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32GB of DDR5 now costs $375 – AI shortage continues to squeeze PC building

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Re: 32GB of DDR5 now costs $375 – AI shortage continues to squeeze PC building

#151

Post by fragmede »

lionkor wrote: post #94
nerdjon wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can be cynics of AI without ignoring reality, if no one wanted this no one would be chatting with Claude or ChatGPT directly, but people obviously are. The fact is there are people that do in fact want this, and it isn't just CEO's hoping to cut jobs.

It's very, very questionable if people want the situation we have. I have yet to meet anyone in person who is really excited about AI. Of course it's useful, but at this cost? Claiming people want this is like claiming that people wanted WW2 because look we're all enjoying the tech that was developed during it!

Talk to more people?

I talk to my Uber driver whenever I'm visiting somewhere, and yes, some of them are actually excited about AI.

Re: 32GB of DDR5 now costs $375 – AI shortage continues to squeeze PC building

#152

Post by pezgrande »

mgfist wrote: post #15
thijson wrote: post #14

Price should send a signal to manufacturers to build more capacity. I wonder if they will though, it takes quite a bit of time, and it's not certain that the demand will continue to exist once built.

A fab for high end memory costs $20B and 5 years to build. It will happen, but yeah it takes time and money

$20B is like pocket money at the scale the whole industry is moving.

Re: 32GB of DDR5 now costs $375 – AI shortage continues to squeeze PC building

#153

Post by szatkus »

fleventynine wrote: post #102
whizzter wrote: post #35

My bet is that the prices will crash once OpenAI (and/or Antrophic) IPO's have happened. Right now the biggest threat to their IPO's is that people realize that local models are good enough for whatever they're peddling, what's the most important factor to even running good enough models? RAM since you want the models in memory to not be total slogs.

If local models are good enough, doesn't that increase demand for DRAM as everyone buys DRAM for their poorly utilized local machines? Surely it is a more efficient use of DRAM to run inference on shared hardware with large batch sizes and more utilization.

Luckily very few people can configure and are interested in local models. But your nearby datacenter running Chinese open-weight models is also good enough.

Re: 32GB of DDR5 now costs $375 – AI shortage continues to squeeze PC building

#154

Post by maerF0x0 »

As an ancient person, and considering my sense of inflation of other things I actually buy, This doesnt sound that high to me. At some point in my life CPU Ghz stopped rising and cores was the only thing to grow, and that seemed to be more slowly than clock rate did. So I guess I fully expected that asymptote to apply to RAM too. If you plot price per GB of ram across last 25 years the memory prices growth is barely a bump in the chart. In (nearly) no other physical product do we expect prices to plummet over time whilst simultaneously getting way better. Maybe we're just spoiled by the first 50 - 75 years of wild innovation that most new things go through before they asymptote ?

Re: 32GB of DDR5 now costs $375 – AI shortage continues to squeeze PC building

#156

Post by turpentine »

Scene_Cast2 wrote: post #5

This is the PCPartPicker chart that I monitor: https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/#ram.ddr5.5600.... - $900 for 2x32GB, used to be $200 a year ago.

It shows 3.5" spinning rust are climbing this year too.

Re: 32GB of DDR5 now costs $375 – AI shortage continues to squeeze PC building

#157

Post by amarcheschi »

alecsm wrote: post #21

Same thing with storage. I wanted to upgrade my SSD but prices are more than at the end of 2025. I refuse to pay 500 euro for a 4TB SSD. I rather go outside and play with my bike like when I was 5.

getting a road bike is understated, at least where i live it is so nice to roam around outisde cities with just a few cars around

Re: 32GB of DDR5 now costs $375 – AI shortage continues to squeeze PC building

#158

Post by pmdr »

We're all grownups, why should we care about RAM prices? /s

This is insane. We've built our apps and websites to require ungodly amounts of memory and now AI scrapes away said websites while pricing us out.

Fast apps and websites need to make a comeback.

Re: 32GB of DDR5 now costs $375 – AI shortage continues to squeeze PC building

#159

Post by adornKey »

whizzter wrote: post #35

My bet is that the prices will crash once OpenAI (and/or Antrophic) IPO's have happened. Right now the biggest threat to their IPO's is that people realize that local models are good enough for whatever they're peddling, what's the most important factor to even running good enough models? RAM since you want the models in memory to not be total slogs.

But remember that markets can stay irrational longer than anyone can hold his breath. If they get more funding there's a good chance they'll invest more in the destruction of the remaining production capacity. Admitting that with normal pricing anyone could have a decent AI-machine for 2K is hard - prices for acceptable AI-machines most likely will go >10K first.

Re: 32GB of DDR5 now costs $375 – AI shortage continues to squeeze PC building

#160

Post by DarkmSparks »

this is almost certainly a us tarriff/China sanctions thing rather than an AI thing. sticks here outside of the us tarriff system never really changed, I just bought like a month or two ago 128GB DDR5 for $500 at a time when US best buy was listing the same kingston 32GB sticks for $200 each.

That said, getting hold of them was hard and needed a special order.

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