this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2026
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What I'm surprised hasn't happened yet is RAM ICs being recycled at the retail level. As in, you could bring in an old laptop or phone with 32GB of soldered RAM and it would be desoldered and sold for cash or possibly even soldered into a new device you buy from that retailer.
I wonder how close we are to that business model arriving.
How many 16k 4116 RAM chips can your laptop handle?
4116s are DIPs. I'd de desolder those myself for installation into my Intel 8088 luggable.
I want to be there when you set that up on the table at your next departmental meeting.
32GB of RAM from old hardware might as well be trash compared to 32GB of RAM made today.
I'm not sure you're caught up to current events. DDR3, from 2007, is making a comeback because of supply shortages of newer RAM. New modern motherboards are being manufactured that can take this old RAM because its available and still cheap enough.
What good is all that (slow) RAM if you're stuck with an equally slow CPU?
Its not an equally slow CPU. These boards support Xeon CPUs that first launched 11 years after DDR3.
The implication is that there are users needing large RAM footprints that aren't CPU bound. The hit in performance on the RAM isn't significant enough to justify spending orders of magnitude more for modern DDR5 which is in short supply.
In computing history there's precedent for this. Amiga computers had a small amount of "Fast RAM" which was extremely expensive, but the CPU could address a second bank of "Chip RAM" which was significantly slower but much much cheaper.
We could see this idea return in modern computers.