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I was expecting the Milk V Titan to avoid this memory nonsense since it has two unpopulated DDR4 slots, but it has fallen off the radar like several other SBCs.
DRAM pricing is killing the everything market. We just had a vendor uplift our quote 50% per unit for some machines because of a mix of memory + supply chain issues.
That’s strange, there aren’t wider market supply chain issues outside of DRAM. Maybe your vendor is just throwing excuses around.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s strange, there aren’t wider market supply chain issues outside of DRAM. Maybe your vendor is just throwing excuses around.
SSDs and HDDs are being squeezed as well.
it's probably time to call those old retired programmers to ask them how to reduce software memory footprint or to teach that again
The title should say: "Collusion of large corporations promoting LLMs with RAM manufacturers is killing the hobbyist SBC market (and bankrupting anybody trying to get a PC or laptop)". Because we all know that DRAM prices have spiked since production is going to those infernal chatbot training data centers. Same as a lot of the electricity in some parts of the world, BTW.
> We all know that DRAM prices have spiked since production is going to those infernal chatbot training data centers
I know it's very fashionable here to talk about capitalism as some hand-washes-hand big corp organized scam, but if you put that ideology aside for a moment, you contradicted yourself here, I think.
I personally don't like conspiracy-theory-thinking. If I was a DRAM manufacturer and had to choose between servicing a single customer, who orders hundreds of millions worth of my product, or service a very large number of customers who order tiny amounts of the product a piece, then of course I would focus on the large client, because they are easier to service for the expected profit margin. I wouldn't even need to think about advertisement, sales, all that jazz. Looking at it from that perspective, it seems pretty logical to me that a spike in demand from datacenter operators would rise prices dramatically. I struggle to see room for collusion / conspiracy here.
it's probably time to call those old retired programmers to ask them how to reduce software memory footprint or to teach that again
The art is not lost, just not funded. Feel free to fund the programmers for your own software projects.
Most programmers are JS web devs writing client side code or server side CRUD.
I would guess < 10% of programmers writing code today get perf / valgrind out on the regular. I know I dont.
With prices steadily going up, for me it's starting to feel more sensible to repurpose the RAM sticks I've collected from old PC builds / laptops and just throw together small amd64 boxes instead of buying more RPis.
“Killing” is strong phrasing. Yes, a $250 mini PC I bought last year is now $350. Is this pricing bad? Yeah, compared to what it was. Is this the end of the world? Not really, and we’ve seen price spikes for all kinds of PC components in the past. It’s rarely permanent.
Not everyone earns tech bro salaries and can sustain a thousand cuts. Many hobbiests are scraping and saving money to acquire hardware. For some it very well msy be the end of their world.
> The price increases bring the 16GB Pi 5 up to $299.99. Meanwhile, a refurbished corporate laptop with 16GB RAM and a 512GB SSD can be yours for $199 [1] I'm sure there will still be people who want the Pi 5 but at these prices, I ain't one of them. [1] https://www.ebay.com/itm/327079631563
You also better hope the aliexpress dont figure out a way to get the RAM out of those things because they will start harvesting it for sure if there is money to made.
it's probably time to call those old retired programmers to ask them how to reduce software memory footprint or to teach that again