161–170 of 587 posts
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
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
There are only 3 manufacturers (about to be 4 soon) total. This is a demand crunch the likes of which the market hasn't seen before, prices are doing the natural thing.
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> There are only 3 manufacturers (about to be 4 soon) total. ...3 manufacturers with a long history of price fixing... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_industry_price_fixing
Uhm, your link states that they were price fixing over 20 years ago, and were in court for almost a decade. There was another accusation in 2018, but it was dismissed. That's not a long history of pricing fixing, just accusations.
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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, th…
Oh yea, governments can fix by putting 100 billion in memory fabs right now, and when demand crater in decade or so, let tax payer eat the cost of those fabs. At least it will benefit poor computer users like me.
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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
>even if there was enough power there’s no use case for this much spend According to them, demand for tokens already exceeds supply. Coding agents are very popular but burn through millions of tokens per hour. The reasoning models that have powered breakthroughs in AI for math, coding, etc require substantially more compute than base LLMs.
Open source https://github.com/cnygaard/glq
Pypi glq https://pypi.org/project/glq/
It's crazy if you think that some years ago were the cheaper part of a personal computer compared to motherboard, cpu, gpu and so on.
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Then perhaps we’re seeing one of the downsides of that. When 0->1 is prohibitively expensive, existing players can continue to raise prices *very* high because cost-of-entry is extreme, until it’s not sufficiently extreme. And then we have bubble issues because the introduction of a new, cheaper player, causes the bottom to fall out and for the circumstances that allowed the new manufacturer to exist to completely go…
This is also caused by the FREE market - consolidation, all markets tend to consolidate around a few companies due to economy of scale. The fix is regulation - we are going to have NOT-FREE-MARKET electricity, NOT-FREE-MARKET water supply, .... for vital services. I'm not talking about you, it's funny to see anti-regulation HN complain about a FREE MARKET working as such. Suddenly it's not so fun where you are at the…
If you want even more bad news: display panel makers also want to raise prices "Due to the continued rise in the prices of core components globally, the production cost of monitors has increased significantly, and we can no longer absorb this pressure on our own." https://respawnfirst.com/we-can-no-longer-absorb-this-ktc-wa...