251–260 of 449 posts
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 $1,000 for the same 2x64GB set.. I have no idea if/when prices will come back down but it sucks.
When the AI bubble bursts we can get back to the old price
I'm so mad about this, I need DDR5 for a new mini-PC I bought and prices have literally gone up by 2.5x.. 128GB used to be 400$ in June, and now it's over $1,000 for the same 2x64GB set.. I have no idea if/when prices will come back down but it sucks.
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I wouldn't be so sure. I've seen analyses making the case that this new phase is unlike previous cycles and DRAM makers will be far less willing to invest significantly in new capacity, especially into consumer DRAM over more enterprise DRAM or HBM (and even there there's still a significant risk of the AI bubble popping). The shortage could last a decade. Right now DRAM makers are benefiting to an extreme degree sin…
A LOT of businesses learned during Covid they can make more money by permanently reducing output and jacking prices. We might be witnessing the end times of economies of scale.
Enjoy yohr number goes up fad.
I'm so mad about this, I need DDR5 for a new mini-PC I bought and prices have literally gone up by 2.5x.. 128GB used to be 400$ 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. :-)
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Nonsense, it would force vertical de- integration. Chip fabs used to be like book publishers; you don't have to own a printing press to be an author. Carver Mead even described his vision of the industry that way. Nowadays you have to get your cell libraries and a large chunk of your toolchain from the fab. Of course it's laundered through cadence+synopsys, but it's still coming from the fab. You have to buy your mas…
> Chip fabs used to be like book publishers; I can still make a book like that in my basement. People do this as a hobby now. You can still build chips like that in your garage. People do this as a hobby now. These things DO NOT SCALE... you cant have 10,000 people running printing presses in their basement to crank out the NYT every day. A modern chip fab has more in common with the printer for the NYT than it does…
You can absolutely manufacture a convincingly-professional, current-generation book in your basement with a practically-small capital investment.
You cannot manufacture a convincingly-professional chip (being generous: feature size and process technology from the last two decades) in your basement without a 6-7 figure capital expenditure, and even then - good luck.
I'm especially annoyed that this is most likely intentional. (Not at all)openAI saw they are getting behind their competitors (gpt 5 and 5.1 were progressively worse for my use case - actual problem solving and tweaking existing scripts) are getting better. (Claude and sonnet were miles ahead and I used gpt only due to lower price). Now not only open weights models like Qwen3 and kimik2 exceeded their capability and…
Uh, the argument ended in some sort of stroke there. Kinda curious how the story
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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. Co…
But federal spending has been historically high ever since like the New Deal. Budget-to-GDP ratio in the US is close to 40%. (On that note, you should really consider federal + state combined rather than just federal.) In early 1900s this same ratio was around 5-10%. It has been increasing pretty much everywhere during the 20th century. It has made me wonder whether much of the prosperity we've seen and felt might no…
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…
This is part of how free markets self correct, misallocate resources and you run out of resources. You can blame irrational exuberance, bubbles, or whatnot markets are ultimately individual choices times economic power. Ai, Crypto, housing, Dotcom etc going back through history all had excess because it’s not obvious when to join and when to stop.
Except that these corporations will almost certainly get a bail out, under the auspices of national security or some other BS. The current admin is backed by the same VCs that are all in on AI.