this post was submitted on 02 Nov 2026
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hardware that people cant USE, they are solely used for AI in those datacenters, its just going to be e-waste.
No it isn't. 0h come on. Yeah thy couldn't possibly take the same or similar hardware components and make them work in PCs.
They are already putting NPUs in PCs.
You'd have to start soldering the HBM and the GPU chips off the boards they're on. Those aren't PCI-E boards much of the time. Also, they don't have display outputs.
I'd absolutely buy one of those servers to run open-weight models locally, but let's not kid ourselves here: We're talking about an ungodly amount of power for a single machine, think it was a few megawatts for a rack, or at least hundreds of kilowatts. A single server luckily should still be in two digit kilowatts. Could realistically only use it in the winter though.
I can. Compute is compute. Even if it's extremely niche you give me enough cycles I'll find something to run on it.
There is a geniuly cool idea floated a last year I think at xorg conf for a Linux driver that used GPGPU instructions to do the traditional GPU processing as well. So theoretically you could use some of the AI accell to instead compute things like rastors.
You used to be able to BIOS flash workstation GPUs to make them somewhat usable for gaming.... not sure how far these AI GPUs have diverged from gaming cards these days and if a BIOS flash could make them playable.
They don’t even have headers for soldering a display output to them. They’re purely a compute card.
It'd work nicely as a pure accelerator for an actual GPU though, with the right firmware.
Almost back to the 3DFX pass-through days again... 😁
AI GPUs have specialized very heavily for neural networks, including things like going down to 8- or 4-bit floats in favor of more parallelization. Most of that hardware is just useless for graphics tasks at this point.