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

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

#101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> We need high RAM prices for manufacturers to expand fab

Manufactures aren't dumb, they lost a lot of money in the last cycle and aren't playing that game anymore. No additional capacity is planned, OEMs are simply redirecting existing capacity towards high-margin products (HBM), instead of chasing fragile demand.

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

#102

What surprises me the most is the 1GB option is even viable though I can imagine this will be for IoT users who shove Pi's into things doing embedded stuff where a kernel with a few user space things along with maybe a container are doing all the work.

> What surprises me the most is the 1GB option is even viable...

There are plenty of non-IoT use cases that are viable with 1GB of general-purpose compute. Hell, I rented an obscenely cheap 512MB VPS until recently, and only abandoned it because its ancient kernel version was a security risk.

Most of my RPi tasks are not memory-bound

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

#104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got one of the Newegg circulars in my email advertising a sweet little uATX AMD server board and got to thinking that my home FreeBSD server could use a CPU bump and more memory. As soon as I saw how much 128GB of DDR5 ECC would cost my jaw dropped and noped the fuck out. The cheapest 32GB modules are around $300 and upwards of $500. Thought I was going to gift myself early this Christmas. Depressing indeed.

Indeed, it makes mini computers with soldered ram actually end up being quite cheap by comparison. HP will currently sell you 128GB AMD or Nvidia boxes for 1.7-2.8k depending on your flavor of choice. Not ECC though.

The strix halo mini workstation is 128gb of ecc. Good machine. Source https://h20195.www2.hp.com/v2/GetPDF.aspx/c09086887

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

#105
post #98
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firstly, this is not due to inflation. The price increase is explicitly (per the article even) due to increased market demand that is causing raised prices. Secondly, Computing has always been subject to inflation. It cannot escape inflation. You may not notice it , perhaps due to the increase in performance but the cost of parts definitely has risen in the same tiers if you look over a long enough period to avoid pr…

> the cost of parts definitely has risen in the same tiers if you look over a long enough period This is especially apparent if you’re a hardware manufacturer and have to buy the same components periodically, since the performance increase that consumers see doesn’t appear.

> if you... buy the same components periodically... the performance increase that consumers see doesn’t appear.

Good point and that should properly be called inflation in the semiconductor sector. We always have general inflation, but the different sectors of the economy exhibit different rates of inflation depending on the driving forces and their strength.

As of today, tariffs are the major driver of inflation and semiconductors are hit hard because the only high-volume, reasonable quality/price country has been practically excluded from the the US market by export bans and prohibitively high tariffs - that's China of course.

The other producers are in a near monopoly situation and are also acting like a cartel without shame or fear of law... which isn't there to begin with.

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

#107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I understand hating at people like Musk who destroys human lifes but what is Sam Altman doing? Because of (c) of images or just because he bought ram?

Inefficiently (from society’s perspective) allocating massive amounts of resources? Why is he specifically being singled out I’m absolutely that certain..

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

#108
post #35
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenAI bought out Samsung and SK Hynixes DRAM wafers in advance, so they'll prioritize producing whatever OpenAI wants to deploy whether that's DDR/LPDDR/GDDR/HBM, with or without ECC. That means way less wafers for everything else so even if you want a different spec you're still shit out of luck.

You forgot to mention that everyone else also raised their price because, you know, who don't like free money. Last year I brought two 8G DDR3L RAM stick made by Gloway for around $8 each, now the same stick is priced around $22, a 275% increase in price. SSD makers are also increasing their prices, but that started one or two years ago, and they did it again recently (of course). It looked like I'll not be buying an…

> you know, who don't like free money.

Yes but otherwise you’d get huge shortages and would be unlikely to be able to buy it at all. Also a significant proportion of the surplus currently going to manufacturers/etc. would go to various scalper and resellers

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

#109

What surprises me the most is the 1GB option is even viable though I can imagine this will be for IoT users who shove Pi's into things doing embedded stuff where a kernel with a few user space things along with maybe a container are doing all the work.

you would be surprised to find out some of us are doing fine with 512mb pi zero w.
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