My own PC died and now I’m locked out of my entire Steam library for the foreseeable future. A $2000 PC is literally a downgrade from what I bought 10 freaking years ago. What the freaking hell.
Ouch, yeah. I hate to say it, but I have been using Geforce Now ($130 a year when they run their regular discounts) Premium for most of my gaming needs. I hate the lack of competition in the space (Onlive, Google's goofy ass gaming thing), but at this time cloud rendered gaming is at least 1 order of magnitude cheaper than building your own system. I play from a browser tab in Linux.
Too high latency for Clair Obscura (and obviously Dark Souls) level reaction time. Though surprisingly passable for most FPS (I just played "Ready or Not" on it yesterday, and it was acceptable).
The alternative is to have shortages. If there is demand for N chips at $X price, but you only have N/2 chips, then half the people aren't going to be able to buy them. The people who really need the chips, and would be willing to pay a lot more than $X for them, will be competing with people who are only willing to pay $X for them. You will end up getting scalping and shortages and hoarding. Since people know that t…
What's the functional difference between "I can't afford it" and "I can't get it due to a shortage"? (Other than a convenient-for-some/inconvenient-for-others "let the richest get the stuff first!" shift, and just pretending that we are all fully independent actors instead of members of a community?)
The supplier receives more money in the first of those scenarios, which (a) can be used to expand its own supply and (b) creates a demand signal for competitors to attempt to clear the barriers to entering the market.
I don't think that anything you said is wrong but I also don't think that memory consumption is going back to the old baseline... well, ever. Memory is just too useful now that you can use it to drive cars and write code.
> Memory is just too useful now that you can use it to drive cars and write code. You can use the state of the art from 20 years ago for that.
You can't, the bandwidth is too low (unless you mean hiring a human, in which case it's quite expensive)
My own PC died and now I’m locked out of my entire Steam library for the foreseeable future. A $2000 PC is literally a downgrade from what I bought 10 freaking years ago. What the freaking hell.
What specs could have possibly bought 10 year ago? And what part of your pc died? CPU? Motherboard? PSU?
So LLM profiteers have bought up all the consumer RAM for the next several years in order to deliver more of a service we're already oversaturated with that doesn't turn a profit..? I guess by then there'll be no consumers left with jobs to afford a PlayStation 6, so no problem. Except how will the AI trainers find revenue? If maximum potential is reached by laying off 90% of workers at companies that sell stuff... h…
>doesn't turn a profit. This isn't the condemnation of AI that you think it is. When you are building an industry, you don't want to be in a "cash cow" phase. Because the person who is willing to reinvest profits (and further: seek and sink investments) into growth and innovation is going to eat your lunch. ~8 years ago my BIL condemned Tesla with "they aren't profitable" and I explained this to him. Now they're a tr…
Tesla is a trillion dollar company because it's a meme stock. It has a 300 P/E
i feel like 90% of complaints about ram shortages i've read here could be solved by realizing that we mostly update devices for status reasons we would collectively all be better off by being forced to stick to older devices, value software optimized for proper resource management, and learn that instead of reflexively accepting "problems" we can see them as choices enjoy the rat race
Something like Windows can't even keep it's cool on my lunar lake 32 GB laptop while NixOS with Niri works great on an 8GB guy
The alternative is they could charge more. They could. And people would pay it.
The problem isn't the price. No matter how much you pay, you can't take delivery of a chip that doesn't exist. Now, you could raise prices to the point where you destroy demand. But that's a tricky window to maneuver through.
>> Now, you could raise prices to the point where you destroy demand
Isn't that topic .. the first chapter of any economics 101 course? Supply and demand and how they influence each other? You think after hundreds of years of economic study we don't have any sort of grasp on these absolute most basic concepts?
Maybe not a traditional disruptive startup but isn’t CXMT from China stepping in to build all those fabs? Previously investing in that space didn’t make a lot of sense. Now that there are a lot of consumers willing to buy something they can build and sell at a price between the previous low point and the current high point. The only tricky thing is that the current shortages need to continue until the fans are well u…
It takes several years to get production and distribution started. You’re not going to see a rush chasing current consumer ram prices like you would a popular toy or something.
Distribution is already mostly in place. The existing channels have run dry so they can be filled with the new supply.
Building things happens a bit quicker in PRC compared to the US. If they see it as a way to undercut the US/Taiwan hegemony on the chip markets, it might even just fun to do it.
Yeah, just barely, and only if you don't value warranty or build time. I'm also not super sure you could get something together that is somewhat compact like the steam machine and still be cheaper. I've built two PCs in the last 5 years and both have had parts that were broken from the factory... There is something to be said about being able to hand off troubleshooting and replacement. I had ASRock pointing fingers…
I always get the highest end components I can find, and I try to stick with Asus and not the cheapest PSU. I've never had anything fail, and I do this every 5 years or so. I hate having to put the fan on the CPU after sticking that in the motherboard, and the cabling is always annoying (although 5x less annoying than it was in the days of IDE and SCSI ribbon cables). Do you trust the brand and models of the gear you'…
I bought from Newegg both times. The first time it was an ASRock MB that was dead, and to be fair, the issue here was that some part was on backorder so by the time everything arrived and I put it together I had to deal with ASRock RMA rather than the Newegg returns department. Typically I choose pretty high end components as well, I do Corsair PSUs & RAM, Samsung SSD, ASUS GPU. Definitely learned my lesson on the MB and went with ASUS for the latest build as well... though that MB's DIMM_B slot was dead. I'm just glad I ended up getting 2x16G of RAM right away instead of starting with 1x16 like I originally planned, because I would have never realized the problem until getting the second stick