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

121–130 of 587 posts

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#121

Post by Noaidi »

preg_match wrote: post #87
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…

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.

I have a MacBook M1 and I recently had to downgrade from Tahoe to Sequoia. Why? First of all they force you to download 7 GB of AI training when you’re not even using their AI. And secondly on Tahoe just watching a video with nothing else running off-line my MacBook was asking for 7 W of power. On Sequoia that drops down to 2 W maybe three.

It’s sad to think they think of themselves as an environmental company, I don’t know if they do, but this update to Sequoia literally doubled the amount of M1 max that are running on the planet in terms of power use.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#122

Post by pjc50 »

Aditya_Garg wrote: post #47
seanp2k2 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wouldn't even short Bitcoin, and that's been on the way out since the AI rise.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#123

Post by harhargange »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #70
nickjj wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm running a 12 year old i5 3.2ghz CPU with 16 GB of memory, an SSD and an AMD RX 480 (8 GB) GPU. Currently using a 100% scaled 4k monitor and a 2nd 1440p monitor. I keep the machine on 24 / 7. It's great for software development along with video + image editing and casual gaming. Everything feels fast and snappy. I will use this until the hardware stops. There's a 0% chance I'd buy hardware at the current prices.

It really depends on what the task at hand is. I have a baseline iMac Pro and custom built tower with similar specs (3.2Ghz Xeon W-2140B, 32GB RAM, Vega Pro 56 and i7-6700K, 32GB, 5700XT respectively) and they're both perfectly responsive. For many day to day things the difference between them and newer machines is negligible. For other things, my 5950X tower and M5 Max MBP run circles around them. Both the 5950X tow…

I recently built a pc with 5950x and 7900xt. What do you mean by diminishing returns?

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#124

Post by dilyevsky »

forinti wrote: post #6
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'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.

on older PC bios would perform a memory test - you may remember those - and that's where it would mark a bunch of pages dead/unusuable and it was not uncommon at all.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#125

Post by Panino »

preg_match wrote: post #87
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…

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.

> Computers are fast and have been fast for a while now.

Absolutely. The only reason I want to upgrade to an iPhone 18 next year is because the 16 doesn't have MIE (Memory Integrity Enforcement) and it feels ridiculous to upgrade so quickly to the 17, which does have MIE. Same thing with a Neo 2. But mostly I buy surplus gear. I've saved a small fortune this way and 8% compounding returns (VT and chill) will help me retire early.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#126

Post by harhargange »

icedchai wrote: post #36
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 recently had part of a 32 gig DIMM go bad on a 128 gig system. One of the larger VMs was spontaneously rebooting for no apparent reason. I was able to find the addresses with MemTest86 and map out 512 megs of the affected DIMM with the Linux kernel memmap option.

So you can still use the hardware via software fix?

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#127

Post by naet »

I almost upgraded my computer a year or two ago, but decided to hold off for a bit longer.

I've always been fine with being "behind" on the latest and greatest. I don't mind watching a movie, playing a game, buying a cell phone, etc, that was released a few years prior. If it was really all that great when it came out it should still be good later on.

Buying slow usually saves a.good bit of money when prices go down over time... but this time they went way up and now I'm kicking myself on it. Not upgrading the computer for now, but it is a bit overdue since I had already put it off for many years.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#128

Post by cm2187 »

minraws wrote: post #119
cm2187 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand the distinction you are making. If you have a massive excess of demand ready to pay any price, and a limited supply, of course the sellers will take advantage, that's how any market works. They can do that because of the lack of supply. Over the long term demand will rationalise and supply will adjust. But in between there is a squeeze, and the right price is the maximum price buyers are willing to…

In an absolutely free market? sure. But we don't live in an absolutely free market, the memory manufacturers have refused to budge on creating new fabs until recently out of caution and to be able to create a demand excess. They have slow rolled rollouts and everything, if there wasn't CXMT they would probably still wouldn't have budged on building new fabs for a while longer. You can absolutely price fix/manufacture…

I think everyone is aware now that you don't build a fab by snapping your fingers, and you need to amortise it over many years. The said manufacturers are just out of a massive slump in demand during covid, when they were selling at a loss, and these cycles happened many times in this industry. It is understandable that they don't jump all-in on the AI bandwagon, which, god knows where it is going and for how long.

If you want evidence that no one predicted this, look at WD. They disinvested from sandisk up to early this year. Now sandisk is worth more than WD. Doesn't seem consistent with a concerted strategy to gauge prices.

> You can absolutely price fix/manufacture a shortage. Ever heard of merchants setting fire to crops after hoarding to sell at a higher price?

Fine. Show me which manufacturer is cutting production to corner the market. I don't see that.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#129

Post by ncallaway »

cm2187 wrote: post #111
1saadcodes wrote: post #105

500% in a year is just insane. I knew RAM prices were going up, but $3k+ for 128GB of DDR5 makes me wonder how much of this is actually AI demand, and how much is this just manufacturers taking advantage of it. They have done this in the past after all

I don't understand the distinction you are making. If you have a massive excess of demand ready to pay any price, and a limited supply, of course the sellers will take advantage, that's how any market works. They can do that because of the lack of supply. Over the long term demand will rationalise and supply will adjust. But in between there is a squeeze, and the right price is the maximum price buyers are willing to…

> If you have a massive excess of demand ready to pay any price, and a limited supply, of course the sellers will take advantage, that's how any market work

The question is how quickly the supply adjusts. In a free market, the suppliers would respond to the price signal by quickly expanding their production to meet the elevated demand.

But a market captured by a cartel will be much slower to expand the supply.

So, the test isn't "how much is price going up" it's "how aggressively are the RAM producers expanding supply production"

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#130

Post by SoftTalker »

naet wrote: post #127

I almost upgraded my computer a year or two ago, but decided to hold off for a bit longer. I've always been fine with being "behind" on the latest and greatest. I don't mind watching a movie, playing a game, buying a cell phone, etc, that was released a few years prior. If it was really all that great when it came out it should still be good later on. Buying slow usually saves a.good bit of money when prices go down…

100% what I do. I buy a few years behind the leading edge, and keep the device until it either dies or will no longer do what I need it to do.

My main desktop computer is Haswell era. Still does fine, for what I do.

Post reply on HN