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Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening

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Re: Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening

#151

Post by refurb »

mrsilencedogood wrote: post #3

All I can say is, - the insane frothing hype behind AI is showing me a new kind of market failure - where resources can be massively misallocated just because some small class of individuals THINK or HOPE it will result in massive returns. Even if it squeezes out every single other sector that happens to want to use SDRAM to do things OTHER than buffer memory before it's fed into a PCIE lane for a GPU. - I'm really R…

> the insane frothing hype behind AI is showing me a new kind of market failure

I see people using "market failure" in weird ways lately. Just because someone thinks a use for a product isn't important, doesn't mean it's a market failure. It's actually the opposite - consumers are purchasing it at a price they value it.

Someone who doesn't really need 128GB of ram won't pay the higher cost, but someone who does need it will.

Re: Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening

#152

Post by indemnity »

sbarre wrote: post #6

I'm so mad about this, I need DDR5 for a new mini-PC I bought and prices have literally gone up by 2.5x.. 128GB used to be 400$ in June, and now it's over $1,000 for the same 2x64GB set.. I have no idea if/when prices will come back down but it sucks.

Wow, no kidding. I checked my BOM for the 9950 build I did a year ago, RAM price has doubled for the exact same DDR5-6000 sticks.

Re: Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening

#153

Post by refurb »

octoberfranklin wrote: post #73
Retr0id wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder, is there any way to avoid this kind of market failure? Even a planned economy could succumb to hype - promises that improved societal efficiency are just around the corner.

A tax on scale . Yeah I know HN is going to hate me for saying that. If a big company and a few small companies all have identical costs for producing a product, society is better served by having it produced by the few small companies than the one big company. Once "better served" is quantified, you know the coefficient for taxation. Make no mistake, this coefficient will be a political football, and will be fought…

> If a big company and a few small companies all have identical costs for producing a product, society is better served by having it produced by the few small companies than the one big company.

How so? Costs will be higher with multiple small products, resulting in higher costs for customers. That's the opposite of "society is served better".

We draw the line at monopolies, which makes sense.

Re: Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening

#154

Post by nine_k »

Loughla wrote: post #126
torben-friis wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The funniest thing is that somehow the executive class is even more out of touch than they used to be. At least before there was a certain common baseline derived from everyone watching the same news and reading the same press. Now they are just as enclosed in their thought bubbles as everyone else. It is entirely possible for a tech CEO to have a full company of tech workers despising the current plan and yet that p…

The out of touch leader is a trope that I'm willing to bet has existed as long as we've had leaders. I remember first hearing the phrase "yes man" in relation to a human ass kisser my dad worked with in like 1988. It's very easy to unknowingly surround yourself with syncophants and hangers on when you literally have more money than some countries. This is true now and has been true forever. I'm not sure they're more…

Out-of-touch leaders existed for millennia. The "Emperor's New Clothes" tale was published in 1837 as a reproduction of a much older folk take. Sima Qian criticizes out-of-touch lords and emperors in his book about ancient history, written in 1th century BC. Maybe there is even older evidence.

Re: Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening

#155

Post by thway15269037 »

NegativeK wrote: post #124
ekropotin wrote: post #77

Just when I start seriously getting into homelabbing

Now you can pretend you're an enterprise IT environment with arbitrary and ridiculous purchasing constraints! But for real, that sucks. The alternatives -- much older, used RAM -- may not be very attractive, depending on what you're doing.

I had a simple proxmox/k8s cluster going, and fitting RAM for nodes was the last on my list. It was cheapo ol' DDR4.

Where I live price for my little cluster project gone up from around ~400 usd in july (for 5 node setup) to almost 2000 usd right now. I just refreshed page and it's up by 20% day-to-day. Welp. I guess they are going to stay with 8gb sticks for a while.

Re: Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening

#156

Post by laterium »

Tempest1981 wrote: post #144
sbarre wrote: post #6

I'm so mad about this, I need DDR5 for a new mini-PC I bought and prices have literally gone up by 2.5x.. 128GB used to be 400$ in June, and now it's over $1,000 for the same 2x64GB set.. I have no idea if/when prices will come back down but it sucks.

Why do we all need 128GB now? I was happy with 32. Close a few Chrome tabs, and save some DDR5 for the rest of us. :-)

Why did you waste all your money on 32gb when 4gb is enough? Why did we all need 32gb?

Re: Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening

#157

Post by chii »

incompatible wrote: post #57
minkeymaniac wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doubled in the last 4 months https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5Zc-FsUDCM Upgraded by adding 64GB.. last Friday I sold the 32 GB I took out for what I paid for the 64 GB in July... insane

Time to start scouring used-PC sales to reclaim the RAM and sell it for a profit?

but why wouldn't that used-PC simply increase in price due to the components becoming more expensive?

Re: Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening

#158

Post by vlovich123 »

epistasis wrote: post #30
automatic6131 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need better antitrust and anti-monopoly enforcement. Break up the biggest companies, and then they'll have to actually participate in markets.

This was Lina Khan's big thing, and I'd argue that our current administration is largely a result of Silicon Valkey no longer being able to get exits in the form or mergers and IPOs. Perhaps a better approach to anti-monopoly and anti-trust is possible, but I'm not sure anybody knows what that is. Khan was very well regarded and I don't know anybody who's better at it. Another approach would be a wealth and income ta…

Sorry, how did she stand in the way of IPOs? She was against the larger players providing easy off-ramps to smaller players but I don’t recall anything about IPOs. Indeed, Figma’s IPO is precisely because she undid the pending Adobe / Figma merger if I recall correctly.

Re: Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening

#159

Post by chii »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #105
fpoling wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a better solution is exponential tax on a company size. I.e. once a company starts to earn above, say, 1 billion, it will be taxed by income by ever increasing amount. Or put it another way, use taxes to break the power law and winner takes effect all into a Gaussian distribution of company sizes.

> I think a better solution is exponential tax on a company size. I.e. once a company starts to earn above, say, 1 billion, it will be taxed by income by ever increasing amount. This is in the right spirit but you want two things to be different about it. The first is that the threshold for a given industry doesn't make sense as a dollar amount, it makes sense as a market share percentage. Having more than 15% market…

> anybody can sue them.

who bears the costs of this suit?

And who determines what makes for a good market share size to be the threshold?

And by having such a rule, an industry that would have higher efficiency to when consolidated would not be able to (but you wouldn't know). It's a bad set of policy imho.

A better way would be for gov't to increase competition by adding supply, or demand, whichever one is the bottleneck to competition. If a company, such as AWS, is getting a lot of marketshare, but their profit margins is still high, then the gov't should incentivize competition by funding or giving loans to businesses that want to compete with AWS.

However, if AWS's profit margins, even at high market share, remains very low (e.g., amazon's commerce side), then there's no need for the gov't to "step in" at all, as there would be no incentive for any competitor to try enter the market due to low margins.

Re: Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening

#160

Post by addaon »

ajb wrote: post #109
sbarre wrote: post #6

I'm so mad about this, I need DDR5 for a new mini-PC I bought and prices have literally gone up by 2.5x.. 128GB used to be 400$ in June, and now it's over $1,000 for the same 2x64GB set.. I have no idea if/when prices will come back down but it sucks.

Dram alternates between feast and famine; it's the nature of a business when the granularity of investment is so huge (you have a fab or you don't, and they cost billions -maybe trillions by now). So, it will swing back. Unfortunately it looks like maybe 3-5 years on average, from some analysis here: https://storagesearch.com/memory-boom-bust-cycles.html (That's just me eyeballing it, feel free to do the math)

Nothing costs trillions.
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