Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

tomshardware.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 415 posts

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

#191

Post by JacobAsmuth »

simonsarris wrote: post #167
pjc50 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Supply is both already constrained and AI companies have pre-purchased enough HBM at enough of a premium that most of the wafers are allocated to them. All the intermediaries are jacking up their prices so their inventory doesn't empty too quickly, because they may not be able to refill it. It is hard to overstate the damage that the infinite money being poured into AI is doing to the wider economy. Anything involved…

> It is hard to overstate the damage that the infinite money being poured into AI is doing to the wider economy. I get what you're saying but medium term this is an extremely funny sentiment. This money being poured is likely to end up being a huge boon for a lot of economic sectors, including in the US. Most commodity shortages like this end in a glut, with a medium term win for consumers, even if we have 1-2 (more)…

Yup. Once production ramps up (and then subsequently overshoots) in the next couple years we're going to have GPUs with 96GB VRAM for the price of a 4090 today.

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

#192

Post by nerdsniper »

maerF0x0 wrote: post #154

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…

I am also that many years old, and I don’t think your analogy holds for this particular situation.

The exact same sticks/model #’s of RAM cost $200 last year, now costs $950. I don’t remember existing CPU’s ever going up in price by 5x (300-400% increases).

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

#193

Post by mysteria »

Hamuko wrote: post #52
qingcharles wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was picking up DDR3 16GB sticks for $5/piece on eBay last year. The world has gone mad.

To be fair, DDR3 is still kinda cheap. It's really only DDR4 and DDR5 that are massively in demand. DDR3 is a bit too old for it to be in high demand by consumers.

Personally I have a lot of DDR3 RDIMMS laying around that I got for cheap/free and have thought of getting a used workstation to put them in (4 channels of DDR3 will still net you ~60 GB/s of bandwidth) but the only Xeons that support it are Sandy/Ivy. Everything Haswell and newer with AVX2 and rebar/etc. use DDR4.

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

#194

Post by zozbot234 »

fleventynine wrote: post #181
szatkus wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My point is that dram demand is mostly orthogonal to whether everyone is using open weight models or secret weight models. Heavy demand for local models (whether secret or open weight) will require even more aggregate DRAM than for shared. Demand will only go down if people reduce their use of these AI tools. Given how much folks here complain about quotas, I'm very skeptical that will happen willingly.

Open weight models allow for repurposing existing hardware locally, and there's a lot of it around - far more than the amount of new RAM being supplied. So they add some short-term downward pressure to the price. (But not very much, since these datacenter builds are long-term investments that are targeted at eventually running far larger models.)

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

#195

Post by coryrc »

JacobAsmuth wrote: post #191
simonsarris wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is hard to overstate the damage that the infinite money being poured into AI is doing to the wider economy. I get what you're saying but medium term this is an extremely funny sentiment. This money being poured is likely to end up being a huge boon for a lot of economic sectors, including in the US. Most commodity shortages like this end in a glut, with a medium term win for consumers, even if we have 1-2 (more)…

Yup. Once production ramps up (and then subsequently overshoots) in the next couple years we're going to have GPUs with 96GB VRAM for the price of a 4090 today.

They're not ramping up capacity though.

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

#197

Post by Aurornis »

pjc50 wrote: post #143
randusername wrote: post #93

I want a more complete picture of why prices are so high from articles like this. Is supply actively constrained, or is this mostly in anticipation of future shortages? How much of this is a mix of panic buying and price gouging on bad news? I care more about the secondhand market. Prices are nuts for old used gear, but that also tracks with patterns I've been seeing since roughly the pandemic where more and more sec…

Supply is both already constrained and AI companies have pre-purchased enough HBM at enough of a premium that most of the wafers are allocated to them. All the intermediaries are jacking up their prices so their inventory doesn't empty too quickly, because they may not be able to refill it. It is hard to overstate the damage that the infinite money being poured into AI is doing to the wider economy. Anything involved…

> It is hard to overstate the damage that the infinite money being poured into AI is doing to the wider economy

I know it's an unpopular opinion on Hacker News but I think most people are overstating the damage to the economy. Increased demand starts to pull more advancements forward and increase spending on production, which benefits everyone.

Transformer demand is real, but what percentage of your electricity bill do you think goes to spending on those transformers? The number is so small that it's a rounding error. Many examples like this where we see headlines about some part going up in price and forget that it's such a negligible piece of our bill that it barely matters.

The cost of fuel inputs for base generation and peak supply are a bigger factor.

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

#198

Post by coryrc »

theandrewbailey wrote: post #173
castlecrasher2 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>they're probably more than what most people are looking to spend on a technically second-hand computer (even if they are like new and still under warranty) Some people need to buy at these inflated prices anyway, and are ultimately willing to spend. Maybe it differs in your area but there's no risk in listing these on Facebook Marketplace or similar platforms and see the interest.

I've had them listed on FB Marketplace for months. In that time, I've sold four (3 to one guy, one to myself), and still have 20-ish more. i5-13500E, 32GB DDR5, 512 GB NVMe, scratched and dinged a bit for $500 is practically a steal! Hardly anyone's biting or clicking, I don't get it... New open box models (not scratched and dinged), if anyone's interested: https://www.ebay.com/itm/188355326179 Edit: they're intended…

I assume you're not in the Seattle area?

Edit: Pittsburgh

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

#199

Post by fleventynine »

zozbot234 wrote: post #194
fleventynine wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point is that dram demand is mostly orthogonal to whether everyone is using open weight models or secret weight models. Heavy demand for local models (whether secret or open weight) will require even more aggregate DRAM than for shared. Demand will only go down if people reduce their use of these AI tools. Given how much folks here complain about quotas, I'm very skeptical that will happen willingly.

Open weight models allow for repurposing existing hardware locally, and there's a lot of it around - far more than the amount of new RAM being supplied. So they add some short-term downward pressure to the price. (But not very much, since these datacenter builds are long-term investments that are targeted at eventually running far larger models.)

If regular people can repurpose old hardware, so can shared providers, who can extract more value from the hardware and thus afford to pay more.

In a constrained market, supply and demand favors folks who can most efficiently extract rent. Local models only make sense in a world with abundant compute and energy.

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

#200

Post by overfeed »

simonsarris wrote: post #167
pjc50 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Supply is both already constrained and AI companies have pre-purchased enough HBM at enough of a premium that most of the wafers are allocated to them. All the intermediaries are jacking up their prices so their inventory doesn't empty too quickly, because they may not be able to refill it. It is hard to overstate the damage that the infinite money being poured into AI is doing to the wider economy. Anything involved…

> It is hard to overstate the damage that the infinite money being poured into AI is doing to the wider economy. I get what you're saying but medium term this is an extremely funny sentiment. This money being poured is likely to end up being a huge boon for a lot of economic sectors, including in the US. Most commodity shortages like this end in a glut, with a medium term win for consumers, even if we have 1-2 (more)…

> Most commodity shortages like this end in a glut

The 3 RAM manufactures know this too, from painful experience. There won't be a glut this cycle because there are no capacity build-outs. Instead of increasing capacity, some OEMs left the consumer segment to focus on enterprise AI.

> Calling this kind of demand economic damage is odd.

It's not odd at all because the complementary industries are being damaged - possibly permanently: manufacturers of motherboard, cases, fans, and the entire consumer PC supply chain are being negatively impacted. Expect bankruptcies and consolidation if this lasts for 2 more years.

Post reply on HN