This website mentions the price increase for DDR, but AI companies use Nvidia GPUs, which probably use HBM or GDDR. So I assume the respective price increase for soldered-on memory on graphics cards is even steeper.
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
#162Well, patience as a consumer might pay off in the next year or so when the music stops and hyperscalers are forced to dump their inventories. There still isn't a clear path to profitability for any of these AI products and the capital expenditure has been enormous.
> Well, patience as a consumer might pay off in the next year or so when the music stops and hyperscalers are forced to dump their inventories. Their inventories are not what consumers use. Consumer DDR5 motherboards normally take UDIMMs. Server DDR5 motherboards normally take RDIMMs. They're mechanically incompatible, and the voltages are different. And the memory for GPUs is normally soldered directly to the board…
I imagine the cost is primarily in the actual DRAM chips on the DIMM. So availability of RDIMMs on the market will affect DRAM prices anyway. These days lots of motherboards come with Oculink, etc. and you can get a U.2 PCIe card for rather cheap.
I put together a small server with mostly commodity parts.
Re: Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening
#163Re: Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wouldn't mind my own offline Gemini or ChatGPT 5. But even if the hardware and model were free, I don't know how I'd afford the electricity.
If you can't afford the electricity to afford to run the model on free hardware, you'd certainly never be able to afford the subscription to the same product as a service! But anyway, the trick is to run it in the winter and keep your house warm.
I think you're underestimating economies of scale, and today's willingness of large corporations to provide cutting-edge services at a loss.
Re: Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is a weird form of centralized planning. Except there's no election to get on to the central committee, it's like in the Soviet era where you had to run in the right circles and have sway in them. There's too much group-think in the executive class. Too much forced adoption of AI, too much bandwagon hopping. The return-to-office fad is similar, a bunch of executives following the mandates of their board, all becau…
how is this centralized planning? It’s a corporate decision making operating in a free market to optimize for what majority shareholders want (though the majority of shares are owned by few).
A free market where the government participates with billions in investment and tax cuts, yes.
Re: Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
Games eventually will move to consoles and the whole PC industry will take a huge hit.
I don't know if the term console even makes sense any more. It's a computer without a keyboard and mouse. And as soon as you do that, it's a PC. So I don't see how this makes any sense or will ever happen.
Actually, a console is worse than a PC. It's main reason for existence is to enforce DRM on the user to protect copyright/IP.
Re: Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening
#167So first it was bitcoin/crypto, now it's ai. pc gaming is dead at this point. i wonder if it will force developers to care about doing more with less hardware and optimize now.
Many studios don't even hire rendering engineers anymore. Much of AAA is UE5 slop. And then there is the looming AI slop, which publishers are already thinking about. I think it'll burst at some point, but it'll get worse before it gets better.
Re: Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening
#168Somebody do the math on when we will reliably start running out of Grid Power. Than only this "AI builout" will slow down. Manufactiring generators is boring, and very less invested than manufacturing AI servers.
Also the transformers. (The big magnetic ones for voltage convetion)
Re: Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening
#169I'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)
A waiver is a waiver. The cost is per square mm.
It’s pure supply and demand
Re: Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's around 3.4% GDP. That puts us in the top 10% or so worldwide, but it's not ridiculously high. It's on a similar level as countries such as Morocco and Colombia, which aren't known for excessive military spending. It's still kind of high for a country with no nearby enemies, but for the most part, US military spending is large because the US economy is large.
Military spending is a type of wealfare for the wealthy it is one of the only forms of public or government spending that doesn't crowd out private investors, the way public housing or publicly funded hospitals do. The high military spending and the contractor class often vote more conservative than typical for their demographic and economic peers It's been high since WW2, with maybe a slight drop in the late 70s. Th…
Our national debt is from our unwillingness to raise taxes to balance the budget. Federal spending is somewhat high historically, but not absurdly so. Relative to the economy, it's at about the same level as it was in the 1980s. Measured as a percentage of GDP, the current military budget is the lowest since before the Second World War, aside from a brief period at the end of the 1990s where it was slightly lower.
Comparing budgets by adjusting for inflation doesn't make any sense. A budget that served a country of 218 million in 1976 would, when adjusted for inflation, serve a country of 218 million in 2026. Percentage of GDP is what you want to look at.