Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

tomshardware.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

521–530 of 587 posts

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#521

Post by account42 »

folkrav wrote: post #401
datakan wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Similar situation here, my desktop is from 2019, with only the GPU upgraded since then. On the other side, I'm also much less interested in modern games these days so perhaps I'll do fine with a 10+ year cycle this time.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#522

Post by account42 »

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 have had a RAM stick start frequently failing ECC checks after a couple years use. I also had the VRAM on a GPU fail, but you could blame that one on overheating from the nearby compute core. I agree is rarer though.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#523

Post by account42 »

e2le wrote: post #344
forinti wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How do you know they weren't faulty? Blip flips are usually silent unless you have ECC memory or are actively testing for faulty cells. Somewhat recently, Firefox implemented memory testing in their crash reporter and found 10% of reports were due to bit-flips[0]. If it weren't for reading that HN thread, I would never have being prompted to check and find the faulty memory in my laptop. It would have gone undetected…

Keep in mind that a passing memtest86 does not prove the absence of faults that could present themselves under different usage patterns.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#524

Post by account42 »

phil21 wrote: post #404
davkan wrote: post #46

Earlier 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.

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.

Are data-center power supplies comparable to higher-end desktop power supplies? And how much do you oversize them compared to the load they will actually handle? E.g. for a desktop buying even double the power supply capacity you need won't really affect the overall PC price that much but I somehow doubt data center operators are willing to not optimize away that cost.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#525

Post by account42 »

derf_ wrote: post #104
cosmic_cheese wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdotally, RAM failures are more common than they used to be in previous decades, I assume due to increased capacities and smaller process nodes. Looser manufacturing standards may also play a part. The component category I've never seen fail is CPU.

> The component category I've never seen fail is CPU. The CPU can fail if the heatsink falls off! That is something that happens (I've had one come off in my hand that was being held on by nothing but hopes and dreams, fortunately not while the CPU was powered on). More likely in a desktop tower form factor.

Even that is not guaranteed to break a modern CPU though as they all monitor their thermals and down-throttle (even below way specified minimum speeds) as needed to protect themselves. Not that I'd recommend relying on that but still, I have had cooling fail without apparent damage.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#526

Post by account42 »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #442
rubiquity wrote: post #351

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.

I just laid an arm and a leg for 128GB of DDR4. More than I normally would have ever spent, because the alternatives were far worse.

I'll go hug my 128GB ECC DDR4 from 2019. With eletrostatic-safe clothing of course.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#528

Post by account42 »

simoncion wrote: post #255
mordae wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except staying on the edge costs exactly the same as not, when you take the resell value of the components on the second hand market into account. The problem is that some can afford to lock their capital in the hardware (via one-time investment) and some do not. R9700 will lose less than 30% of value in the upcoming 3 years. Give or take. Yet people buy ancient cards for way more than 30% of R9700's cost.

> ...when you take the resell value of the components on the second hand market into account. When taking the resale value of used kit on the second-hand market into account, one must also take into account the hassle of selling on the second-hand market. For me? Personally? That hassle absolutely eliminates any money I would get from any plausible sale price. If I'm getting rid of used kit, it's going to be as donat…

Yes and I seriously doubt gps insinuation that resale could make up for the price premium of top of the line components when they were consistently beat by the next years significantly cheaper mid range components.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#529

Post by mike_hearn »

paulpauper wrote: post #194

This is "the memory shortage that no one saw coming." To the best of my knowledge, no podcasters, bloggers, or experts in AI predicted this or were sounding the alarm of a memory shortage. No one was saying pre-2025 to buy memory/data storage stocks. This goes to show how hard it is to predict. Everyone was saying to buy NVDA, which had done well from 2022-2024, and then stalled out, only to be surpassed by memory st…

There were some. Read SemiAnalysis.

I picked up some Micron last year anticipating memory demand, but then the stock went down for a while. I waited, it went up and I took 25% profit as I figured they couldn't add any new capacity and would have sold all the capacity from their existing fabs on long term contracts. Then prices went crazy, sigh.

I'm not sure why prices have gone boom now rather than before given we're years into the LLM boom, but probably it's to do with capacity lockups expiring or something similar.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#530

Post by diogenescynic »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #500
diogenescynic wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By what metric? Houses, healthcare, cars, college... everything that matters is way more expensive for current generations when you compare to multiples of income or ounces of gold. We're working harder for less to show. Yes, there are FSD vehicles and rockets that can land and be re-used... but steak is up 30% from a year ago. In most ways, life is going in the wrong direction. The only thing getting 'better' for mo…

Your grandparents almost certainly had siblings or knew of their friends siblings dying from now completely preventable diseases. The quality, safety, comfort of low income housing in the United States is exceptional in historical terms. The fact that you CAN be anything you want is an unheard of concept even 60 years ago. The worst cars on the market today are modern marvels of engineering compared to decades ago. L…

Okay Ben Shapiro, but you skipped an entire generation to make your argument and are ignoring what's happened in the last 5/10/15/30 years.

I don't WANT to be mad and that shows you're arguing in bad faith. I want to stop checking my bank balance before I buy toilet paper and paper towels. Life wasn't like this until very recently... We're destroying the middle class and making home ownership virtually unaffordable. The average first time home buyer is 40. The economy is not healthy and has not been this disconnected from the stock market since probably 2007.

Post reply on HN