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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

#221

Post by tshaddox »

lvzw wrote: post #147
ncallaway wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Memory fab build out times are years not months. The existing ones already run 24/7. If these companies could pull more supply out of thin air they would, but they cannot.

Large barriers to entry are anathema to competitive markets, so the conclusion here is still that firms are benefitting from the lack of a competitive market.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#222

Post by Der_Einzige »

dietr1ch wrote: post #79
Aditya_Garg wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

People think that shorting is an easy way of getting rich when you think a stock will go down, but even if you know it will, getting the timing wrong on it is catastrophic as you'll get unbounded loses while the market fails to correct the issues you are betting against

People who talk shit about stocks are talking shit about stocks at a particular time.

"Oh no, when you apply scrutiny to my bullshit I get punished! That means the game is wrong!"

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#223

Post by dontSendItBack »

icedchai wrote: post #182
harhargange wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you can still use the hardware via software fix?

Correct! Basically, I excluded the bad range so Linux doesn't touch it. It's been stable for weeks now. I should send the DIMM back under warranty.

Don't send it back. Since they can't easily replace it with new hardware, they will probably refund you the price of purchase. Which is normally a very good deal, but obviously not in these circumstances. I've seen it happen with GPUs as well.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#224

Post by preg_match »

florakel wrote: post #134
preg_match wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Can you provide evidence for your claim? Most people take this statement at face value and I don’t understand why. I do some volunteer work supporting elderly people that have issues adapting to a digital only world and I am always pleasantly surprised by the performance of their old iPhones all the way down to the 8 (old phones they get from their kids) Also the coming iOS 27 release supposedly has some big performa…

Every time I upgrade iOS past a few major versions there is significant slow down. I don’t think it’s done on purpose, it’s just that software grows more demanding over time.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#225

Post by AnimalMuppet »

mschild wrote: post #178
lvzw wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Memory fab build out times are years not months. The existing ones already run 24/7. If these companies could pull more supply out of thin air they would, but they cannot.

Would they? Cartels aren't known for massively increasing production to satisfy all demand. Far from it I'd say, they're more likely to expand supply to such a level that they can still reap massive profits. Very few countries/companies have the knowhow and willingness to be able to build more. OPEC is a perfect example of this behaviour. They set hearly production goals to keep prices high. Or the Quebec Maple Syrup…

But are the memory chip producers acting like a cartel? In the past they have not. When there was a shortage, they increased production as rapidly as they could build the new fabs, crashing the price of memory.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#226

Post by paunchy »

carlosjobim wrote: post #169
dist-epoch wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Everybody needs electricity and water, but nobody needs more RAM except for companies. And they can pay for it.

You can travel to the ends of the earth, to a village down miles and miles of dirt roads and still see someone bent over their phone. People buy RAM.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#227

Post by unsui »

bhaney wrote: post #39
dgellow wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, the AI boosters are saying the exact same thing but mean it seriously. There is no way to distinguish without a tone indicator

> There is no way to distinguish without a tone indicator And yet many of us aren't having any trouble distinguishing.

"sarcasm" is a cop-out.

The writer can simply say "it was a joke!", cuz we all know someone who uses this pattern regularly when they are trying to squeeze in a non-popular but highly lucrative (to the messenger) position to test the waters.

Either it lands (in which case, it was always meant to be taken literally), or it doesn't land (and can always be walked back as "it was meant sarcastically" or "can't you take a joke?"

The cost proposition to sending this message payload is low, since the messenger can always wiggle their way out (therefore, a "cop-out").

Therefore the need to be more explicit (i.e., /s) in a medium with little nuance affordances for tone and the significantly-increasing risk of such non-popular messages being taken literally (particularly by the also significantly-increasing audience of robots, who themselves may not have the capacity for nuance or irony detection).

Tl;Dr

It's a cop-out, and should be stopped.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#228

Post by greggoB »

matt-p wrote: post #84
greggoB wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does 'registration' introduce anything physically different? Or could they be completely interoperable?

Yeah a RCD on the memory stick, it's PCB is designed around it. The actual DRAM chips themselves are not different though, which is why I mention it would be super easy to produce more consumer unregistered and less server registered at assembly time :)

Thanks for the clarification, that makes a lot of sense!

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#229

Post by wonnage »

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

It could be the economically rational thing to do if they think there is a bubble

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#230

Post by dawnerd »

luma wrote: post #132
cm2187 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You make it sound like the crunch is caused by manufacturers, my understanding is that it is caused by the abnormal demand. I am not aware that RAM production is at a historically low level.

Demand crunch comes from the customer. All HBM and DDR5 wafer capacity is sold out through 2027 and all three vendors are booking 2028 capacity. This was not created by the manufacturers.

The manufacturers are not doing a whole lot to fix the problem l and I don’t blame them. It’s expensive to build out and they know demand will slow down and don’t want to be stuck with excess capacity. Better to be sold out and high prices.

Samsung said they were “moderating demand” which doesn’t sound like they want this problem to be solved either.

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