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

Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

tomshardware.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 587 posts

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#41

Post by Analemma_ »

qurren wrote: post #34
cosmic_cheese wrote: post #3

The situation is absolutely awful for anybody who needs significant memory or storage (or devices incorporating such). Even people who think they have enough for the next few years already could end up with an unpleasant surprise if they e.g. have a stick or two of RAM go bad or a GPU fry. I have a few machines with aging sticks that I'm hoping will manage to hold out until when/if things improve.

I would absolutely love if some startup came up right now to manufacture and sell RAM at normal prices to everyone else and put Crucial et al out of business for price-gouging everyone just because they can.

DRAM fabs are multi-billion dollar investments which take years to come online. That's the whole reason we're in this situation, there is no quick fix available.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#43

Post by OutOfHere »

dijit wrote: post #20
OutOfHere wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and the shareholders. Your comment is an illustration of exactly what is wrong with this website. Given his preceding statements, I sincerely do not believe it is sarcasm.

I'm quite sure he's being sarcastic. "The best good ever is to maximise shareholder profits" is a tired and cliched caricature that some people unfortunately take seriously. But this is too on the nose.

I have the innate right to take what is said literally. Moreover, his preceding statements attempt to legitimize his concluding statement.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#44

Post by andriy_koval »

phonon wrote: post #8
master_crab wrote: post #2

I’m even more confused by the economics of the frontier model businesses. Even if they got preferential prices, they are still paying an inordinate amount for their infrastructure. If it wasn’t economically feasible without VC/Nvidia money 3 years ago, how is it possibly economically feasible now at 10x prices for things like memory?

OpenAI (Stargate) kicked off the price increases a year ago by locking up 40% of the global supply of RAM output. https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/dram/openais-star...

next they will become successful business by reselling RAM

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#46

Post by davkan »

seanp2k2 wrote: post #37
cosmic_cheese wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdotally, RAM failures are more common than they used to be in previous decades, I assume due to increased capacities and smaller process nodes. Looser manufacturing standards may also play a part. The component category I've never seen fail is CPU.

I've worked in and around datacenters for a few decades now and I've seen pretty much everything fail, but power supplies in particular do so at a higher rate than I expected. I've had one literally start smoking in my home office recently too. Luckily, it didn't damage any components, but it was pretty dramatic and abrupt -- just powered on my desktop and got nothing but a fog machine coming out of the rear fan unti…

My evga 1000w has been going strong for 11 years now. Cheaper power supplies fail often but if you buy quality and oversized they’ll outlast all your other components as they don’t become outdated.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#47

Post by Aditya_Garg »

seanp2k2 wrote: post #33
datakan wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm saving a ton of money by simply not upgrading. I used to do upgrades every 1-2 years just to keep up on things, pass the old box down to my son or otherwise donate it. Now I intend to keep my current setup for 7+ years. Its 2 years old next month. I may even stay with it longer. I just see no reason to upgrade with things how they are. I considered a Mac Studio a couple months ago. Price was up but might have pul…

There also seems to have been a major shift in strategy from AMD / Intel / Apple / NVidia due to this, as I was used to CPU / GPU / chipset upgrades coming out more regularly with double-digit percentage improvements each year, but that seems to be basically over for the consumer space now that everyone is just trying to build as much AI hardware as fast as possible for enterprise markets. I also used to rebuild my d…

Are you willing to short anthropic and openai on your beliefs? Would love to be on the other side of this trade.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#48

Post by revolvingthrow »

datakan wrote: post #28
cosmic_cheese wrote: post #3

The situation is absolutely awful for anybody who needs significant memory or storage (or devices incorporating such). Even people who think they have enough for the next few years already could end up with an unpleasant surprise if they e.g. have a stick or two of RAM go bad or a GPU fry. I have a few machines with aging sticks that I'm hoping will manage to hold out until when/if things improve.

I'm saving a ton of money by simply not upgrading. I used to do upgrades every 1-2 years just to keep up on things, pass the old box down to my son or otherwise donate it. Now I intend to keep my current setup for 7+ years. Its 2 years old next month. I may even stay with it longer. I just see no reason to upgrade with things how they are. I considered a Mac Studio a couple months ago. Price was up but might have pul…

There isn't much to upgrade to if all you want is a desktop for gaming, a non-workstation work box or just a decent laptop. Much like smartphones, there just hasn't been much innovation of late. A midrange gaming desktop from mid 2023, something like rtx 4070 and ryzen 7800x3d, can still play pretty much any video game on max settings and high framerate at 1440p, and has sufficient performance for most workstation-esque tasks as long as you have enough ram. Similarly, the only thing my spare macbook m2 lacks compared to m5 is hardware av1 decoding - the performance is worse, but I don't really notice it in normal usage, and macOS 27 runs perfectly well on it.

Local AI will crush any machine, of course, and if you need a 512gb ram box you'll probably need to sell both kidneys, but you're well past the average consumer territory with those.

So, fingers crossed nothing breaks down and that some of the funny money goes into R&D which will eventually trickle down to consumer devices in a few years (16TB gum stick SSDs at sane prices pretty please) instead of endless datacenter GPUs and SSDs that will be tossed into a shredder in x years.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#49

Post by forinti »

BenjiWiebe wrote: post #30
forinti wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using computers for more than 40 years now and the one component I have never seen fail is RAM. All the other bits in a computer I've seen fail.

I've seen some fail. Might have had to do with the fact that the computers were literally flooded (river came up faster than the sandbaggers could keep up) while running.

I've seen computers brought back to life after flooding by lying in rice for a week, but they weren't turned on when the water hit (and not all survived).

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#50

Post by hobojojo »

Analemma_ wrote: post #41
qurren wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would absolutely love if some startup came up right now to manufacture and sell RAM at normal prices to everyone else and put Crucial et al out of business for price-gouging everyone just because they can.

DRAM fabs are multi-billion dollar investments which take years to come online. That's the whole reason we're in this situation, there is no quick fix available.

China is making central decisions for its RAM makers (and who can complain now that the US isn't a legitimate free trade defender). I think their strategy could go in any direction to either get a small portion of still gouging or a large portion of a market with somewhat stale specs.
Post reply on HN