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DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market

jeffgeerling.com

251–260 of 592 posts

Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market

#251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If I categorized these situations the way you do, and I said what I'm saying, I would be a pedant. I am not categorising any situation. The vast majority of people would omit unreasonable options. I could buy a racing bike that is £5000 new, for £200 when I live in London (back in 2000s). The bike would most likely would have been stolen. So technically I can buy a £5000 bike for £200. But most people wouldn't want…

I like these many posts about how you, specifically, chose not to use any of the available systems to get a GPU that rapidly organized and became common globally during lockdown. The line from “I just didn’t feel like doing something once” through to “My predictions for the future about a different problem are obviously true” is clear as day. Can’t see why anyone would disagree

> I like these many posts about how you, specifically, chose not to use any of the available systems to get a GPU that rapidly organized and became common globally during lockdown.

You like the other people are was arguing with are pretending that the options were reasonable. They weren't at the time. Many other people I know thought the same.

There was no stock for any GPU except for absolute crap on any of the retail sites in the UK. There are not many options in the UK generally. It is not like the US.

As far as I am concerned what you are engaging is effectively gas-lighting.

> The line from “I just didn’t feel like doing something once” through to “My predictions for the future about a different problem are obviously true” is clear as day. Can’t see why anyone would disagree

If you deliberately want to misunderstand what is said you could draw that conclusion. Which is blatantly what you are doing.

The only thing I claimed about the current high price DRAM situation is:

1) It is likely to get worse before it gets better (due to supply chain issues due to current wars). 2) It resolve itself over time and you should be patient and just make your existing stuff last as long as possible.

That is how any crisis often plays out and I was actually telling people in my original statement not to be all doom and gloom and just be patient. It will sort itself out. It won't be this year for sure.

Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market

#252
post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are classes of bug that are easy to write in C that are impossible to express in Rust.

let foo = [1, 2, 3]; unsafe { *foo.get_unchecked_mut(4) = 5; } Not sure why Rust evangelists always seem to ignore that unsafe exists.

Hmmm... where could the oob access possibly be I can't tell

Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market

#253
If I spent a bajillion dollars on massive data centres I would be delighted if personal computing were also crippled for a while. It would allow me to further own your ability to do compute tasks and to help kill the concept of doing it yourself for a while.

Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market

#254
post #4

OTOH things which belong on microcontrollers are now being pushed back to microcontrollers for cost reasons, so there is a win to be found there.

Yeah, never understood why I would want an entire OS running just to blink an LED. I was going to make a pro-Arduino comment but I guess my LED example warrants little more than an R/C circuit and a transistor, ha ha. (Anyway, I still remember the thrill of writing assembly for a 68HC11 and getting a pair of hobby servos to respond.)

Familiarity - it’s easy for us Linux dweebs to build a pi that can flip an LED, but programming an arduino is an entire new area.

Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market

#257

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.

> Helium supply issues are only going to make this worse. I believe helium, although important constitutes a small percent of the cost of semiconductors, so its effect on price will be less severe. It will be more noticeable in other uses of helium though - party balloons could get very expensive etc.

[deleted]

Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market

#258
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine if AI cures cancer.

An already-ageing population living even longer while nobody wants kids anymore?

Am I correctly reading your argument that you are pro cancer for the purposes of demographic balance?

Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market

#259
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

Nonsense. You prompt an adversarial agent to look for bottlenecks and suggest improvements in what your coding agent wrote, "and don't make mistakes".

Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market

#260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even before the hikes, SBCs were $50-$100 a pop, compared to pennies for basic MCUs and maybe $4 for high-performance ones. People were clearly willing to pay 100x more just for familiarity and the ecosystem ("hats", forums, etc). I don't know if 300x is going to make more hobbyists see the light, or just result in fewer of them being able to afford the hobby?

That's an apples to oranges comparison. Might as well bring up how people pay thousands of dollars for FPGA boards.

No. Many hobbyists default to SBCs whether they need them or not. No one defaults to FPGA if they don't need it.
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