211–220 of 592 posts
Helium supply issues are only going to make this worse. I feel like for the first time in our lives we might have seen peak technology for the next few years. Everyone is going to have to make do instead of depending on ever increasing performance.
First time in your life? Were you born after COVID and the 24 months of dire component shortages that followed?
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Main producers actually reduced dram output in 2026. When you have few players with very high capital cost you will end up with cartels like light bulb cartel.
Someone will come in when the price goes up enough. It will take time, but it will happen. What people are complaining about is that the time for this to happen is too long. Oh look, there is a player coming into the market it seems: https://economy.ac/news/2026/02/202602288291#:~:text=If%20eq... EDIT: In fact many other chinese companies are now expanding into DRAM because of the high prices. Which confirms exactly…
> chinese companies are now expanding into DRAM because of the high prices
The SBC markets been on life support for a long time. Youtubers making videos about them don't seem to grasp that and keep pumping out reviews and projects like its still 2019. The pi specifically has plummeted in popularity and for most use cases they just aren't a cost effective option when second hand micro pcs are dirt cheap and vastly more capable.
PCs don't have GPIO. They're different markets and the desktop replacement never materialized.
If you use a PC or mini-PC that you already have, that is much cheaper than using a Raspberry Pi or similar.
Helium supply issues are only going to make this worse. I feel like for the first time in our lives we might have seen peak technology for the next few years. Everyone is going to have to make do instead of depending on ever increasing performance.
Ultra clean rooms with massive air handling systems can't recapture all their helium? Or is this just a temporary thing based on where processing is located?
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Yes, you are crazy for thinking that. The extra ram is useful for small LLMs and also running lots of dock containers. The very low power consumption makes it ideal for a low end home server. I use the 16GB SKU to host a bunch of containers and some light debugging tools, and the power usage that sips at idle will probably pay for the whole board over my previous home server, within about 5 years.
You can just as well not run docker. 1GiB machine can run a lot of server software, if RAM is not wasted on having duplicate OSes on one machine.
what are the barriers to new DRAM supply coming online?
Otherwise their memory manufacturing companies would be happy to exploit this opportunity.
Actually some Chinese companies already sell cheap DDR5 memory modules, but their production capacity is severely limited by the US blockade, so the cheap memories are available in few places, mainly in Asia.
So the high memory prices are caused by USA both by the AI companies that have bought most of the existing production and by the US government, who has sabotaged the Chinese memory vendors since a couple of years ago, in order to protect the market share of Micron (the US sanctions coincided with the moment when several companies, including Apple, intended to use the cheaper Chinese memories, so preventing this to happen seems a much more likely reason for the "sanctions" than the BS excuse that consumer DDR DIMMs and SSDs are dual-use products that may benefit the military. Even if that were true, the US sanctions did not prevent at all the Chinese from producing anything that would be needed in a small quantity, like for a military application. The sanctions have prevented only the mass production of devices using state-of-the-art lithography, which would have impacted the prices in consumer markets).
am I crazy for thinking that the 16GB Pi 5 is just there to absorb money from people who purchase the most expensive version of things? Like really nobody needs that much RAM on a Pi?
No you are not crazy. It's silly to try to use a raspberry pi 5 16GB (or equivalent priced product) as a desktop workstation with a GUI on it when much better actual x86-64 based workstations exist. Ones with real amounts of PCI-E lanes of I/O, NVME SSD interfaces on motherboard, multiple SATA3 interfaces on motherboard, etc. In very small form factors same as you'd see in any $bigcorp office cubicle.
Which bigcorp does use cubicles?
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You can just as well not run docker. 1GiB machine can run a lot of server software, if RAM is not wasted on having duplicate OSes on one machine.
Containers are not Virtual Machines. 1GB cannot run a lot of server software. If stuff is written in .NET, Java or JavaScript. Hosting a non-trivial web app can use several hundred megabytes of memory.
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>That’s strange, there aren’t wider market supply chain issues outside of DRAM. GPUs, ram, ssds, hdds, hell even CPUs are starting to climb in price. It's an everything shortage and it's only getting worse. A workstation that two years ago cost $3,000 was $10,000 last month and $10,500 this month. There are parts which aren't available at any price.
Wait what? That's over 300%. Between this revelation and that post recently on HN about the scanned receipts and egg prices, I find myself wondering if we're worrying about the wrong things. We're seeing massive inflation in computing, but because the dollar is holding its value we call it increased prices. But the buying by the big buyers is the thing driving the inflation, its mechanism is scarcity. But it's also l…
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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…
I hear you, and this is a real problem. But it's kind of depressing to need incentives to care about the quality of your work.