I almost upgraded my computer a year or two ago, but decided to hold off for a bit longer.
I've always been fine with being "behind" on the latest and greatest. I don't mind watching a movie, playing a game, buying a cell phone, etc, that was released a few years prior. If it was really all that great when it came out it should still be good later on.
Buying slow usually saves a.good bit of money when prices go down over time... but this time they went way up and now I'm kicking myself on it. Not upgrading the computer for now, but it is a bit overdue since I had already put it off for many years.
500% in a year is just insane. I knew RAM prices were going up, but $3k+ for 128GB of DDR5 makes me wonder how much of this is actually AI demand, and how much is this just manufacturers taking advantage of it. They have done this in the past after all
I don't understand the distinction you are making. If you have a massive excess of demand ready to pay any price, and a limited supply, of course the sellers will take advantage, that's how any market works. They can do that because of the lack of supply.
Over the long term demand will rationalise and supply will adjust. But in between there is a squeeze, and the right price is the maximum price buyers are willing to bid for the limited supply. Sucks for other buyers, on the other hand it ensures demand destruction, i.e. that the limited supply goes to the buyer who need it the most, other buyers will delay their purchase and do with what they have.
> If you have a massive excess of demand ready to pay any price, and a limited supply, of course the sellers will take advantage, that's how any market work
The question is how quickly the supply adjusts. In a free market, the suppliers would respond to the price signal by quickly expanding their production to meet the elevated demand.
But a market captured by a cartel will be much slower to expand the supply.
So, the test isn't "how much is price going up" it's "how aggressively are the RAM producers expanding supply production"
In an absolutely free market? sure. But we don't live in an absolutely free market, the memory manufacturers have refused to budge on creating new fabs until recently out of caution and to be able to create a demand excess.
They have slow rolled rollouts and everything, if there wasn't CXMT they would probably still wouldn't have budged on building new fabs for a while longer.
You can absolutely price fix/manufacture a shortage.
Ever heard of merchants setting fire to crops after hoarding to sell at a higher price?
The issue is the distributer and producer are the very same people this essentially means producers have no incentive to rationalize supply, they can make much more money of the long drawn out shortage.
I think everyone is aware now that you don't build a fab by snapping your fingers, and you need to amortise it over many years. The said manufacturers are just out of a massive slump in demand during covid, when they were selling at a loss, and these cycles happened many times in this industry. It is understandable that they don't jump all-in on the AI bandwagon, which, god knows where it is going and for how long.
If you want evidence that no one predicted this, look at WD. They disinvested from sandisk up to early this year. Now sandisk is worth more than WD. Doesn't seem consistent with a concerted strategy to gauge prices.
> You can absolutely price fix/manufacture a shortage. Ever heard of merchants setting fire to crops after hoarding to sell at a higher price?
Fine. Show me which manufacturer is cutting production to corner the market. I don't see that.
Yes when there are large fixed costs to expanding production, that will happen more slowly, after determining that the high demand isn't just a short term spike.
It's not like wheat, where you just can just plant more at marginal cost (I'm sure someone in farming will now explain why that isn't exactly true either).
> But we don't live in an absolutely free market, the memory manufacturers have refused to budge on creating new fabs until recently out of caution
...that's how the market works. This is called capital discipline and is standard across industries. If the increase in demand is temporary, they would be spending 5-10 years of profit on facilities which will only lose money. The same works in non-capitalist economies too, you don't want to waste resources on stranded assets and many still believe this RAM demand is temporary and the house of cards will collapse.
> the memory manufacturers have refused to budge on creating new fabs
That's EXACTLY how a free market is supposed to work. The existing memory manufacturers are FREE to not build new factories, and anyone else is FREE to build those factories in their place.
Then perhaps we’re seeing one of the downsides of that. When 0->1 is prohibitively expensive, existing players can continue to raise prices *very* high because cost-of-entry is extreme, until it’s not sufficiently extreme.
And then we have bubble issues because the introduction of a new, cheaper player, causes the bottom to fall out and for the circumstances that allowed the new manufacturer to exist to completely go away.
> According to the one-count charge filed in San Francisco's federal court on Thursday, Park conspired with unnamed employees from other memory makers to fix the price of DRAM sold to computer makers from April 1, 2001, to June 15, 2002. The government says the move directly affected sales to U.S. computer makers Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Compaq, IBM, Apple Computer, and Gateway.
"that the limited supply goes to the buyer who need it the most" - I would say that the limited supply goes to the buyer who can afford to pay higher than others. Someone may need the memory more, but may not have the deeper pockets to pay for it like NVidia and Apple might.
FWIW I have a friend who makes hardware and it's extremely difficult for him to secure memory at any price. Because AI people have locked up so much of the upcoming supply it's often not a question of how much it will cost but of finding someone who will sell you memory at all. If this were price gouging I would expect he'd have no trouble finding allocations at exorbitant prices but that doesn't seem to be the case.
There are only 3 manufacturers (about to be 4 soon) total. This is a demand crunch the likes of which the market hasn't seen before, prices are doing the natural thing.
You make it sound like the crunch is caused by manufacturers, my understanding is that it is caused by the abnormal demand. I am not aware that RAM production is at a historically low level.
To take advantage they'd have to do some form of price fixing which in most places is a very big footgun.
I honestly don't think they need to fix their prices, and it's possible that selling to consumers is a secondary market for them compared to datacenters, like Nvidia selling GPUs to gamers. We know that's not where the money is.
Seeing some companies actually exit the consumer market is evidence for this.
> To take advantage they'd have to do some form of price fixing which in most places is a very big footgun.
When parent commenter says "They have done this in the past after all" that's exactly what they're talking about. Micron, Samsung, Hyinx (prior to SK Group acquisition), and others all participated in RAM price fixing in the early 2000's.
The situation is absolutely awful for anybody who needs significant memory or storage (or devices incorporating such).
Even people who think they have enough for the next few years already could end up with an unpleasant surprise if they e.g. have a stick or two of RAM go bad or a GPU fry. I have a few machines with aging sticks that I'm hoping will manage to hold out until when/if things improve.
I'm saving a ton of money by simply not upgrading. I used to do upgrades every 1-2 years just to keep up on things, pass the old box down to my son or otherwise donate it. Now I intend to keep my current setup for 7+ years. Its 2 years old next month. I may even stay with it longer. I just see no reason to upgrade with things how they are.
I considered a Mac Studio a couple months ago. Price was up but might have pulled the trigger if not for the delivery date that was almost 4 months out. Sale lost. I suspect a lot of people are like me right now and we'll start seeing significant drops in consumer spending on electronics the next 2-4 years minimum.
I think it's probably for the best, the hyperconsumerism around electronics was getting out of hand. Computers are fast and have been fast for a while now. An iPhone 12 is probably more than fine to do iPhone things, if Apple didn't sabotage their old phones with poorly-written poor-performance software.
Can you provide evidence for your claim? Most people take this statement at face value and I don’t understand why. I do some volunteer work supporting elderly people that have issues adapting to a digital only world and I am always pleasantly surprised by the performance of their old iPhones all the way down to the 8 (old phones they get from their kids)
> Computers are fast and have been fast for a while now.
Absolutely. The only reason I want to upgrade to an iPhone 18 next year is because the 16 doesn't have MIE (Memory Integrity Enforcement) and it feels ridiculous to upgrade so quickly to the 17, which does have MIE. Same thing with a Neo 2. But mostly I buy surplus gear. I've saved a small fortune this way and 8% compounding returns (VT and chill) will help me retire early.
I have a MacBook M1 and I recently had to downgrade from Tahoe to Sequoia. Why? First of all they force you to download 7 GB of AI training when you’re not even using their AI. And secondly on Tahoe just watching a video with nothing else running off-line my MacBook was asking for 7 W of power. On Sequoia that drops down to 2 W maybe three.
It’s sad to think they think of themselves as an environmental company, I don’t know if they do, but this update to Sequoia literally doubled the amount of M1 max that are running on the planet in terms of power use.
There also seems to have been a major shift in strategy from AMD / Intel / Apple / NVidia due to this, as I was used to CPU / GPU / chipset upgrades coming out more regularly with double-digit percentage improvements each year, but that seems to be basically over for the consumer space now that everyone is just trying to build as much AI hardware as fast as possible for enterprise markets.
I also used to rebuild my desktop every 1-2 years and upgrade laptops every 2-3 years, but I'm currently a bit past that and have no plans to refresh anything in the near future. I'll probably wait another CPU and GPU generation or two to even consider it, especially with prices being this ridiculous.
I'm fully anticipating AI hardware demand to dry up once Anthropic and OpenAI start tanking financially in a few years after missing earnings and investors and banks wanting their loans paid back combined with more folks realizing that LLMs cannot achieve AGI. After that, I would hope that the demand that's driving this pricing spike will fall along with it, but I also fully expect hardware companies to be as greedy as possible, so maybe a 32TB HDD will just cost $1000 going forward and the era of "a decent gaming PC made up of the tier of components one step below TOTL costs ~$2000" we've been in since the 1990s is fully over, and it's just going to be more like $5k going forward.
> There also seems to have been a major shift in strategy from AMD / Intel / Apple / NVidia due to this, as I was used to CPU / GPU / chipset upgrades coming out more regularly with double-digit percentage improvements each year, but that seems to be basically over for the consumer space now that everyone is just trying to build as much AI hardware as fast as possible for enterprise markets.
I believe all of them realized nobody really needs more than 16c32t on a desktop, and architectural changes nowadays can only go so far to bump performance. The biggest changes across generations in the last ~5 years were the introduction of specialized instructions for wider vectors (AVX512/AVX2, and even then you need specialized workloads to use them), bigger L3 caches and/or efficiency cores to lower power draw. The double-digits gains recently were in memory bandwidth, frequency and locality, because you can make a 5GHz CPU and make it go 10% faster than the previous generation, but you also need to supply the extra data for the CPU to make useful work so that it's not data-starved.
> I also used to rebuild my desktop every 1-2 years and upgrade laptops every 2-3 years, but I'm currently a bit past that and have no plans to refresh anything in the near future. I'll probably wait another CPU and GPU generation or two to even consider it, especially with prices being this ridiculous.
I built my desktop in 2019 (right before the COVID madness, luckily) and I was also used to 1-3 year cycles. I upgraded the CPU and GPU since then, but the performance is still that of a workstation, even though perhaps a little bit behind in pure single-core benchmarks. I plan to keep this until either CPU, RAM or MB fall out (hopefully another 5y at least), and then I'll make a huge leap, instead of making 4x smaller ones which deliver little uplift anyway.
The biggest changes across generations in the last ~5 years were the introduction of specialized instructions for wider vectors (AVX512/AVX2, and even then you need specialized workloads to use them), [...]
AVX2 is actually 13 years (!) old already (first appearing in Intel's Haswell architecture).
AVX512 is also nearly 10 years old right now, but not many CPUs actually support it (none of the devices I own support it)
People think that shorting is an easy way of getting rich when you think a stock will go down, but even if you know it will, getting the timing wrong on it is catastrophic as you'll get unbounded loses while the market fails to correct the issues you are betting against
I'm running a 12 year old i5 3.2ghz CPU with 16 GB of memory, an SSD and an AMD RX 480 (8 GB) GPU. Currently using a 100% scaled 4k monitor and a 2nd 1440p monitor. I keep the machine on 24 / 7. It's great for software development along with video + image editing and casual gaming. Everything feels fast and snappy.
I will use this until the hardware stops. There's a 0% chance I'd buy hardware at the current prices.
I have a baseline iMac Pro and custom built tower with similar specs (3.2Ghz Xeon W-2140B, 32GB RAM, Vega Pro 56 and i7-6700K, 32GB, 5700XT respectively) and they're both perfectly responsive. For many day to day things the difference between them and newer machines is negligible. For other things, my 5950X tower and M5 Max MBP run circles around them.
Both the 5950X tower and M5 Max MBP are deep into diminishing returns territory regardless, however. Aside from some extreme niche workloads like LLMs I can't imagine needing anything more powerful. They both have a ridiculous amount of headroom for the overwhelming majority of anything most people might want a computer for.
Yep, I have an M4 MBP company issued laptop for work and in my day to day there's not a enough of a performance win to feel like I'm missing out for most tasks.
Sure, the Slack web app might initially load half a second faster since there's a lot of CPU bound JS executing but generally speaking I never feel like "wow this sucks" on my main machine. It's kind of the opposite, for a number of things my desktop machine feels faster than the MBP for overall "using the computer", with development heavy tasks (running Docker based web apps, browser tabs, various tools open, streaming music, etc.). It was like that when I ran Windows 10 Pro with WSL 2 and now native Linux with Arch + niri.
Even CPU bound tasks on my 12 year old box that I do a lot, such as editing a blog post on a static site with Hugo takes ~100ms to get live reloading with over 1,000 posts and drafts. I'm sure if I were constantly doing huge CPU bound tasks I'd have issues but I don't have that use case.
After recording 500+ videos, encoding isn't a problem too. If I record a 30 min video, it takes ~20 minutes to render but it's so easy to fit that into other areas of my life, like I'll record + edit a video and then render it while I walk.
I have a 2021 M1 pro and see no reason to upgrade it... ever?
I do web & general java work on it and it's plenty fast even using a memory hog like IntelliJ (which is typically disk bound anyway). Claude tells me that a new macbook would feel about 1.8x faster in my CPU-bound cases, which is not common.
If memory prices returned to normal and if local inference gets over the hump, I could see upgrading for local AI agents, but I'm fine waiting for a good long while on that.
I say all this as someone who, five years ago, was a perpetual upgrader: immediately bought new product and got excited for next product. Wonder if the future will see the end of that culture in tech and, looking back, it was a little silly and wasteful anyway.
I too have an M1 Pro and it does everything I need to do. I bought it in 2023, so it's 'only' 3.5 years old now.
Maybe this is the tipping point where hardware companies can't rely on the upgrade cycle for sales any more. I've always upgraded at least every three years, but with the combination of high RAM prices and good enough performance from an older machine, there is no need to.
There isn't much to upgrade to if all you want is a desktop for gaming, a non-workstation work box or just a decent laptop. Much like smartphones, there just hasn't been much innovation of late. A midrange gaming desktop from mid 2023, something like rtx 4070 and ryzen 7800x3d, can still play pretty much any video game on max settings and high framerate at 1440p, and has sufficient performance for most workstation-esque tasks as long as you have enough ram. Similarly, the only thing my spare macbook m2 lacks compared to m5 is hardware av1 decoding - the performance is worse, but I don't really notice it in normal usage, and macOS 27 runs perfectly well on it.
Local AI will crush any machine, of course, and if you need a 512gb ram box you'll probably need to sell both kidneys, but you're well past the average consumer territory with those.
So, fingers crossed nothing breaks down and that some of the funny money goes into R&D which will eventually trickle down to consumer devices in a few years (16TB gum stick SSDs at sane prices pretty please) instead of endless datacenter GPUs and SSDs that will be tossed into a shredder in x years.
My desktop PC turns 20 next year. I've never seen any need to upgrade it, went out of my way to build it with silent parts and it rarely if ever goes outside a single-digit CPU load (before anyone asks, software development and a bit of CAD work). I'll upgrade it when something in it physically fails, which means I'll need to replace it with new hardware with 5-10x the specs just to get the same performance.
My laptop is currently about two years into a typically 5-year lifespan, limited by when the keys start to fail rather than any need to upgrade it just because. The RAM in it is now worth more than the rest of the laptop.
Anecdotally, RAM failures are more common than they used to be in previous decades, I assume due to increased capacities and smaller process nodes. Looser manufacturing standards may also play a part.
The component category I've never seen fail is CPU.
> The component category I've never seen fail is CPU.
The CPU can fail if the heatsink falls off! That is something that happens (I've had one come off in my hand that was being held on by nothing but hopes and dreams, fortunately not while the CPU was powered on). More likely in a desktop tower form factor.
I've worked in and around datacenters for a few decades now and I've seen pretty much everything fail, but power supplies in particular do so at a higher rate than I expected. I've had one literally start smoking in my home office recently too. Luckily, it didn't damage any components, but it was pretty dramatic and abrupt -- just powered on my desktop and got nothing but a fog machine coming out of the rear fan until I yanked the power cord a few seconds later.
My evga 1000w has been going strong for 11 years now. Cheaper power supplies fail often but if you buy quality and oversized they’ll outlast all your other components as they don’t become outdated.
It’s the caps that fail. Electrolytic caps have the highest failure rate of any passive component. My team tries to avoid them in our designs as much as possible. But you’re right, caps in a good design can easily last 20 years, making a power supply the longest lasting component of most builds.
My go to source for reviews was always jonnyguru.com but he closed up shop. Not sure who’s actually doing in-depth performance and component reviews these days.
I had a 2012 mac book pro that burned out 2 different crucial memory sticks. Would have bricked the machine if it was the soldered-on type, but it was the last model apple sold that have swappable memory. Crucial had a lifetime warranty so they replaced them for free.
I used to game on it and I think the design just couldn't handle the cpu and dgpu being active for long periods, it would get extremely hot in the area close to where the memory was.
Most devices never test their memory and don’t have ecc, so you generally never know. Random instability can be fixed by restarting and your program not being in an area with bad bits anymore.
on older PC bios would perform a memory test - you may remember those - and that's where it would mark a bunch of pages dead/unusuable and it was not uncommon at all.
I recently had part of a 32 gig DIMM go bad on a 128 gig system. One of the larger VMs was spontaneously rebooting for no apparent reason. I was able to find the addresses with MemTest86 and map out 512 megs of the affected DIMM with the Linux kernel memmap option.
I've seen some fail. Might have had to do with the fact that the computers were literally flooded (river came up faster than the sandbaggers could keep up) while running.
I've seen computers brought back to life after flooding by lying in rice for a week, but they weren't turned on when the water hit (and not all survived).
I've had a few RAM sticks fail, but the ECC usually caught it first. Also had one case that somehow the stick slightly unseated itself; dunno how but it was out of service for months until someone opened it up and reseated the stick.
...granted though I've also seen a backpane on a server fail. I didn't think that was even possible until that point.
I built my machine in 2022 with 64GB of memory and upgraded to a 4090 at MSRP in 2023 so at this point I'm good but I fear the back end of the bathtub curve. I currently expect to have to hold on until 2029 and at that point the mobo and CPU will be 7 years old, and the GPU almost 6.
I would absolutely love if some startup came up right now to manufacture and sell RAM at normal prices to everyone else and put Crucial et al out of business for price-gouging everyone just because they can.
DRAM fabs are multi-billion dollar investments which take years to come online. That's the whole reason we're in this situation, there is no quick fix available.
China is making central decisions for its RAM makers (and who can complain now that the US isn't a legitimate free trade defender). I think their strategy could go in any direction to either get a small portion of still gouging or a large portion of a market with somewhat stale specs.
While I share your optimism, I still don't fully understand why a crash will necessarily lead to an oversupply and lower prices for regular consumers. The components / RAM you are referencing are for enterprise use / data centers which in my limited understanding is not a 1:1 swap for the kind of components that your smartphone / car / fridge / gaming rig use. I would love for someone more informed than me to spell out the rationale here.
It seems the chokehold started from the very beginning of the supply chain (wafers), so if a crash were to occur I don't see how we wouldn't be doubly screwed. Lots of worthless enterprise gear being shopped on eBay + a scarcity of consumer grade components leading to sustained high prices.
My understanding is that it's fundamentally a fab capacity limit. At a given node size/technology (think 7nm, etc) they can only output so many wafers. If AI data centers are generating enormous demand for memory, then that's what those wafers are going to be used to for, unless they can be outcompeted, hence higher prices.
I'm not actually sure if enterprise designated memory is equivalent or not to consumer designated. Could be they are the same just packaged differently and/or with better binning. Either way, it's the same supply/demand dynamic at work.
Yeah a RCD on the memory stick, it's PCB is designed around it. The actual DRAM chips themselves are not different though, which is why I mention it would be super easy to produce more consumer unregistered and less server registered at assembly time :)
Datacentre NVMe disk is still usable in a standard desktop. Sever memory less so, but essentially if there were no 'new' server market whatsoever then you could redirect 100% of memory production to consumer chips without enormous upheaval.
By the way I personally think this scenario is very unlikely to happen.
We are starting from a frankly completely unimaginable hypothetical that there's 0 new "datacentre demand".
In that scenario producing consumer chips is still profitable, much less profitable but still much better than giving up and going home.
You will also unlock latent demand by the mere fact that consumer prices are reasonable again. Those who may have postponed a new MacBook or gaming PC will likely buy as soon as lower prices return.
> you could redirect 100% of memory production to consumer chips without enormous upheaval
They would never do that. By then the market has changed and they would produce at the limit of expected demand, certainly not intentionally causing oversupply.
same. still rockin a 2016 era dell xps 13. I was about to pull the trigger on a few laptops but I always psych myself out because I assume prices will drop and I can pick them up secondhand. big mistake...
I bought an RX 6600 for $450 during the GPU shortage a few years ago. I know the AI boom is different than the crypto/COVID boom, but still. Don't be me.
I’m even more confused by the economics of the frontier model businesses. Even if they got preferential prices, they are still paying an inordinate amount for their infrastructure.
If it wasn’t economically feasible without VC/Nvidia money 3 years ago, how is it possibly economically feasible now at 10x prices for things like memory?
And watch … $5 says they have nothing to do with the ram because even if there was enough power there’s no use case for this much spend
If I had to guess they’re just buying up ram to keep others from having it same way meta, Google, etc hired up engineers to keep others from having them
Also imagine people having their own cheap 2TB rigs at home for their own usage/inference, or a multitude of small providers serving/sharing capacity thanks to cheap available hardware.
But we cant have that, as the big guys are hoarding everything for themselves, so that you have to pay them instead.
I’ve been wondering this if you buy up all the memory you can ensure the competition cannot compete with huge investment raising the bar for competition. Of course this all sounds all conspiracy theory. Though without a place to power this or put it makes me wonder this.
It's pulling the ladder up behind them. OpenAI bought up more co tracts for wafers than they could even use. But now that means everyone else has to fight over what's left. This makes it too expensive to compete with OpenAI. No upstart can really afford to build infrastructure.
And that's the really fun part of all this, that weak substitutes will also become more expensive. But on the bright side, I've got dozens of sticks of DDR3 RAM that I'm hoarding like Pokémon cards. Any day now, we'll get desperate enough to start using them again!
I noticed that resellers on ebay of used server equipment that I keep an eye on in Germany pulled all their DDR4 from surplus and used server racks and now list it separately for sale, at jacked up prices. Where you used to be able to see a used Gigabyte server listed with "128GB" "256GB" etc listed in the title, they now all say "0GB". They took extra effort, to pull used ram from older servers, and list it separate, just out of the greed of potentially capitalizing on this market.
The problem is... now for anyone looking to pickup a slightly older used/surplus server rack - you have the go and buy the (now marked up) RAM separate.
So... did they list the "0GB" racks with removed ram cheaper you ask?
Nope. Many of them seem to be basically the same price as they were or even higher than they were, except now you're paying for RAM separate.
I bought a surplus Gigabyte server about 2 years ago off ebay for a home project, and I just went and the same seller still has some for sale, even older now than they were when I grabbed one, but they are 2x the price, and they don't come with any RAM, whereas I got one already populated as they were from the factory. Once you add that back in literally looking at 150-200% markup in the last 2 years on what was just surplus computer equipment that is 5+ years old.
Why would I voluntarily choose to sell the hardware I have for less than the going price? The odds of it getting picked up by a scalper and resold are extremely high. If I was sitting on a goldmine of old server hardware, I would absolutely be ripping out the RAM and selling it per stick in this market.
Greed? Resellers aren't charities, good for them if the value of their stock goes up. Besides, people buying server equipment aren't exactly starving, I bet most of them can either simply not buy the server, or cut some other expense.
> So... did they list the "0GB" racks with removed ram cheaper you ask?
Could this be an indication that there's a supply shortage/price increase of the remaining components in the rack? Or do you interpret it as people just trying their luck out of sheer greed?
Been long past that time, probably 15-20 years past. It's not even the languages its the 500 different layers of abstraction and abominations like Electron.
Even with AI pressure I'm willing to bet there's no need for prices to be this high. There has to be some price gouging/fixing going on. Same thing for nand and GPUs. Or else they're doing it to try to pressure people not to use local compute instead of the "cloud"
Memory manufacturers have gone through several cycles of lawsuits for market collusion at this point. It's gone from an open secret to just outright flaunting in our face.
Until the penalties involve actual jail time or a fine 10x larger than the profit they made from doing it, they couldn't care less.
Given the number of upvotes my comment got and the other comments where people missed the sarcasm, I wouldn’t be too sure that many people have no trouble distinguishing
"The best good ever is to maximise shareholder profits" is a tired and cliched caricature that some people unfortunately take seriously. But this is too on the nose.
You also have the innate right to be off base, btw.
It's sarcasm, and the main tell is I'm not even bothering with pretense; just serving up the dystopia straight and acting like that's good.
But one of the "fun" things about HN is SV is so fucked up you can't even be sure someone doesn't actually sincerely believe that shit. And most of them are probably dumbasses with nothing to gain.
I appreciate sarcasm when it's clear. Marking it as "/s" prevents this whole line of discussion. As you noted in your last paragraph, it's hard to be sure without a marking.
It's crazy if you think that some years ago were the cheaper part of a personal computer compared to motherboard, cpu, gpu and so on.
I almost upgraded my computer a year or two ago, but decided to hold off for a bit longer.
I've always been fine with being "behind" on the latest and greatest. I don't mind watching a movie, playing a game, buying a cell phone, etc, that was released a few years prior. If it was really all that great when it came out it should still be good later on.
Buying slow usually saves a.good bit of money when prices go down over time... but this time they went way up and now I'm kicking myself on it. Not upgrading the computer for now, but it is a bit overdue since I had already put it off for many years.
100% what I do. I buy a few years behind the leading edge, and keep the device until it either dies or will no longer do what I need it to do.
My main desktop computer is Haswell era. Still does fine, for what I do.
500% in a year is just insane. I knew RAM prices were going up, but $3k+ for 128GB of DDR5 makes me wonder how much of this is actually AI demand, and how much is this just manufacturers taking advantage of it. They have done this in the past after all
I don't understand the distinction you are making. If you have a massive excess of demand ready to pay any price, and a limited supply, of course the sellers will take advantage, that's how any market works. They can do that because of the lack of supply.
Over the long term demand will rationalise and supply will adjust. But in between there is a squeeze, and the right price is the maximum price buyers are willing to bid for the limited supply. Sucks for other buyers, on the other hand it ensures demand destruction, i.e. that the limited supply goes to the buyer who need it the most, other buyers will delay their purchase and do with what they have.
> If you have a massive excess of demand ready to pay any price, and a limited supply, of course the sellers will take advantage, that's how any market work
The question is how quickly the supply adjusts. In a free market, the suppliers would respond to the price signal by quickly expanding their production to meet the elevated demand.
But a market captured by a cartel will be much slower to expand the supply.
So, the test isn't "how much is price going up" it's "how aggressively are the RAM producers expanding supply production"
In an absolutely free market? sure. But we don't live in an absolutely free market, the memory manufacturers have refused to budge on creating new fabs until recently out of caution and to be able to create a demand excess.
They have slow rolled rollouts and everything, if there wasn't CXMT they would probably still wouldn't have budged on building new fabs for a while longer.
You can absolutely price fix/manufacture a shortage. Ever heard of merchants setting fire to crops after hoarding to sell at a higher price?
The issue is the distributer and producer are the very same people this essentially means producers have no incentive to rationalize supply, they can make much more money of the long drawn out shortage.
I think everyone is aware now that you don't build a fab by snapping your fingers, and you need to amortise it over many years. The said manufacturers are just out of a massive slump in demand during covid, when they were selling at a loss, and these cycles happened many times in this industry. It is understandable that they don't jump all-in on the AI bandwagon, which, god knows where it is going and for how long.
If you want evidence that no one predicted this, look at WD. They disinvested from sandisk up to early this year. Now sandisk is worth more than WD. Doesn't seem consistent with a concerted strategy to gauge prices.
> You can absolutely price fix/manufacture a shortage. Ever heard of merchants setting fire to crops after hoarding to sell at a higher price?
Fine. Show me which manufacturer is cutting production to corner the market. I don't see that.
Yes when there are large fixed costs to expanding production, that will happen more slowly, after determining that the high demand isn't just a short term spike.
It's not like wheat, where you just can just plant more at marginal cost (I'm sure someone in farming will now explain why that isn't exactly true either).
Feel free to spin up a fab and undercut the current prices, I'd certainly appreciate it!
I don't know if I would personally fund such a venture though, for roughly the same reason existing manufacturers aren't expanding production.
> But we don't live in an absolutely free market, the memory manufacturers have refused to budge on creating new fabs until recently out of caution
...that's how the market works. This is called capital discipline and is standard across industries. If the increase in demand is temporary, they would be spending 5-10 years of profit on facilities which will only lose money. The same works in non-capitalist economies too, you don't want to waste resources on stranded assets and many still believe this RAM demand is temporary and the house of cards will collapse.
> the memory manufacturers have refused to budge on creating new fabs
That's EXACTLY how a free market is supposed to work. The existing memory manufacturers are FREE to not build new factories, and anyone else is FREE to build those factories in their place.
Then perhaps we’re seeing one of the downsides of that. When 0->1 is prohibitively expensive, existing players can continue to raise prices *very* high because cost-of-entry is extreme, until it’s not sufficiently extreme.
And then we have bubble issues because the introduction of a new, cheaper player, causes the bottom to fall out and for the circumstances that allowed the new manufacturer to exist to completely go away.
> I don't understand the distinction you are making.
20 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_industry_price_fixing
> According to the one-count charge filed in San Francisco's federal court on Thursday, Park conspired with unnamed employees from other memory makers to fix the price of DRAM sold to computer makers from April 1, 2001, to June 15, 2002. The government says the move directly affected sales to U.S. computer makers Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Compaq, IBM, Apple Computer, and Gateway.
etc
"that the limited supply goes to the buyer who need it the most" - I would say that the limited supply goes to the buyer who can afford to pay higher than others. Someone may need the memory more, but may not have the deeper pockets to pay for it like NVidia and Apple might.
Gamers may need the memory more, but AI labs can use the memory more productively
Profitably-for-the-fabs*
FWIW I have a friend who makes hardware and it's extremely difficult for him to secure memory at any price. Because AI people have locked up so much of the upcoming supply it's often not a question of how much it will cost but of finding someone who will sell you memory at all. If this were price gouging I would expect he'd have no trouble finding allocations at exorbitant prices but that doesn't seem to be the case.
There are never shortages in a free market, just higher prices.
There are only 3 manufacturers (about to be 4 soon) total. This is a demand crunch the likes of which the market hasn't seen before, prices are doing the natural thing.
You make it sound like the crunch is caused by manufacturers, my understanding is that it is caused by the abnormal demand. I am not aware that RAM production is at a historically low level.
Demand crunch comes from the customer. All HBM and DDR5 wafer capacity is sold out through 2027 and all three vendors are booking 2028 capacity.
This was not created by the manufacturers.
> There are only 3 manufacturers (about to be 4 soon) total.
...3 manufacturers with a long history of price fixing...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_industry_price_fixing
To take advantage they'd have to do some form of price fixing which in most places is a very big footgun.
I honestly don't think they need to fix their prices, and it's possible that selling to consumers is a secondary market for them compared to datacenters, like Nvidia selling GPUs to gamers. We know that's not where the money is.
Seeing some companies actually exit the consumer market is evidence for this.
> To take advantage they'd have to do some form of price fixing which in most places is a very big footgun.
When parent commenter says "They have done this in the past after all" that's exactly what they're talking about. Micron, Samsung, Hyinx (prior to SK Group acquisition), and others all participated in RAM price fixing in the early 2000's.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_industry_price_fixing
If it's a highly profitable footgun why not?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_industry_price_fixing#202...
Just to be clear the big Memory giants are famous for their price fixing historically speaking.
It is all temporary and cyclical - https://s-1.vercel.app/posts/the-capital-cycle-theory/
The situation is absolutely awful for anybody who needs significant memory or storage (or devices incorporating such).
Even people who think they have enough for the next few years already could end up with an unpleasant surprise if they e.g. have a stick or two of RAM go bad or a GPU fry. I have a few machines with aging sticks that I'm hoping will manage to hold out until when/if things improve.
I'm saving a ton of money by simply not upgrading. I used to do upgrades every 1-2 years just to keep up on things, pass the old box down to my son or otherwise donate it. Now I intend to keep my current setup for 7+ years. Its 2 years old next month. I may even stay with it longer. I just see no reason to upgrade with things how they are.
I considered a Mac Studio a couple months ago. Price was up but might have pulled the trigger if not for the delivery date that was almost 4 months out. Sale lost. I suspect a lot of people are like me right now and we'll start seeing significant drops in consumer spending on electronics the next 2-4 years minimum.
I think it's probably for the best, the hyperconsumerism around electronics was getting out of hand. Computers are fast and have been fast for a while now. An iPhone 12 is probably more than fine to do iPhone things, if Apple didn't sabotage their old phones with poorly-written poor-performance software.
Can you provide evidence for your claim? Most people take this statement at face value and I don’t understand why. I do some volunteer work supporting elderly people that have issues adapting to a digital only world and I am always pleasantly surprised by the performance of their old iPhones all the way down to the 8 (old phones they get from their kids)
Also the coming iOS 27 release supposedly has some big performance improvements for all supported models that people have verified in the beta releases even with the iPhone 11: https://www.macworld.com/article/3160623/apple-finally-figur...
> Computers are fast and have been fast for a while now.
Absolutely. The only reason I want to upgrade to an iPhone 18 next year is because the 16 doesn't have MIE (Memory Integrity Enforcement) and it feels ridiculous to upgrade so quickly to the 17, which does have MIE. Same thing with a Neo 2. But mostly I buy surplus gear. I've saved a small fortune this way and 8% compounding returns (VT and chill) will help me retire early.
And Apple will continue to because they have to sell more devices to keep customers interested.
Apple could release a new on-device LLM model every year and keep the hyperconsumerism going...
I have a MacBook M1 and I recently had to downgrade from Tahoe to Sequoia. Why? First of all they force you to download 7 GB of AI training when you’re not even using their AI. And secondly on Tahoe just watching a video with nothing else running off-line my MacBook was asking for 7 W of power. On Sequoia that drops down to 2 W maybe three.
It’s sad to think they think of themselves as an environmental company, I don’t know if they do, but this update to Sequoia literally doubled the amount of M1 max that are running on the planet in terms of power use.
There also seems to have been a major shift in strategy from AMD / Intel / Apple / NVidia due to this, as I was used to CPU / GPU / chipset upgrades coming out more regularly with double-digit percentage improvements each year, but that seems to be basically over for the consumer space now that everyone is just trying to build as much AI hardware as fast as possible for enterprise markets.
I also used to rebuild my desktop every 1-2 years and upgrade laptops every 2-3 years, but I'm currently a bit past that and have no plans to refresh anything in the near future. I'll probably wait another CPU and GPU generation or two to even consider it, especially with prices being this ridiculous.
I'm fully anticipating AI hardware demand to dry up once Anthropic and OpenAI start tanking financially in a few years after missing earnings and investors and banks wanting their loans paid back combined with more folks realizing that LLMs cannot achieve AGI. After that, I would hope that the demand that's driving this pricing spike will fall along with it, but I also fully expect hardware companies to be as greedy as possible, so maybe a 32TB HDD will just cost $1000 going forward and the era of "a decent gaming PC made up of the tier of components one step below TOTL costs ~$2000" we've been in since the 1990s is fully over, and it's just going to be more like $5k going forward.
> There also seems to have been a major shift in strategy from AMD / Intel / Apple / NVidia due to this, as I was used to CPU / GPU / chipset upgrades coming out more regularly with double-digit percentage improvements each year, but that seems to be basically over for the consumer space now that everyone is just trying to build as much AI hardware as fast as possible for enterprise markets.
I believe all of them realized nobody really needs more than 16c32t on a desktop, and architectural changes nowadays can only go so far to bump performance. The biggest changes across generations in the last ~5 years were the introduction of specialized instructions for wider vectors (AVX512/AVX2, and even then you need specialized workloads to use them), bigger L3 caches and/or efficiency cores to lower power draw. The double-digits gains recently were in memory bandwidth, frequency and locality, because you can make a 5GHz CPU and make it go 10% faster than the previous generation, but you also need to supply the extra data for the CPU to make useful work so that it's not data-starved.
> I also used to rebuild my desktop every 1-2 years and upgrade laptops every 2-3 years, but I'm currently a bit past that and have no plans to refresh anything in the near future. I'll probably wait another CPU and GPU generation or two to even consider it, especially with prices being this ridiculous.
I built my desktop in 2019 (right before the COVID madness, luckily) and I was also used to 1-3 year cycles. I upgraded the CPU and GPU since then, but the performance is still that of a workstation, even though perhaps a little bit behind in pure single-core benchmarks. I plan to keep this until either CPU, RAM or MB fall out (hopefully another 5y at least), and then I'll make a huge leap, instead of making 4x smaller ones which deliver little uplift anyway.
The biggest changes across generations in the last ~5 years were the introduction of specialized instructions for wider vectors (AVX512/AVX2, and even then you need specialized workloads to use them), [...]
AVX2 is actually 13 years (!) old already (first appearing in Intel's Haswell architecture).
AVX512 is also nearly 10 years old right now, but not many CPUs actually support it (none of the devices I own support it)
Are you willing to short anthropic and openai on your beliefs? Would love to be on the other side of this trade.
People think that shorting is an easy way of getting rich when you think a stock will go down, but even if you know it will, getting the timing wrong on it is catastrophic as you'll get unbounded loses while the market fails to correct the issues you are betting against
I wouldn't even short Bitcoin, and that's been on the way out since the AI rise.
"Sometime in the next few years" is not anywhere near narrow enough of a window to start putting shorts on stock prices.
Somewhat hard to short non public company, don't you think?
I'm running a 12 year old i5 3.2ghz CPU with 16 GB of memory, an SSD and an AMD RX 480 (8 GB) GPU. Currently using a 100% scaled 4k monitor and a 2nd 1440p monitor. I keep the machine on 24 / 7. It's great for software development along with video + image editing and casual gaming. Everything feels fast and snappy.
I will use this until the hardware stops. There's a 0% chance I'd buy hardware at the current prices.
It really depends on what the task at hand is.
I have a baseline iMac Pro and custom built tower with similar specs (3.2Ghz Xeon W-2140B, 32GB RAM, Vega Pro 56 and i7-6700K, 32GB, 5700XT respectively) and they're both perfectly responsive. For many day to day things the difference between them and newer machines is negligible. For other things, my 5950X tower and M5 Max MBP run circles around them.
Both the 5950X tower and M5 Max MBP are deep into diminishing returns territory regardless, however. Aside from some extreme niche workloads like LLMs I can't imagine needing anything more powerful. They both have a ridiculous amount of headroom for the overwhelming majority of anything most people might want a computer for.
I recently built a pc with 5950x and 7900xt. What do you mean by diminishing returns?
Yep, I have an M4 MBP company issued laptop for work and in my day to day there's not a enough of a performance win to feel like I'm missing out for most tasks.
Sure, the Slack web app might initially load half a second faster since there's a lot of CPU bound JS executing but generally speaking I never feel like "wow this sucks" on my main machine. It's kind of the opposite, for a number of things my desktop machine feels faster than the MBP for overall "using the computer", with development heavy tasks (running Docker based web apps, browser tabs, various tools open, streaming music, etc.). It was like that when I ran Windows 10 Pro with WSL 2 and now native Linux with Arch + niri.
Even CPU bound tasks on my 12 year old box that I do a lot, such as editing a blog post on a static site with Hugo takes ~100ms to get live reloading with over 1,000 posts and drafts. I'm sure if I were constantly doing huge CPU bound tasks I'd have issues but I don't have that use case.
After recording 500+ videos, encoding isn't a problem too. If I record a 30 min video, it takes ~20 minutes to render but it's so easy to fit that into other areas of my life, like I'll record + edit a video and then render it while I walk.
I have a 2021 M1 pro and see no reason to upgrade it... ever?
I do web & general java work on it and it's plenty fast even using a memory hog like IntelliJ (which is typically disk bound anyway). Claude tells me that a new macbook would feel about 1.8x faster in my CPU-bound cases, which is not common.
If memory prices returned to normal and if local inference gets over the hump, I could see upgrading for local AI agents, but I'm fine waiting for a good long while on that.
I say all this as someone who, five years ago, was a perpetual upgrader: immediately bought new product and got excited for next product. Wonder if the future will see the end of that culture in tech and, looking back, it was a little silly and wasteful anyway.
I'm also using an iPhone mini 12 and it's fine.
I too have an M1 Pro and it does everything I need to do. I bought it in 2023, so it's 'only' 3.5 years old now.
Maybe this is the tipping point where hardware companies can't rely on the upgrade cycle for sales any more. I've always upgraded at least every three years, but with the combination of high RAM prices and good enough performance from an older machine, there is no need to.
There isn't much to upgrade to if all you want is a desktop for gaming, a non-workstation work box or just a decent laptop. Much like smartphones, there just hasn't been much innovation of late. A midrange gaming desktop from mid 2023, something like rtx 4070 and ryzen 7800x3d, can still play pretty much any video game on max settings and high framerate at 1440p, and has sufficient performance for most workstation-esque tasks as long as you have enough ram. Similarly, the only thing my spare macbook m2 lacks compared to m5 is hardware av1 decoding - the performance is worse, but I don't really notice it in normal usage, and macOS 27 runs perfectly well on it.
Local AI will crush any machine, of course, and if you need a 512gb ram box you'll probably need to sell both kidneys, but you're well past the average consumer territory with those.
So, fingers crossed nothing breaks down and that some of the funny money goes into R&D which will eventually trickle down to consumer devices in a few years (16TB gum stick SSDs at sane prices pretty please) instead of endless datacenter GPUs and SSDs that will be tossed into a shredder in x years.
My desktop PC turns 20 next year. I've never seen any need to upgrade it, went out of my way to build it with silent parts and it rarely if ever goes outside a single-digit CPU load (before anyone asks, software development and a bit of CAD work). I'll upgrade it when something in it physically fails, which means I'll need to replace it with new hardware with 5-10x the specs just to get the same performance.
My laptop is currently about two years into a typically 5-year lifespan, limited by when the keys start to fail rather than any need to upgrade it just because. The RAM in it is now worth more than the rest of the laptop.
Yeah, it really sucks I can't even afford a computer that can have two Chrome tabs open these days.
I've been using computers for more than 40 years now and the one component I have never seen fail is RAM.
All the other bits in a computer I've seen fail.
Anecdotally, RAM failures are more common than they used to be in previous decades, I assume due to increased capacities and smaller process nodes. Looser manufacturing standards may also play a part.
The component category I've never seen fail is CPU.
> The component category I've never seen fail is CPU.
The CPU can fail if the heatsink falls off! That is something that happens (I've had one come off in my hand that was being held on by nothing but hopes and dreams, fortunately not while the CPU was powered on). More likely in a desktop tower form factor.
I've worked in and around datacenters for a few decades now and I've seen pretty much everything fail, but power supplies in particular do so at a higher rate than I expected. I've had one literally start smoking in my home office recently too. Luckily, it didn't damage any components, but it was pretty dramatic and abrupt -- just powered on my desktop and got nothing but a fog machine coming out of the rear fan until I yanked the power cord a few seconds later.
My evga 1000w has been going strong for 11 years now. Cheaper power supplies fail often but if you buy quality and oversized they’ll outlast all your other components as they don’t become outdated.
Had the EVGA 1000w fail on me. It did not fail dramatically though, rather it refused to output high power. Got a replacement under warranty
It’s the caps that fail. Electrolytic caps have the highest failure rate of any passive component. My team tries to avoid them in our designs as much as possible. But you’re right, caps in a good design can easily last 20 years, making a power supply the longest lasting component of most builds.
My go to source for reviews was always jonnyguru.com but he closed up shop. Not sure who’s actually doing in-depth performance and component reviews these days.
What brand of power supply?
You didn't hold on to your Pentium 4 long enough. :-)
My main machines were PowerPC G3s/G4s/G5s back then with the P4 boxes I had taking secondary/tertiary roles, so that lines up.
Anecdatum, but mine still works :D
I had a 2012 mac book pro that burned out 2 different crucial memory sticks. Would have bricked the machine if it was the soldered-on type, but it was the last model apple sold that have swappable memory. Crucial had a lifetime warranty so they replaced them for free.
I used to game on it and I think the design just couldn't handle the cpu and dgpu being active for long periods, it would get extremely hot in the area close to where the memory was.
Most devices never test their memory and don’t have ecc, so you generally never know. Random instability can be fixed by restarting and your program not being in an area with bad bits anymore.
on older PC bios would perform a memory test - you may remember those - and that's where it would mark a bunch of pages dead/unusuable and it was not uncommon at all.
I recently had part of a 32 gig DIMM go bad on a 128 gig system. One of the larger VMs was spontaneously rebooting for no apparent reason. I was able to find the addresses with MemTest86 and map out 512 megs of the affected DIMM with the Linux kernel memmap option.
So you can still use the hardware via software fix?
Well, you’re lucky. I had to change laptop memory sticks a few times. Though not since they are soldered directly to the motherboard
Same, it's either bad to begin with or it's basically immortal.
This isn’t true anymore beginning with DDR4 speeds.
I've seen some fail. Might have had to do with the fact that the computers were literally flooded (river came up faster than the sandbaggers could keep up) while running.
I've seen computers brought back to life after flooding by lying in rice for a week, but they weren't turned on when the water hit (and not all survived).
I've had a few RAM sticks fail, but the ECC usually caught it first. Also had one case that somehow the stick slightly unseated itself; dunno how but it was out of service for months until someone opened it up and reseated the stick.
...granted though I've also seen a backpane on a server fail. I didn't think that was even possible until that point.
I built my machine in 2022 with 64GB of memory and upgraded to a 4090 at MSRP in 2023 so at this point I'm good but I fear the back end of the bathtub curve. I currently expect to have to hold on until 2029 and at that point the mobo and CPU will be 7 years old, and the GPU almost 6.
I bought a prebuilt with a 5090 a little over than one month ago, whole system was on sales.
The cost of the prebuilt is now lower than today 5090 price.
before the memory cartel, I was automatically putting in 64 or 128GB for my work flow as the prices just seems absurd not to.
I would absolutely love if some startup came up right now to manufacture and sell RAM at normal prices to everyone else and put Crucial et al out of business for price-gouging everyone just because they can.
DRAM fabs are multi-billion dollar investments which take years to come online. That's the whole reason we're in this situation, there is no quick fix available.
Surely the chinese are spinning up fabs as we speak?
China is making central decisions for its RAM makers (and who can complain now that the US isn't a legitimate free trade defender). I think their strategy could go in any direction to either get a small portion of still gouging or a large portion of a market with somewhat stale specs.
I'm really happy that I bought 32G of RAM and a 2T M.2 SSD for my desktop two years ago. In retrospect, of course, I should've bought 64G and 4T.
I still hope all this will come crashing down, there will be an oversupply of components and RAM will be cheaper than paper.
The net effect of a crash would be far worse than the benefit of getting a bit of a discount on RAM and storage.
While I share your optimism, I still don't fully understand why a crash will necessarily lead to an oversupply and lower prices for regular consumers. The components / RAM you are referencing are for enterprise use / data centers which in my limited understanding is not a 1:1 swap for the kind of components that your smartphone / car / fridge / gaming rig use. I would love for someone more informed than me to spell out the rationale here.
It seems the chokehold started from the very beginning of the supply chain (wafers), so if a crash were to occur I don't see how we wouldn't be doubly screwed. Lots of worthless enterprise gear being shopped on eBay + a scarcity of consumer grade components leading to sustained high prices.
"I've seen gluts not followed by shortages, but I've never seen a shortage not followed by a glut." - NNTaleb
My understanding is that it's fundamentally a fab capacity limit. At a given node size/technology (think 7nm, etc) they can only output so many wafers. If AI data centers are generating enormous demand for memory, then that's what those wafers are going to be used to for, unless they can be outcompeted, hence higher prices.
I'm not actually sure if enterprise designated memory is equivalent or not to consumer designated. Could be they are the same just packaged differently and/or with better binning. Either way, it's the same supply/demand dynamic at work.
Typically (not always!) server memory is 'registered' so won't work with consumer CPUs which run on un-registered.
Does 'registration' introduce anything physically different? Or could they be completely interoperable?
Yeah a RCD on the memory stick, it's PCB is designed around it. The actual DRAM chips themselves are not different though, which is why I mention it would be super easy to produce more consumer unregistered and less server registered at assembly time :)
Datacentre NVMe disk is still usable in a standard desktop. Sever memory less so, but essentially if there were no 'new' server market whatsoever then you could redirect 100% of memory production to consumer chips without enormous upheaval.
By the way I personally think this scenario is very unlikely to happen.
> If there were no 'new' server market whatsoever then you could redirect 100% of memory production to consumer chips without enormous upheaval.
> By the way I personally think this scenario is very unlikely to happen.
Can you explain why? I imagine pivoting to a much less lucrative consumer market when the time comes would lead to financial ruin?
We are starting from a frankly completely unimaginable hypothetical that there's 0 new "datacentre demand".
In that scenario producing consumer chips is still profitable, much less profitable but still much better than giving up and going home.
You will also unlock latent demand by the mere fact that consumer prices are reasonable again. Those who may have postponed a new MacBook or gaming PC will likely buy as soon as lower prices return.
> you could redirect 100% of memory production to consumer chips without enormous upheaval
They would never do that. By then the market has changed and they would produce at the limit of expected demand, certainly not intentionally causing oversupply.
Any new fabs on the horizon or do the powers that be expect the music to stop sooner than that?
CXMT is a memory fab that just opened in China. They achieved a 90% yield on DDR5. Hopefully that could ease up the supply squeeze.
I believe they've been building them like crazy since covid, but it takes a looong time for them to come online (like 5-10 years?)
I cross my fingers that my 10 years old laptop and desktop will hold until the crazyness ends
same. still rockin a 2016 era dell xps 13. I was about to pull the trigger on a few laptops but I always psych myself out because I assume prices will drop and I can pick them up secondhand. big mistake...
I bought an RX 6600 for $450 during the GPU shortage a few years ago. I know the AI boom is different than the crypto/COVID boom, but still. Don't be me.
I got a 3060 ti for like $900 at that time <melting-face-emoji>
I’m even more confused by the economics of the frontier model businesses. Even if they got preferential prices, they are still paying an inordinate amount for their infrastructure.
If it wasn’t economically feasible without VC/Nvidia money 3 years ago, how is it possibly economically feasible now at 10x prices for things like memory?
OpenAI (Stargate) kicked off the price increases a year ago by locking up 40% of the global supply of RAM output.
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/dram/openais-star...
And watch … $5 says they have nothing to do with the ram because even if there was enough power there’s no use case for this much spend
If I had to guess they’re just buying up ram to keep others from having it same way meta, Google, etc hired up engineers to keep others from having them
Also imagine people having their own cheap 2TB rigs at home for their own usage/inference, or a multitude of small providers serving/sharing capacity thanks to cheap available hardware.
But we cant have that, as the big guys are hoarding everything for themselves, so that you have to pay them instead.
>even if there was enough power there’s no use case for this much spend
According to them, demand for tokens already exceeds supply. Coding agents are very popular but burn through millions of tokens per hour.
The reasoning models that have powered breakthroughs in AI for math, coding, etc require substantially more compute than base LLMs.
I’ve been wondering this if you buy up all the memory you can ensure the competition cannot compete with huge investment raising the bar for competition. Of course this all sounds all conspiracy theory. Though without a place to power this or put it makes me wonder this.
next they will become successful business by reselling RAM
There is a reason NVIDIA and the hyperscalers are injecting so much money into them
It's pulling the ladder up behind them. OpenAI bought up more co tracts for wafers than they could even use. But now that means everyone else has to fight over what's left. This makes it too expensive to compete with OpenAI. No upstart can really afford to build infrastructure.
Storage has more than doubled as well. The same SSD (4TB M.2) I bought in September 2025 for £229 is now £500.
I also had another order where I paid £30 for a 1TB SSD (sata though) and it is now more than £100...
Not just SSDs, HDDs are also way more expensive. End of 2024 I bought 4 14TB drives for ~$250 CAD each, $400+ for even a refurb drive now.
The possibility that these fail does concern me.
And that's the really fun part of all this, that weak substitutes will also become more expensive. But on the bright side, I've got dozens of sticks of DDR3 RAM that I'm hoarding like Pokémon cards. Any day now, we'll get desperate enough to start using them again!
I noticed that resellers on ebay of used server equipment that I keep an eye on in Germany pulled all their DDR4 from surplus and used server racks and now list it separately for sale, at jacked up prices. Where you used to be able to see a used Gigabyte server listed with "128GB" "256GB" etc listed in the title, they now all say "0GB". They took extra effort, to pull used ram from older servers, and list it separate, just out of the greed of potentially capitalizing on this market.
The problem is... now for anyone looking to pickup a slightly older used/surplus server rack - you have the go and buy the (now marked up) RAM separate.
So... did they list the "0GB" racks with removed ram cheaper you ask? Nope. Many of them seem to be basically the same price as they were or even higher than they were, except now you're paying for RAM separate.
I bought a surplus Gigabyte server about 2 years ago off ebay for a home project, and I just went and the same seller still has some for sale, even older now than they were when I grabbed one, but they are 2x the price, and they don't come with any RAM, whereas I got one already populated as they were from the factory. Once you add that back in literally looking at 150-200% markup in the last 2 years on what was just surplus computer equipment that is 5+ years old.
Why would I voluntarily choose to sell the hardware I have for less than the going price? The odds of it getting picked up by a scalper and resold are extremely high. If I was sitting on a goldmine of old server hardware, I would absolutely be ripping out the RAM and selling it per stick in this market.
Greed? Resellers aren't charities, good for them if the value of their stock goes up. Besides, people buying server equipment aren't exactly starving, I bet most of them can either simply not buy the server, or cut some other expense.
> So... did they list the "0GB" racks with removed ram cheaper you ask?
Could this be an indication that there's a supply shortage/price increase of the remaining components in the rack? Or do you interpret it as people just trying their luck out of sheer greed?
I hate that I am no longer certain I don’t need to buy a new machine just in case.
I guess it's high time to stop using memory inefficient programming languages for any serious work.
Been long past that time, probably 15-20 years past. It's not even the languages its the 500 different layers of abstraction and abominations like Electron.
The fake economics of the AI sector are damaging the real economy. This is madness.
Even with AI pressure I'm willing to bet there's no need for prices to be this high. There has to be some price gouging/fixing going on. Same thing for nand and GPUs. Or else they're doing it to try to pressure people not to use local compute instead of the "cloud"
Memory manufacturers have gone through several cycles of lawsuits for market collusion at this point. It's gone from an open secret to just outright flaunting in our face.
Until the penalties involve actual jail time or a fine 10x larger than the profit they made from doing it, they couldn't care less.
Good. The more expensive memory is, the more everyone will be pushed into using cloud AI from hyperscalars.
They should each buy out a RAM manufacture, and make this the new normal.
It really is the best thing for AI adoption and the shareholders.
No, this is not good, in any way, except for AI shareholders (of which I assume you are one, else not rational to support this position).
Paperclipping here, greedily optimizing for shareholder value above all else. Please stop.
Some people really so need the /s huh
To be fair, the AI boosters are saying the exact same thing but mean it seriously. There is no way to distinguish without a tone indicator
> There is no way to distinguish without a tone indicator
And yet many of us aren't having any trouble distinguishing.
Given the number of upvotes my comment got and the other comments where people missed the sarcasm, I wouldn’t be too sure that many people have no trouble distinguishing
sadly, Poe's law scales exponentially on HN
what the heck
did you drop a '/s'?
> and the shareholders.
Your comment is an illustration of exactly what is wrong with this website. Given his preceding statements, I sincerely do not believe it is sarcasm.
I'm quite sure he's being sarcastic.
"The best good ever is to maximise shareholder profits" is a tired and cliched caricature that some people unfortunately take seriously. But this is too on the nose.
I’ve been on HN long enough to know that a disturbing number of people do actually believe that line and act accordingly.
The fact that, on HN, you can't be sure of that, tells you all you need to know.
I have the innate right to take what is said literally. Moreover, his preceding statements attempt to legitimize his concluding statement.
You also have the innate right to be off base, btw.
It's sarcasm, and the main tell is I'm not even bothering with pretense; just serving up the dystopia straight and acting like that's good.
But one of the "fun" things about HN is SV is so fucked up you can't even be sure someone doesn't actually sincerely believe that shit. And most of them are probably dumbasses with nothing to gain.
I appreciate sarcasm when it's clear. Marking it as "/s" prevents this whole line of discussion. As you noted in your last paragraph, it's hard to be sure without a marking.