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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

#391

Post by trinsic2 »

sleight42 wrote: post #88
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.

And Apple will continue to because they have to sell more devices to keep customers interested.

See this is what I don't get. This effects big organizations like this, there should be a class action lawsuit for these criminals LLM and Memory companies.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#392

Post by api »

Schnitz wrote: post #384
abeppu wrote: post #375

So the 1970s oil crisis caused a shift that included fuel efficiency rules. For like, the whole time I've been a software engineer, memory footprints of a lot of software have crept up, even when they aren't really doing more. The memory situation currently is a mess. But ... is it bad enough to get us to _change_ how we build?

Or it’ll accelerate the push to the cloud even more making the client even thinner.

Memory in the cloud isn't free either.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#393

Post by api »

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'm glad I splurged years ago and got an M1 Max with 64 GiB RAM. Still fast enough for everything, don't plan to upgrade until this cools off.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#394

Post by embedding-shape »

sheeshkebab wrote: post #379
abeppu wrote: post #375

So the 1970s oil crisis caused a shift that included fuel efficiency rules. For like, the whole time I've been a software engineer, memory footprints of a lot of software have crept up, even when they aren't really doing more. The memory situation currently is a mess. But ... is it bad enough to get us to _change_ how we build?

llms make it trivial writing code in rust, without even knowing rust. There is hope…

When even the large AI labs that supposedly sit on (/with) the best of the best can't even ship native cross-platform desktop applications and instead ship some bloated Electron monsters, I'm not sure what kind of hope there is. The ones who were publishing lightweight apps continue to do so, the ones who didn't care, still don't care.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#395

Post by phil21 »

rwyinuse wrote: post #187
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.

This is one of the rare situations where an out-of-control homelab & PC building hobby is actually useful. With over 250GB of RAM & 90TB of storage I will be fine for a while, especially as long as DDR4 era machines remain relevant.

My issue is my digital hoarding. I've always said it I "collect" things digitally vs. physical, so I can scratch that itch without causing a disaster for my life. A half rack of JBODs is a lot cleaner and overall less expensive to operate than deciding I need to collect every single Lego Technic set ever produced or something.

The problem is I also operated under the prior "storage always gets cheaper over time" and was right at about 80% full when all this insanity hit. I'm now at 90% on my largest ZFS array (~280TB) of spinners... and I get to decide if I want to drop a few paychecks on the next vdev upgrade, or start deleting things.

Not to mention I've been holding off replacing a bunch of old 1TB SATA drives (19 years old now!!) as my scratch partition, as I was going to wait until 8TB SSD got really cheap and just buy two of them for a RAID1 for the use. And now I need those drive slots to upgrade the mass storage pool.

Talk about backing oneself into a corner at the wrong time!

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#397

Post by 8note »

api wrote: post #392
Schnitz wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or it’ll accelerate the push to the cloud even more making the client even thinner.

Memory in the cloud isn't free either.

it isnt free but its easier to get 99.999% of the time usage out of it, vs having the client only sometimes have their machine on

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#398

Post by stephen_cagle »

Schnitz wrote: post #384
abeppu wrote: post #375

So the 1970s oil crisis caused a shift that included fuel efficiency rules. For like, the whole time I've been a software engineer, memory footprints of a lot of software have crept up, even when they aren't really doing more. The memory situation currently is a mess. But ... is it bad enough to get us to _change_ how we build?

Or it’ll accelerate the push to the cloud even more making the client even thinner.

Concidently, I asked Claude yesterday whether we have crossed the point that there is more compute and memory in the cloud or in personal computers.

It claims fp8 and fp16 has had higher throughput in the cloud since 2023.

fp32 and general computing still has more compute than personal computers.

And that memory is at the crossover point, but at this point only 10% of memory is going to personal computers, so the next few years will radically change the pc to cloud memory ratios.

https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/8733239a-328b-4aaa-8d76-0...

Anyway, all of this made me a (tiny bit) sad. It is the gradual end of general purpose computing you own, and the start of everything just being cloud compute that someone else owns and you rent.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#400

Post by Grombobulous »

ashdksnndck wrote: post #373
elictronic wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple is still paying out the 500 million dollars they lost in a lawsuit about this exact practice. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-67911517

Apple admitted to slowing down iPhones to keep the batteries from failing, and agreed to stop doing it and created a new battery replacement plan. I’ve personally experienced the benefit of getting the battery on Apple devices replaced which made them behave like new again. There’s a reason old Apple devices hold their value a lot better than competing manufacturers.

It was a pretty terrible controversy at the time but I think the battery health settings pane we got out of it was a good compromise and a net positive. What would be even better would be fully user-replaceable batteries.

To be more precise, the phones weren’t slowed down to keep the batteries from failing, they were slowed down to maintain stability and stop random crashes. As batteries age they lose their peak voltage capability, so you’re basically undervolting your components unless you slow them down.

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