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DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market

jeffgeerling.com

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Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market

#171

Post by shiroiuma »

SkyeCA wrote: post #45
homebrewer wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you looked at how expensive international shipping is? eBay covers just a few countries, the rest of us can't buy there because we'll be paying 10 times the cost of hardware to get it over here. I already moaned about this recently, but to briefly reiterate: the only hardware that's becoming available for most people in my region are Frankenstein desktops built from heavily used 10+ year old Xeons running on sus…

> Have you looked at how expensive international shipping is? It really shocks me how bad shipping has gotten. It's nearly unaffordable to buy things on eBay from the US as a Canadian due to shipping costs, so I can only imagine just how bad it is for people from other countries.

It's probably unaffordable for anyone to buy things from the US due to shipping costs, because the Trump administration has completely screwed up everything there with tariffs and mismanagement of the USPS and more. But the US is not the world. A better comparison is how much it cost to ship things from China a year ago compared to today.

Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market

#172

Post by akomtu »

mhb wrote: post #23
elwebmaster wrote: post #21

It's terrible. Fake money is fueling the exhaustion of real resources in search of questionable outcomes ("AGI"). Imagine if all of these money were invested in curing cancer.

Imagine if AI cures cancer.

Curing cancer isn't profitable. But even if someone tries to mix AI and biotech, the result will be a dangerous medical slop.

Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market

#173

Post by kelnos »

JollySharp0 wrote: post #156
Dylan16807 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Did you not read what I said? I couldn't even get a replacement video card at any price during the height of COVID and believe you I had the money to pay for one. You're comparing to memory sticks that went up 6x. If you were offering anywhere near 6x MSRP and you couldn't get a video card... I don't believe you. https://www.pcmag.com/news/scalpers-have-sold-50000-nvidia-r... https://www.pcmag.com/news/read-it-and-…

I am in the UK. Not the US! > If you were offering 5x MSRP and you couldn't get a video card... I don't believe you. My 1080Ti had died. I had to use a 8800GTS from the late 2000s for about a year. As that was the only GPU I had. I have no iGPU on my CPU. There was at one time, no stock available. Not on Amazon, Not on Overclockers, Not on Scan. They had some weird lotto system taking place on most sites. Scalpers cl…

> Scalpers claimed to have cards. But I wouldn't risk sending a lot of money to some random seller on ebay.

Ah, so you could have bought one, but you judged the available suppliers to be too risky.

Completely fair, but then it's not true that you couldn't buy one "at any price". It was just not a price+risk that you were willing to take.

Also, re: Raspberry Pis, you couldn't always get the exact RAM configuration you wanted, but they were pretty continuously available during COVID on Aliexpress. You did have to pay 3-5x normal price, but you could do it. I really needed one after one at home died, and paid the 3x markup, and it was annoying but fine. Not sure if Aliexpress is equally as available in the UK as it is here in the US, though.

Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market

#174

Post by michaelt »

kube-system wrote: post #139
michaelt wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right that fuel prices have risen. But usually the impact of fuel prices is mostly felt on bulkier, lower cost items first. After all, a truck can carry a 10kg sack of rice, or a 10kg nvidia gpu. If shipping costs for 10kg rise by $15 the sack of rice has doubled in price, but the GPU is only 0.5% more expensive.

For a truck yeah, but across the ocean, it isn't quite that simple because GPUs and grains are sent in different types of ships (or different modes entirely) that aren't interchangeable.

You're right - perishable goods have to be shipped fast. Your bananas, berries, fresh fish, and not-fron-concentrate juice can't be on some slow-steaming container ship with the furniture, clothes, building materials and vehicles.

The GPUs can though.

Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market

#175

Post by Dylan16807 »

JollySharp0 wrote: post #164
Dylan16807 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, UK, maybe that changes things more than I expected. But what about ebay and the sites that replaced classified ads? And is it unreasonable for me to say that you could have bought a US listing and had it reshipped? Edit since you added: Scalpers claimed to have cards. But I wouldn't risk sending a lot of money to some random seller on ebay. Even with ebay's buyer protection? Well not to be mean but I think "I r…

> Even with ebay's buyer protection? I've had problems with it before (I can't remember specifics as it was a while ago). I'd rather not going through the hassle and/or risk in the first place. There are still plenty of scams on ebay. During this era there were people scamming. e.g the box for a GPU. Listing the entire specs and then putting right at the bottom of the listing it was only the box and not the card. > W…

I wasn't trying to be a smart arse at all. "I couldn't get a new card from a store" and "I couldn't get a card at all" are extremely different claims in my mind.

I'd rate my pedantry level as quite low. From my point of view this is not a nitpick.

Especially because you emphasized "at any price". It's the scalpers and the used market that were selling at any price. Sticking to reputable stores means sticking close to MSRP.

Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market

#176

Post by pilgrim0 »

zie wrote: post #28
jonathantf2 wrote: post #7

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.

At work we just got a quote to upgrade a couple servers, original price a few years ago was ~ $150k. Essentially the same hardware, just newer, is now quoted at ~ $450k. We decided to just keep our current hardware for now and extend a support contract for ~ normal price.

I wonder how long these shortages have to last until software developers are required to be mindful of RAM usage like in the decades before,

Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market

#177

Post by kelnos »

JollySharp0 wrote: post #164
Dylan16807 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, UK, maybe that changes things more than I expected. But what about ebay and the sites that replaced classified ads? And is it unreasonable for me to say that you could have bought a US listing and had it reshipped? Edit since you added: Scalpers claimed to have cards. But I wouldn't risk sending a lot of money to some random seller on ebay. Even with ebay's buyer protection? Well not to be mean but I think "I r…

> Even with ebay's buyer protection? I've had problems with it before (I can't remember specifics as it was a while ago). I'd rather not going through the hassle and/or risk in the first place. There are still plenty of scams on ebay. During this era there were people scamming. e.g the box for a GPU. Listing the entire specs and then putting right at the bottom of the listing it was only the box and not the card. > W…

> What you are doing is being hyper-pedantic. It is fucking tiresome when people do this online.

That's not pedantry. There's a huge difference between "they were unavailable and I couldn't get one at any price" and "I could have bought one from a scalper but I didn't trust them". Even if it's reasonable not to trust them (it is!), the first statement is sensational, and untrue, especially considering you emphasized "at any price" in your comment upthread.

> If you are going to be a smart arse, I will modify my statement to say "I could not get a card from a reputable online store as they were all out of stock and did not wish to risk buying from a less reputable one".

That's what you should have said in the first place; that would have been honest and correct.

And please, there's no need to call the other poster names. That's uncalled-for and childish. You seem to be new here (9-day-old account), so please read the site guidelines and turn it down a notch or three.

Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market

#178

Post by JollySharp0 »

josephg wrote: post #127
jokoon wrote: post #6

it's probably time to call those old retired programmers to ask them how to reduce software memory footprint or to teach that again

Taking a big, complex, already well optimised program like Chrome or the linux kernel and optimising the memory footprint is hard. But 90% of programs are just crappy web apps that nobody has even bothered to optimise at all. (Sometimes wrapped in electron or something.) If you go look, you often discover that 90% of the requests are useless, or at least could be combined. That 60% of bandwidth is used up by 3 high r…

It isn't that they are crappy web devs. It is that often the org paying for the development doesn't care.

I am a web developer of over 20 years. I can create insanely optimised pages using nothing other than vanilla CSS and JS.

I have been paid exactly once to do this. There is a site I built in 2023 that has a JS and CSS footprint of less than 100KB after GZip (large site). We even had the Go templates compiled when the web app initialised so the server responded as fast as possible.

Guess what happened when it went live? The content team use 8mb images for everything and every single optimisation I did at CSS/JS was totally useless.

Devs don't care because the people above them don't care and therefore there is zero incentive to even bother.

Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market

#179

Post by firen777 »

jonathantf2 wrote: post #7

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.

> a vendor uplift our quote 50% per unit

Try 200% (tho tbf our boss sit on that quote for like a year and a half because he thought it was too pricey. Bet he regretted it now).

And all the quotes are now only valid for a week due to insane price fluctuation.

Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market

#180

Post by zozbot234 »

nl wrote: post #165

In the Dwarkesh podcast with Semi-Analysis's Dylan Patel they forecast the phone market will shrink by 50% this year because of RAM prices: But that’s the high end of the market, which is only a few hundred million phones a year. Apple sells two or three hundred million phones annually. The bulk of the market is mid-range and low-end. It used to be that 1.4 billion smartphones were sold a year. Now we’re at about 1.1…

Smartphones are widely available on the used goods market though, perhaps even more so than second-hand SBCs or old PCs. The "low and mid range" can be filled by the former high end.
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