Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months • Hacker News Board

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#401

Post by folkrav » Wed, Aug 19, 2026, 1:21 AM UTC

datakan wrote: post #28

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 saving a ton of money by simply not upgrading. I used to do upgrades every 1-2 years just to keep up on things, pass the old box down to my son or otherwise donate it. Now I intend to keep my current setup for 7+ years. Its 2 years old next month. I may even stay with it longer. I just see no reason to upgrade with things how they are. I considered a Mac Studio a couple months ago. Price was up but might have pul…

I've always done 5-7 year cycles on machine I've owned, but this time around its getting quite complicated as my last refresh was 4-5 years ago. So I'm kind of stuck wishing my current hardware both meets the requirements and just survives another half a decade, or my next upgrade, even if only partial, will be VERY expensive...

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#402

Post by elictronic » Wed, Aug 19, 2026, 1:35 AM UTC

dieortin wrote: post #291

elictronic wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it makes you feel better. The US government looks like it might start removing some of the 28k troops that are stationed in South Korea over this. No reason to keep them in a country that enables this sort of behavior.

Do you have a source for this being the reason they might remove some troops?

An admin upset about inflation driven negative economic sentiment and a country that is slow rolling a couple hundred billion in investments. Current events.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#403

Post by subscribed » Wed, Aug 19, 2026, 1:36 AM UTC

forinti wrote: post #6

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've been using computers for more than 40 years now and the one component I have never seen fail is RAM. All the other bits in a computer I've seen fail.

Oh well, it's fairly common.Maybe not in a singular/several rarely used (and not monitored) desktop computers, but.... it's common once you have quite a few under your care.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#404

Post by phil21 » Wed, Aug 19, 2026, 1:38 AM UTC

davkan wrote: post #46

seanp2k2 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked in and around datacenters for a few decades now and I've seen pretty much everything fail, but power supplies in particular do so at a higher rate than I expected. I've had one literally start smoking in my home office recently too. Luckily, it didn't damage any components, but it was pretty dramatic and abrupt -- just powered on my desktop and got nothing but a fog machine coming out of the rear fan unti…

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.

Power supplies - regardless of quality - die pretty regularly at scale. Only disks fail more often. They are the #2 component we replace in the datacenter.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#405

Post by biddit » Wed, Aug 19, 2026, 1:39 AM UTC

jmward01 wrote: post #329

If 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…

> This means that when this ram hits EOL it -won't- flood the consumer market in a meaningful way. It is disposed of because most people won't put a server GPU into anything. It is like a used big rig, built for purpose and when it reaches end of life it is truly at end of life.

This was true until the last year.

P40, P100, V100, A40, etc are selling like hotcakes and prices have been rapidly increasing.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#406

Post by dijit » Wed, Aug 19, 2026, 1:43 AM UTC

forinti wrote: post #6

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've been using computers for more than 40 years now and the one component I have never seen fail is RAM. All the other bits in a computer I've seen fail.

I've seen every single component of a system fail, the least I've seen fail has been the CPU itself (I've only seen one fail out of thousands).

Memory seems to fail pretty commonly overall, less common than harddisks but more common than motherboards.

The issue is that I'm used to using ECC ram, which fails loud when it's actually bad.. consumer memory won't tell you unless you can't boot.. and everyone disables the startup memory testing too.. (in fact, I think it's disabled by default for the last 10 years because people want to boot quickly).

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#407

Post by api » Wed, Aug 19, 2026, 1:45 AM UTC

stephen_cagle wrote: post #398

Schnitz wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 nex…

I agree with the sentiment, but there is a devils' advocate argument:

Most compute loads are bursty. Most PCs and phones sit idle almost all the time. It's an inefficient use of capital. In the cloud you can be idle and then suddenly command 1000X more power than any affordable PC could ever have... for 10 seconds... then be idle again. Those kinds of work loads aren't possible to realize on a PC without massively overbuying hardware.

I'd like to see more research on secure private cloud computing. Homomorphic encryption has gotten better but is still very slow, but there's other approaches that can help quite a bit but don't require much of a performance hit. Look into secure multiparty computation, reversible anonymization, etc.

I don't think personal computing will die, but I think it'll go back to being a hobbyist and pro thing like it was from its birth in the 1970s up until the middle 1990s. In the 1980s the average person did not own a computer, or if they did it was just to play some games. The average person was not loading BASIC programs off bootleg tapes and calling BBSes.

BTW I've been thinking a lot lately about how AI could save personal computing by allowing us to create an off-ramp from the present rats nest of complexity to something saner and simpler. Just thoughts right now but it's interesting.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#408

Post by trinsic2 » Wed, Aug 19, 2026, 1:47 AM UTC

forinti wrote: post #6

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've been using computers for more than 40 years now and the one component I have never seen fail is RAM. All the other bits in a computer I've seen fail.

I also have been using PC's for a long time, thirty years. The only time I have seen ram fail during use was within the last 5 years. My 10th gen platform and 32 gigs of ram DDR4 and one of the sticks failed, this was before the ramapocalypse of course, the sticks were replaced under warranty. But I have had systems in my shop with failed ram. it happens, but its rare, unless its cheap ram, less rare.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#409

Post by DroneBetter » Wed, Aug 19, 2026, 1:49 AM UTC

amenghra wrote: post #96

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.

Apple could release a new on-device LLM model every year and keep the hyperconsumerism going...

it is difficult to motivate hyperconsumers with the narrow band of improvements that can be made with new LLM models and also are specific to smartphone OS integration and not superseded years in advance by datacentres

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#410

Post by chrysoprace » Wed, Aug 19, 2026, 1:51 AM UTC

z_rho_one wrote: post #175

After RAM prices climbed 200% between August and November of last year, a store associate at Micro Center encouraged me to buy some RAM sticks if I needed them because "prices might continue to rise for a few years". I told him that was ridiculous and nobody would tolerate it if prices got higher. How wrong I was...

I built a new main rig in November because I saw the memory prices going up. I overpaid about AUD$110 above its RRP. The same kit is now AUD$610 above RRP from the same retailer.

Here's hoping I can wait out the current shortage before any upgrades (I typically only upgrade every 5-7 years or so anyway) or replacements, because I do not plan to pay the new price.