Boy am I feeling this. I had my eye on building a new Threadripper machine, which requires DDR5 RDIMMs. Much to my surprise while happily building out a parts list one fine evening I learned that these are going for between $500 and $1000 for one single 16GB module right now. I think I'll hold off and squeeze a few more years out of DDR4 and PCIe 4.0.
Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months
351–360 of 587 posts
Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months
#352Doesn't solve the present shortage, but perhaps this is a good opportunity for software developers to start caring about memory usage again, since consumers may be forced to keep their existing hardware for a few more years.
Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months
#353There is no law that states memory must be a consumer product. I truly believe the era of personal computing was a beautiful blip that our masters are beginning to take away from the general public. It could be terminals and time sharing for the foreseeable future through "smart" phones.
Personal computing has been in a sad state for a while now. Only "PC enthusiasts" were gamers. Rest of the population uses their phone 18hrs a day and seldomly use PC for Excel tasks at work.
Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months
#354I've got a dead older GPU (RTX titan, 24GB of GDDR6). It's been a paper weight for a while, core is damaged, but I realize I could probably sell it or just the memory chips for a decent price on eBay.
Still, it's a nice reminder of my hubris.
Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months
#355Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
It's actually both. DRAM manufactures operate on a boom bust cycle and by 2023 there was significant oversupply. This meant even leading up to that they had already decided not to invest in further capacity explicitly to recover profit on their existing lines.
So a lack of builds coupled with AI boom at the same time created a perfect storm with no new capacity coming online for years after demand rapidly escalated.
Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months
#356If this was a competitive market some suppliers would be ramping up pc memory and avoiding the AI buildout. But instead we see all of them diverting to GPU memory and cutting production of PC related parts universally. This sure looks like a coordinated move. I think there is a real point people are missing here. Memory is going sky high because most of it is being shifted to GPU specific ram for server build out. Th…
CXMT is almost certainly going to eat the DDR5 market (not that will change anything in the next year or two)
Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months
#357Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
As others have noted they've been found colluding previously, more than once. Even admitted guilt and some people went to jail over it.
And the reason the market is so small is because of players who did as you propose, the DRAM market crashed on them (not due to them but due to broader market dynamics), and they went out of business.
So there is, quite perversely, strong incentive to collude if possible and if not to abide by an unstated agreement to be extremely slow to expand DRAM capacity.
That said...
SK Hynix has two fabs under construction, one set to open later this year. One for 80k wpm, another 360k wpm. A third was recently approved to start construction.
Micro has an overhaul of Fab 6 in Virgina near done and slated to produce first wafers this year. It also has a large expansion in Boise nearly completion for 300k wpm. They're also building a "megafab" site in New York (my guess is >1m wpm) and expanding at their Japanese plants (40k wpm).
Samsung has two under construction, P4 for 100k wpm.
Nanya - historically a secondary player focused only on producing non-leading-edge DRAM is making a play for the leading-edge market with a new fab dedicated to DDR5 and HBM.
It appears they've all decided that the demand is sufficiently sustained that building new fabs is worth doing... but it takes time. If my guess is right Micron is making the largest play with their New York site at 1-1.5m wafers per month. That would give them a large chunk of the market.
(wpm = wafers per month)
Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months
#358Earlier 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…
>that the limited supply goes to the buyer who need it the most Everything else you said is accurate, but this is not. Supply will go to those most able to pay, not those who need it the most. It is not a moral allocation, which your language implies.
Someone please put RAM into Maslow's hierarchy of needs
Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months
#359500% 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
Taking advantage of Trump admin, AI hype, and setting themselves up as "too big to fail" for bailouts when demand eventually collapses
See the tariff thing where Bessent bought rights to refunds
It's all a really low tech con perpetuated by weak elders who need blue pills to simulate virility. Odd how they complain about the kids virtual reality.
Oh no it's not either; it's intentional petty bullying
Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months
#360I already decided I won’t be upgrading any hardware for a few years and I’m going to ride this out. As right now we’re seeing that all prices of everything electronics is going up, my biggest worry is that once memory prices go down, the rest of the electronics will stay high. Eg after the price hike of all Apple electronics, will they go down again in prices in a few years after RAM goes down? If history can predict…
> If history can predict anything it’s that the price hikes are permanent.
There was a massive spike of RAM prices from 2016 to 2018 followed by a price crash in 2019...