But what about Apple, with their memory-carrying SOC, one would think they are in a very cool position?
They still need to buy said RAM from all the same players.
Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months
271–280 of 587 posts
Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which reversed in about 6 months and now eggs are are their lowest prices in nearly a decade.
The same thing will happen with RAM. A glut will come eventually. It might take a year, maybe two.
Isn't next year's capacity already sold out? Is there any reason to hope for significant additional capacity to come online during that term?
Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months
#273I'm waiting for China to start selling cheaper memory. They can have my money. The greed of US billionaires need to be lanced with a hefty kick in their wallets.
Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
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supplies fail often but if you buy quality and oversized they’ll outlast all your other components as they don’t become outdated.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
They just rebrand PSUs, not all of them are bomber. But they have 10yr warranties on PSUs and are good about honoring them. I wish they still sold gpus. I would only buy evga for every component if I could specifically for the painless warranty. Had to warranty an asus mobo and it was like pulling teeth.
Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months
#275Earlier 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…
> 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…
Free Market doesn’t mean new ram production can “just be stood up”
And given that these are independent actors in the free market, they’ve seen the history of boom/bust cycles in this market
Free market doesn’t mean “everything just magically happens”
Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
Probaby CXMT
What about YMTC?
Tiny market share compared to top 4, but also looking to expand into HBM in collaboration with CXMT
https://chipletsummit.com/proceeding_files/a0qVV0000032cp3/2...
Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
To take advantage they'd have to do some form of price fixing which in most places is a very big footgun. I honestly don't think they need to fix their prices, and it's possible that selling to consumers is a secondary market for them compared to datacenters, like Nvidia selling GPUs to gamers. We know that's not where the money is. Seeing some companies actually exit the consumer market is evidence for this.
If it's a highly profitable footgun why not? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_industry_price_fixing#202...
If something is illegal, and the punishment is a fine, it's not illegal it just has a cost.
Is it worth the cost? Yup.
Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Wasn't that bad for business last time? I could see them erring on slower build up because of how it went before, if they're not sure how long this demand will last especially
Which is exactly what's happening. There used to be a lot more then 3 makers but up till very recently memory was a comedically low margin business you didn't go into.
Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months
#279500% 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.
If you are talking CXMT Apple recently learned the hard way that even with price fixed RAM from the big 3, CXMT is struggling to provide cheaper prices as they are using much older design/manufacturing systems.
https://www.msn.com/en-xl/money/general/apple-s-cxmt-memory-...
Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same thing happened with eggs in the USA with bird flu used as an excuse.
Which reversed in about 6 months and now eggs are are their lowest prices in nearly a decade.
The average hatching egg costs a few dollars. Can go as high as nearly $20 if it's something remarkably rare and useful in terms of breed/quality.
An egg takes 21 days to hatch.
Then it's 18-24 weeks to start laying their own eggs. That's ~$5-15 in feed over the period, maybe 40-50 pounds. There's utilities, labor, land, etc., but your incremental cost to add a hen if you have the space is minimal. My numbers won't reflect a lot of operators, as scale matters.
Out of a typical 1.5-3 year lifespan that had a startup cost of a few dollars per, paying back its return by about month 6-7, that's not too bad. It's only worth doing financially in this economy at ludicrous, arguably inherently inhumane scales, but that's what it is on paper.
Not quite the same path to course-correction as a silicon shortage.