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submitted 2 weeks ago by MichaelTen@lemm.ee to c/technology@lemmy.ml
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[-] Haus@startrek.website 54 points 2 weeks ago

The buyer is a comedian. His bid was 4-BOOBS.

[-] Melatonin@lemmy.dbzer0.com 53 points 2 weeks ago

Is that a good deal? I mean, it says "multi-million" and then it sells for less than 1/2 million, so I'm guessing good deal.

IDK, part it out on eBay?

[-] Delphia@lemmy.world 55 points 2 weeks ago

Theres a non-zero chance that Linus Sebastian just did something really dumb. LoL.

[-] twei@discuss.tchncs.de 25 points 2 weeks ago

If someone doesn't know that person by name, here is a picture of him:

[-] Adm_Drummer@lemmy.world 10 points 2 weeks ago

In case anyone confuses him with Linus Torvalds:

[-] Eheran@lemmy.world 34 points 2 weeks ago

The CPUs are almost 10 years old. What are they supposed to be worth?

[-] Galaxy@lemm.ee 30 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

About $15 per CPU on ebay or so, so about $121,000 USD for the CPU's alone

[-] Eheran@lemmy.world 35 points 2 weeks ago

Have fun selling 8000 individual CPUs on eBay, so handling, storage, shipping... and even if that is for free it would only be 1/4 of what they paid. Not too mention that flooding the marked will mean the pieces goes down.

[-] pastermil@sh.itjust.works 13 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

That is true and all, but have it occur to you the person who's spending all this might not care about money?

[-] bradorsomething@ttrpg.network 8 points 2 weeks ago

Next week we find out russia has their missile cpu problem “mysteriously solved”

[-] monk@lemmy.unboiled.info 1 points 1 week ago

Hope you're joking, because this is not how any of this works.

[-] PriorityMotif@lemmy.world 7 points 2 weeks ago

13% eBay fees, around $5 to pack and ship it, not including your time. Around $8 net per chip, so, $60k less returns/losses, then taxes on that. It might be worth it for one of those large liquidation companies, but they usually charge companies to recycle their equipment or pay very little at auctions.

[-] Moonrise2473@feddit.it 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

For the E5-2697 v4 that are in this server I see much higher prices even on Chinese e-waste resellers, about $45

But I don't think that there's enough demand on the market for 8000 of them

Maybe if you pair with those unstable "x79” Chinese desktop motherboards with server sockets and then sell them as package like "ATX motherboard with 18 cores CPU and 256 gb ECC RAM" maybe can find more customers

For the ram they're going to make much more, 5000 sticks of 64gb ECC DDR4 are still expensive

Edit: no, I accidentally saw the prices of unregistered ECC RAM. Registered ECC RAM is very cheap and super abundant as only servers use that. Corps aren't stupid and buy used memory for their expensive servers, so when a server is decommissioned, registered ECC RAM is dumped on ebay for pennies

[-] Galaxy@lemm.ee 1 points 1 week ago

Ah I thought I saw v3 when I looked it up, so about double the price then but with fees (and probably low demand) my original estimate was probably correct enough

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[-] golli@lemm.ee 14 points 2 weeks ago

Ian Cutress recently did a video on the topic here (I think he changed the title to reflect the end price of the auction), which does a bit of a breakdown. You for example also have to add shipping costs (from a certified company) to the price.

Pretty crazy to think that it is actually not sure whether spending less than 500k on a supercomputer is worth it. Goes to show how far technology has come.

I guess if everything sells you might make profit, but then it also comes with a lot of hassle and risk. And for actually using it, I imagine that electricity cost would be a huge factor.

[-] anachronist@midwest.social 3 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Pretty crazy to think that it is actually not sure whether spending less than 500k on a supercomputer is worth it.

Has more to do with the market for supercomputers. They are monsters to keep fed so it's not a question of if you can buy it but rather if you can run it. But customers for supercomputers are in the market because they need the most raw power that the technology is capable of supplying, so buying and installing a decade old supercomputer (which is going to have the same operating costs at a lower capability than a new one) doesn't make sense.

You also have to consider that the downtime's going to be a lot higher on this equipment as you're going to start having components hit the end of their useful life.

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[-] AlexisFR@jlai.lu 2 points 2 weeks ago

What about the metal costs? Is this thing worth at this price for disassembly and salvaging?

[-] Eheran@lemmy.world 3 points 2 weeks ago

There are only tiny amounts of precious metals in there.

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[-] PipedLinkBot@feddit.rocks 1 points 2 weeks ago

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[-] PriorityMotif@lemmy.world 11 points 2 weeks ago

It's likely not worth using, maybe splitting the nodes out individually for colleges to use for research projects for a few years. The cabinets are probably worth something because of the graphics on them. The power consumption, lack of the high speed storage, and large scale industrial cooling system make it impractical to use. You would probably need an entire power substation in order to run it. You could probably install it at an industrial site, but you would still need to come up with networking and installation, which could cost more than what you paid for the thing in the first place.

[-] treadful@lemmy.zip 4 points 2 weeks ago

Don't think anyone thinks a hobbyist would be buying this thing.

[-] PriorityMotif@lemmy.world 3 points 2 weeks ago

I mean, even if some company has a practical need for it, or even just wanted to sell compute time on it, it wouldn't be worth it due to the operating and installation costs. Although, it wouldn't surprise me to see individual nodes from this poping up on /r/homelab, those guys are nuts.

[-] Dkarma@lemmy.world 1 points 2 weeks ago

Homelab guys probably don't have the liquid cooling infrastructure needed to pump the fluid.

[-] PriorityMotif@lemmy.world 2 points 2 weeks ago

It looks like each blade has 4 modules with 2 processors each with up to 9 blades plus management and networking in each blade cabinet and 4 of those in each rack. Liquid cooling is only an option, so it could be possible to run it on air only. I couldn't find much on the cooling system other than it's self contained if you have one if the separate cooling cabinets. It does look like is an air to water radiator. You could pay run it off of a pool pump or something.

https://irix7.com/techpubs/007-6399-002.pdf

[-] TheWolfOfSouthEnd@lemmygrad.ml 1 points 2 weeks ago

So what’s the point in buying it?

[-] Emotet@slrpnk.net 39 points 2 weeks ago
[-] prime_number_314159@lemmy.world 9 points 2 weeks ago

Inflation is wild. Just a few decades ago, you could get this kind of thing for just an arm and a leg.

[-] gregorum@lemm.ee 13 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)
[-] delirious_owl@discuss.online 37 points 2 weeks ago

313TB RAM?!?

The array's services were used by scientists across the state of Wyoming and the rest of the country when needed. The 5.34 petaflops system was mainly used for weather and climate studies, helping the National Science Foundation better study climate change and other Earth-related sciences.

Yeah that makes sense

[-] antsu@lemmy.wtf 28 points 2 weeks ago

Enough to run Chrome and 2 Electron apps!

[-] RecallMadness@lemmy.nz 11 points 2 weeks ago

Let’s not get carried away.

[-] some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org 24 points 2 weeks ago

Those clowns who told me a RasPi would cover my needs will be proven wrong now!

[-] Evil_Shrubbery@lemm.ee 4 points 2 weeks ago

Home lab for booba.

[-] PiratePanPan@lemmy.dbzer0.com 17 points 1 week ago

Finally, a computer that can run unoptimized Minecraft and the desktop Discord client!

(not both at once, though)

[-] the_boxhead@sh.itjust.works 13 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)
[-] Renegade_roosteR@lemmy.world 12 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 1 week ago)
[-] Luisp@lemmy.dbzer0.com 13 points 1 week ago

Mr beast: I bought one of the world's fastest computer and we are going to run the biggest Minecraft server in the world for a competition with 1 million players! the winner will get 10000 dollars and also I'm donating 10000 diapers to Angola

[-] Lets_Eat_Grandma@lemm.ee 11 points 2 weeks ago

I don't know why anyone would buy this. Maybe it's one of those precious metal reclamation groups.

Generally hardware that old is cheaper to replace with newer more efficient hardware than to even consider running due to electricity costs.

[-] seaQueue@lemmy.world 44 points 2 weeks ago

r/homelab poster: "hey guys, check out my starter homelab! My electrical utility sends me a free thank you card every month!"

[-] agressivelyPassive@feddit.de 2 points 2 weeks ago

Selling for parts. Techtechpotato did a rough estimate and RAM/CPUs alone are currently worth and 1M (using eBay prices). If you add all the support components (network cards, mainboards, PSUs) it might be worth it.

[-] Lets_Eat_Grandma@lemm.ee 2 points 2 weeks ago

The piecemeal nature of selling thousands of parts means the wages for a group necessary to coordinate it all would probably make the whole thing not feasible.

Ebay prices are higher than market prices imo. 15% ebay cut + 3% paypal fees + sales tax + shipping is brutal.

[-] Moonrise2473@feddit.it 1 points 1 week ago

Yes and no. You can sell easily 2-3 units at the current price, but 8000 pieces...

Technology is improving fast, the E5-2697 v4 has a similar benchmark to a Ryzen 5600, which uses half the power, and making a computer with desktop components is cheaper (except for used registered ECC RAM which is being dumped for cheap)

And that Ryzen is the old generation, the newer are even faster

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[-] MidnightBanjo@lemmy.zip 8 points 1 week ago

Next he can install Skyrim and all the mods. ALL THE MODS!!!

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this post was submitted on 05 May 2024
255 points (99.6% liked)

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