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I’ll make publicly a comment I’ve said privately to a few of the old guard:
Sit on working (x86, AMD64/y86-64, and Power) chips… for now!
Including the Boardsort tested chip program
>>note: sorry Chris et al, delete this if I’m too far out of line<<

There are two major aspects of this comment going on right now.
First, something clear to most non-windows users.
X86 is dead. As in good bye nice run dead.
D E A D ! !
In the last 4 years AMD has completely destroyed Intel in every benchmark and real world test part to part matched. The i9 struggles to match a Ryzen 7 a generation back in the majority of comparisons.
What many people don’t realise is, at the instruction level, the Ryzen family is more RISC than CISC. That matters because for already defeating the x86 Intel chips (which use AMD’s licensed IA), it’s actually virtualising much of the processing!
Built for ryzen leaves x86 based AMD64 code so far behind that it’s barely worth recording a comparison.

But that’s only the early stage. The 50 year old instructor set was dealt a mortal blow with M1.
3 days after Apple announced the transition Microsoft increased the arm team 1000 fold! And windows 7, 10, and 11 are all supported via parallels via windows arm implementation.

As an interesting side note, Windows Arm converts AMD64 to ARM. So Windows 11 Arm running via parallels, running non-Microsoft windows software…
Is converting AMD64 to ARM, then converted from standard ARM to M code. And performance still beats many standard pre-built computer performance.

The other helper here: Covid. There is a massive resurgence in retro tech. It started before Covid but lead by video games, the retro scene went from scene to pop culture during the Covid years. Early X86 chips are growing in demand almost daily.
The average selling rate of a working 486DX increases almost 20% weekly.
Pentium up to Core is also seeing a revival. The K6 series from AMD, the first to use hardware RISC functions, has nearly doubled in value this year.
Another huge spot of interest is early and mid-range POWER CPUs. HP-RISC (HPIA) is seeing good returns.
32-bit arm socs are moving well. Power 10 suddenly has interest outside servers.
Hold out.

This is my own opinion

But it’s based on being 100% in on “retro” for over 20 years. My daily work involves computing platforms older than most users here. And occasionally projects using mechanical computers
Not even in the early half of the 2000s when everything 70s was a hit again have I seen such interest in computing from 1975-1995. Doom, the game on EVERY platform in existence, has been recently ported to POWER 7. (Why? Who knows).
There’s a huge movement in PS3 systems with old firmware for conversions.

Wait: till early November. When parents think about tweens and teens and early adults looking to do retro refit projects.
Regardless of where you sell, use ebay’s completed/sold search option to see real prices. And wait.

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Agreed. This particular discussion can be seen on this forum going back a number of years. I think it was mainly us ranting and then that snowballed into a full-blown discussion.
The bulk of what we do (I, myself, and the company I formed) aside from the day-to-day recycling operations, is act as an intermediary/custom build shop for any and all things vintage computing, within reason. This includes pulling in things from my own collection and the collections of my friends, as well as inventory from museums.
The demand has always been there for older stuff, but you're right, Covid definitely prodded folks to acquire inventory at an alarming rate. I wouldn't stop at just CPU's, I would hang onto 30/72 pin SIMMS, socket 3-8 motherboards, cabling, IDE/SCSI drives, 3.5"/5.25" drives, etc.
Once this stuff goes away it isn't coming back.
It also prompts the discussion on what is "vintage". If we're working on the same rules applied to cars, theres "classic" (20 years) and "vintage" (even older) and every year that passes, newer things are added to these categories. It makes me sad to now say that P4 era stuff is now classic, borderline vintage. It makes sense that the x86 stuff from this era is now sought after, scarcity aside. 18 year old kids who weren't around for the launch of XP are now paying $500 for XP rigs, calling the Gamecube "vintage" and paying even more money on dumb stuff like Pokemon.
I destroy Vista machines like a fat kid destroys cake, and I cringe knowing full well that someone will ask me a year from now to produce a "vintage" Vista machine. It's sad, but we all get older.
I will now go make myself some beans and toast and throw on a very thin blanket.

I’m biased: but I’d call this another Apple effect.
Dumping Intel suddenly brought PowerPC back into the picture in CPU history reviews.
I’ve seen a large spike in PowerMac prices since the M announcement.

M isn’t far from reference ARM. We’re in a place where porting modern software to “old” platforms is fairly easy work. A week after NSCDE, the modern cross-platform common desktop implementation, was released for M-based BSD and Linux, an alpha showed up for CELL: the PS3.

Firmware patches for the Saturn, Dreamcast, PS2, PS3, Xbox, and Xbox 360… A brand new Odyssey system?
Covid did something for retro that has never happened before. World wide. People were tired of sitting around and went digging. Basements, attics, boxes. That corner of the garage or the trunk. With shoppes closed people went online. Looked at videos and read. Busied themselves with repairs. Millions of people opened up a computer or game system for the first time. Swapped a capacitor. Replaced a resistor. Changed a battery. All seeing how a bit of care and reading and most things are fixable.


Add to that the explosion in filecoin… the paid for storage crypto, and there’s a huge new market for low processing power systems.

Atari’s 3 later systems are all workable computers. Every Sega system Is a competent platform. Even the SG1000 had a tape adaptor and keyboard accessory. And with a bit of time, can run most 80s software. The NES WAS a computer. Family computer.

Fun times ahead.

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I was starting to get a box ready of old RAM and CPUs to send in. Maybe I need to wait a bit.

I noticed that 5th gen i-Series are not listed on the price list. Is this an oversight, or intentional? (And if intentional, what's so special about 5th gens that they aren't on the list?)

Also missing: i3 11th gen.

guess it’s a mistake but not sure.

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