If he wanted more money from the people living there he could just increase the rent?
- lazide 7mo agoThose are negative margins.
- colechristensen 7mo agoEhhh, I think it's more like the CEO and others were Chinese assets for a long time. Remember the 2018 accusations of spy chips implanted in supermicro motherboards that everyone denied so strongly?
- platinumrad 7mo agoThis news doesn't magically make those 2018 accusations true.
- genewitch 7mo ago2,500,000,000 is a lot of cash
- overfeed 7mo ago> Remember the 2018 accusations of spy chips implanted in supermicro motherboards that everyone denied so strongly It'd be easy to prove the existence of a pervasive "spy-chip" problem using a camera or a microscope. Unsurprisingly, neither Bloomberg nor it's quoted "experts" ever managed to do so, deapite loudly banging that drum.
- mlyle 7mo agoSpy chips could be just slightly different firmware for... any number of different things. It could be pretty stealthy, too.
- overfeed 7mo agoWhat you describe is a software Advanced Persistent Threat and not a "spy chip" as reported by Bloomberg. People have been reverse engineering firmware since forever, no any evidence of booby-trapped firmware was found or reported. Us splitting hairs is moot: the claims of subversion - whether by sw or hw - were unsubstantiated and uncorroborated, and remain so to date.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- skullone 7mo agoSupermicro is definitely a "you get what you pay for". We bought thousands of servers from their vertical integrations partners, had massive board and backplane problems. Took a few years but they eventually took back over $30 million dollars worth of servers, which were scrapped ultimately because the rework on them was so cost prohibitive. We lost $30M on that even after the $30M in good will refunds. Supermicro also has the lowest bios/efi/bmc/ipmi/redfish out of any vendor we have seen. Just low tier cheap ass shit by a company who can barely survive quarter to quarter without running some new scam on customers, investors, and even governments.
- SoftTalker 7mo agoPretty much the same experience (on a much smaller scale). And just open up one of their servers and compare the engineering to a Dell or HPE server. Anything that can be cheaped out is. Corrugated plastic for cooling air channels, FRU assemblies held in place with sheet metal screws, all very bargin basement.
- kube-system 7mo agoThey look cheap even from the outside. They all look like they last went through a chassis redesign in 2002.
- EvanAnderson 7mo agoI haven't worked with anything at that scale, but the little bit that I was SuperMicro adjacent I was always unimpressed by the "fit and finish" of the entire experience, as compared to Dell and HP. (Having said that, the entire x86 commodity server experience is shitty anyway. I had a brief time, early in my career, when I did work with DEC Alpha machines. Man, they had their shit together. Stuff was expensive as sin, but stuff worked together and worked well. Build quality was tank-like.)
- jacquesm 7mo agoWhen Compaq servers were still a thing it was the same with those. You could drop them two stories and they'd probably continue playing if the cable was long enough ;) Oh and you'd get fined for damage to the pavement.
- SomeHacker44 7mo agoCurious what the features are that you like and can source from AliExpress? I have usually gotten boards from Asus and its ilk, these days with 4+ M.2 slots...
- gzread 7mo agoWhat's the sad part? Now they have more GPUs to sell to the rest of us.