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1GB Raspberry Pi 5, and memory-driven price rises

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41–50 of 124 posts

Re: 1GB Raspberry Pi 5, and memory-driven price rises

#41
post #16

It’s sad to see the one area of life that has long resisted inflation (computing) now succumb to inflationary forces. Other than emergency situations such as COVID-19, I’m used to seeing prices going down over time for computers and their components. It’s one of the rare bright spots when everything else is escalating in price, and now that’s disappearing.

I've seen prices for memory, SSDs, thunderbolt hubs, and thunderbolt/high end USB cables, flatline or get worse over the last 3 or so years.

Re: 1GB Raspberry Pi 5, and memory-driven price rises

#43
post #16

It’s sad to see the one area of life that has long resisted inflation (computing) now succumb to inflationary forces. Other than emergency situations such as COVID-19, I’m used to seeing prices going down over time for computers and their components. It’s one of the rare bright spots when everything else is escalating in price, and now that’s disappearing.

It's not inflation tho ? It's just rise in demand.

Seriously doubt it.

Re: 1GB Raspberry Pi 5, and memory-driven price rises

#44
post #16

It’s sad to see the one area of life that has long resisted inflation (computing) now succumb to inflationary forces. Other than emergency situations such as COVID-19, I’m used to seeing prices going down over time for computers and their components. It’s one of the rare bright spots when everything else is escalating in price, and now that’s disappearing.

Memory price fluctuations due to market demand and monetary inflation - the increase in quantity of fiat money, diluting its value - are two separate and unrelated things.

And both are at play here - it's not just RAM, to ascribe it to AI

Re: 1GB Raspberry Pi 5, and memory-driven price rises

#45
post #27
post #16

It’s sad to see the one area of life that has long resisted inflation (computing) now succumb to inflationary forces. Other than emergency situations such as COVID-19, I’m used to seeing prices going down over time for computers and their components. It’s one of the rare bright spots when everything else is escalating in price, and now that’s disappearing.

> time for computers and their components Seems it has been the opposite for some components like GPUs though for years (well before the AI boom)

Speaking as someone who used to buy them regularly to support a PC gaming hobby stretching back to the original glQuake -- GPUs were on average very reasonably priced prior to the crypto boom that preceded the AI boom.

So its technically not AI "ruining everything" here, but there was a nice, long before-time of reasonable pricing.

Re: 1GB Raspberry Pi 5, and memory-driven price rises

#46
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not inflation tho ? It's just rise in demand.

Seriously doubt it.

When Sam Altman buys 40% of global DRAM wafer production, that looks like a demand increase to the market.

Re: 1GB Raspberry Pi 5, and memory-driven price rises

#47
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently OpenAI locked down 40% of the global DRAM supply for their Stargate project, which then caused everyone else to start panic-buying, and now we're here: https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/

I dont even get this trend, wouldnt OpenAI be buying ECC RAM only anyway? Who in their right mind runs this much infrastructure on NON ECC RAM??? Makes no sense to me. Same with GPUs they aren't buying your 5090s. Peoples perception is wild to me.

ECC RAMs utility is overblown. Major companies often use off-the-shelves non enterprise parts for huge server installations, including regular RAM. The rare bit flipping is hardly a major concern at their scale, and for their specific purposes.

Re: 1GB Raspberry Pi 5, and memory-driven price rises

#48
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dont even get this trend, wouldnt OpenAI be buying ECC RAM only anyway? Who in their right mind runs this much infrastructure on NON ECC RAM??? Makes no sense to me. Same with GPUs they aren't buying your 5090s. Peoples perception is wild to me.

I seriously doubt that single bit errors on the scale of OpenAI workloads really matters very much, particularly for a domain that is already noisy.

Till they hit your program memory. We just had really interesting incident where one of the Ceph nodes didn't fail but started acting erratically, bringing whole cluster to a crawl, once a failing RAM module had some uncorrectable errors.

And that was caught because we had ECC. If not for that we'd be replacing drives, because metrics made it look like it is one of OSDs slowing to a crawl, which usual reason is drive dying.

Of course, chance for that is pretty damn small, bit also their scale is pretty damn big.

Re: 1GB Raspberry Pi 5, and memory-driven price rises

#49
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently OpenAI locked down 40% of the global DRAM supply for their Stargate project, which then caused everyone else to start panic-buying, and now we're here: https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/

I dont even get this trend, wouldnt OpenAI be buying ECC RAM only anyway? Who in their right mind runs this much infrastructure on NON ECC RAM??? Makes no sense to me. Same with GPUs they aren't buying your 5090s. Peoples perception is wild to me.

ECC memory is a bit like RAID: A consumer-level RAM stick will (traditionally) have 8 8-bit-wide chips operating basically in RAID-0 to provide 64-bit-wide access, whereas enterprise-level RAM sticks will operate with 9 8-bit-wide chips in something closer to RAID-4 or -5.

But they are all exactly the same chips. The ECC magic happens in the memory controller, not the RAM stick. Anyone buying ECC RAM for servers is buying on the same market as you building a new desktop computer.

Re: 1GB Raspberry Pi 5, and memory-driven price rises

#50
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently OpenAI locked down 40% of the global DRAM supply for their Stargate project, which then caused everyone else to start panic-buying, and now we're here: https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/

It's kind of depressing to see that it takes just one asshole to screw the entire electronic market. If you read this, Sam, FU.

That really isn't unprecedented. We need high RAM prices for manufacturers to expand fabs, supply overshoots demand because the AI bubble will contract to some extend and then we'll have cheap RAM once again. Classic cycle.
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