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Motherboard sales are now collapsing amid unprecedented shortages fueled by AI (www.tomshardware.com)
submitted 3 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.bestiver.se/post/1091783

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[–] 22 points 3 months ago (4 children)

Dammit. Everything is going up in fire GPU prices. . Ram prices. Storage. Then cpu. And now motherboards. So basically everything...!

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  • [–] 14 points 3 months ago*

    Motherboards are, if anything, probably going to do the opposite

    motherboard prices aren't rising because of increased demand. Memory prices rose because of increased demand. Prices for things that use memory also rose. Motherboard sales are falling because of decreased demand; motherboards don't use a ton of memory, and fewer people need a new motherboard because the components that they'd plug into the motherboard cost enough to cause them to defer upgrading or buying a new PC. You might see price cuts, if anything.

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  • [–] 8 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    It's actually the other way around, prices should go down as mobo sales are low.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (2 children)

    No, sales are going down because prices are going up. If you have a fixed inventory and sales go down, you lower prices to increase demand and move the product and keep your revenue stream. But in this case, they're moving supply away from this market (consumer hardware) to a different market (AI data centers). So the supply is going down with (previously) fixed demand, driving prices up. The "motherboard sales are collapsing" headline comes from looking at the consumer hardware slice of the computing hardware market. If you look at total sales from each manufacturer, so include the AI data center sales in the analysis, they're not having any trouble moving inventory nor keeping up their revenue stream overall.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago

    Unlike DRAM, which is quite universal, most manufacturers of motherboards specialise in a specific direction. Asus, MSI, etc., hell, most of the consumer market players, have specialised in gaming oriented motherboards.

    Do you know what a server motherboard doesn't need?

    • 4 different RGB headers
    • various gamer crap baked into the motherboard
    • gamer branding all over the place

    what they need is:

    • specially formatted motherboards with built in IPMI or similar remote management systems
    • dual CPU sockets in most cases
    • tons of PCIe lanes available for interconnect fabric, GPUs, and so on

    the two markets simply don't mesh. Asus losing 25-30% of its market practically overnight because people can't afford to buy RAM, SSD, etc. does not negate the fact they need sales to survive, so what they'll do is drop prices, lowering their profit margin, just so they're not sitting on unsellable stock.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (1 child)

    Yes normally speaking that would be logical. But today nobody is producing any products anymore for consumers.

    Hack even one of the 3 chip products, Micron, just said fk consumers. We only focus on businesses (Ai datacenters). Since we can earn more that way. In the short term at least.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (1 child)

    Tell me, what other market will pick up those gamer oriented motherboards?

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

    They'll just stop making them and shift toward parts that sell with a x100 markup fueled by batshit insane speculation. They'll become a niche product in high demand thus prices will ultimately rise.

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