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Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

tomshardware.com

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Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#91

I cross my fingers that my 10 years old laptop and desktop will hold until the crazyness ends

same. still rockin a 2016 era dell xps 13. I was about to pull the trigger on a few laptops but I always psych myself out because I assume prices will drop and I can pick them up secondhand. big mistake...

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#92
post #6

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'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 had a 2012 mac book pro that burned out 2 different crucial memory sticks. Would have bricked the machine if it was the soldered-on type, but it was the last model apple sold that have swappable memory. Crucial had a lifetime warranty so they replaced them for free.

I used to game on it and I think the design just couldn't handle the cpu and dgpu being active for long periods, it would get extremely hot in the area close to where the memory was.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#93

I noticed that resellers on ebay of used server equipment that I keep an eye on in Germany pulled all their DDR4 from surplus and used server racks and now list it separately for sale, at jacked up prices. Where you used to be able to see a used Gigabyte server listed with "128GB" "256GB" etc listed in the title, they now all say "0GB". They took extra effort, to pull used ram from older servers, and list it separate…

Greed? Resellers aren't charities, good for them if the value of their stock goes up. Besides, people buying server equipment aren't exactly starving, I bet most of them can either simply not buy the server, or cut some other expense.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#94
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

And watch … $5 says they have nothing to do with the ram because even if there was enough power there’s no use case for this much spend If I had to guess they’re just buying up ram to keep others from having it same way meta, Google, etc hired up engineers to keep others from having them

Also imagine people having their own cheap 2TB rigs at home for their own usage/inference, or a multitude of small providers serving/sharing capacity thanks to cheap available hardware.

But we cant have that, as the big guys are hoarding everything for themselves, so that you have to pay them instead.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#95
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Had the EVGA 1000w fail on me. It did not fail dramatically though, rather it refused to output high power. Got a replacement under warranty

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#96
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…

I think it's probably for the best, the hyperconsumerism around electronics was getting out of hand. Computers are fast and have been fast for a while now. An iPhone 12 is probably more than fine to do iPhone things, if Apple didn't sabotage their old phones with poorly-written poor-performance software.

Apple could release a new on-device LLM model every year and keep the hyperconsumerism going...

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#99
post #20

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’ve been on HN long enough to know that a disturbing number of people do actually believe that line and act accordingly.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#100
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I share your optimism, I still don't fully understand why a crash will necessarily lead to an oversupply and lower prices for regular consumers. The components / RAM you are referencing are for enterprise use / data centers which in my limited understanding is not a 1:1 swap for the kind of components that your smartphone / car / fridge / gaming rig use. I would love for someone more informed than me to spell o…

Datacentre NVMe disk is still usable in a standard desktop. Sever memory less so, but essentially if there were no 'new' server market whatsoever then you could redirect 100% of memory production to consumer chips without enormous upheaval. By the way I personally think this scenario is very unlikely to happen.

> you could redirect 100% of memory production to consumer chips without enormous upheaval

They would never do that. By then the market has changed and they would produce at the limit of expected demand, certainly not intentionally causing oversupply.

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