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PS5 now costs less than 64GB of DDR5 memory. RAM jumps to $600 due to shortage

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Re: PS5 now costs less than 64GB of DDR5 memory. RAM jumps to $600 due to shortage

#131
post #78
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a sad trend for "the rest of us" and history in general. The economic boom of the 80's thru the 2010s has been a vast democratization of computation - hardware became more powerful and affordable, and algorithms (at least broadly if not individually) became more efficient. We all had supercomputers in our pockets. This AI movement seems to move things in the opposite direction, in that us plebeians have less and…

It's not like you need 64GB to have "democratized computation". We used to have 64MB and that was plenty. Unfortunately, software got slower more quickly than hardware got quicker.

> We used to have 64MB and that was plenty.

Bullshit. It was cramped and I wasn't able to do half of what I was wanting to actually do. Maybe it was plenty for your usecases, but such a small amount of memory was weak for my needs in the late 90s and 2000s. 64MB desktops struggled to handle the photo manipulations I wanted to do with scanned images. Trying to do something like edit video on a home PC was near impossible with that limited amount of memory. I was so happy when we managed to get a 512MB machine a few years later, it made a lot of my home multimedia work a lot better.

Re: PS5 now costs less than 64GB of DDR5 memory. RAM jumps to $600 due to shortage

#133

Built my son's first gaming PC 2 months ago. Figured it would be cheaper around Black Friday, but the prices were reasonable enough that we didn't wait. Turned out to be a huge savings to buy that fast DDR5 in September.

I bought 32GB x 2 of G.SKILL a year ago and paid $204. Now it's $600. Insane

Re: PS5 now costs less than 64GB of DDR5 memory. RAM jumps to $600 due to shortage

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flight simulators just had more cash for more advanced chips, but arcade games like the Sega Model 1 (Virtua Racing) was via Virtua Fighter an inspiration for the Playstation, and before that there was crude games on both PC and Amiga. Games were always going to go 3d sooner or later, the real pressure of the high volume competitive market got us more and more capable chips until they were capable enough for the kind…

> Flight simulators just had more cash for more advanced chips Yes. That is my point. The customers willing to pay the high initial R+D costs opened up the potential for wider adoption. This is always the case. Even the gaming GPUs which have grown in popularity with consumers are derivatives of larger designs intended for research clusters, datacenters, aerospace, and military applications. No question that chip com…

It's symbiotic, I suppose.

Re: PS5 now costs less than 64GB of DDR5 memory. RAM jumps to $600 due to shortage

#136
post #98

So, like, we were already pretty much priced out of higher-end graphic cards, and now it's happening to RAM. All this while jobs are disappearing, layoffs are ongoing and CEOs are touting AI's 'capabilities' left and right. Next is probably CPUs, even if AIs don't use them that much, manufactures will shift production to something more profitable, then gouge prices so that only enterprises will pay for them. What's n…

In world history, the vast majority of abundance is downstream of conquest, not innovation. Plunder makes profit. Even in weird moments like today, where innovation is (or, at least, was) genuinely the driving force of abundance, that innovation would not have come about without the seed capital of Europe plundering Africa and the Americas.

Abundance isn't even the right framing. What most people actually want and need is a certain amount of resources - after which their needs are satiated and they move onto other endeavors. It's the elites that want abundance - i.e. infinite growth forever. The history of early agriculture is marked by hunter-gatherers outgrowing their natural limits, transitioning to farming, and then people figuring out that it's really fucking easy to just steal what others grow. Abundance came from making farmers overproduce to feed an unproductive elite. Subsistence farming gave way to farming practices that overtaxed the soil or risked crop failure.

The history of technology had, up until recently, bucked this trend. Computers got better and cheaper every 18 months because we had the time and money to exploit electricity and lithography to produce smaller computers that used less energy. This is abundance from innovation. The problem is, most people don't want abundance; the most gluttonous need for computational power can be satisfied with a $5000 gaming rig. So the tech industry has been dealing with declining demand, first with personal computers and then with smartphones.

AI fixes this problem, by being an endless demand for more and more compute with the economic returns to show for it. When AI people were talking about abundance, they were primarily telling their shareholders: We will build a machine that will make us kings of the new economy, and your equity shares will grant you seats in the new nobility. In this new economy, labor doesn't matter. We can automate away the entire working and middle classes, up to and including letting the new nobles hunt them down from helicopters for sport.

Ok, that's hyperbole. But assuming the AI bubble doesn't pop, I will agree that affordable CPUs are next on the chopping block. If that happens, modular / open computing is dead. The least restrictive computing environment normal people can afford will be a Macbook, solely because Apple has so much market power from iPhones that they can afford to keep the Mac around for vanity. We will get the dystopia RMS warned about, not from despotic control over computing, but from the fact that nobody will be able to afford to own their own computer anymore. Because abundance is very, very expensive.

Re: PS5 now costs less than 64GB of DDR5 memory. RAM jumps to $600 due to shortage

#137
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a sad trend for "the rest of us" and history in general. The economic boom of the 80's thru the 2010s has been a vast democratization of computation - hardware became more powerful and affordable, and algorithms (at least broadly if not individually) became more efficient. We all had supercomputers in our pockets. This AI movement seems to move things in the opposite direction, in that us plebeians have less and…

> This AI movement seems to move things in the opposite direction, in that us plebeians have less and less access to RAM, computing power and food and...uh...GPUs to play Cyberpunk; and are dependent on Altermanic aristocracy to dribble compute onto us at their leisure and for a hefty tithe. Compute is cheaper than ever. The ceiling is just higher for what you can buy. Yes, we have $2000 GPUs now. You don't have to b…

I would take this argument more seriously if

-the whole reason why the GPU is $2000 is because of said AI bubble sucking up wafers at TSMC or elsewhere, with a soupçon of Jensen's perceived monopoly status...

-for a good part of the year, you could not actually buy said $2000 GPU (I assume you are referring to the 5090) also because of said AI bubble

(granted, while Jensen does not want to sell me his GPU, I would like to point out that Tim Cook has no problem taking my money).

on that point, I can go and buy a Ford F150 tomorrow. Apparently, per the article, I would have problems buying bog standard DDR5 DIMMS to build my computer.

Re: PS5 now costs less than 64GB of DDR5 memory. RAM jumps to $600 due to shortage

#138
post #104
post #91

I picked up a PS5 today on a Black Friday deal for 350EUR. 32GB DDR5 is at around 280EUR at the moment. I have a gaming PC, it runs Linux because (speaking as a Microsoft sysadmin with 10 years under my belt) I hate what Windows has become, but on commodity hardware it’s not quite there for me. Thought I’d play the PlayStation backlog while I wait for the Steam Machine.

Don't forget to play Astro's Playroom, it comes with the system and it's a blast.

Thanks, will do!

Re: PS5 now costs less than 64GB of DDR5 memory. RAM jumps to $600 due to shortage

#139
Is it really a shortage, rather than unfair order fulfillment, when it's just four companies buying up everything? There's plenty of RAM, it's just getting sold to the people who yell the loudest instead of going "sorry we have more customers than just you" and fulfilling orders to everyone.

Re: PS5 now costs less than 64GB of DDR5 memory. RAM jumps to $600 due to shortage

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same chips in both, made in the same fabs. Any relative price difference is like the difference between regular and premium gas/petrol.

wait, are you saying that there's no difference between regular and premium gas?

This may surprise you, but gas stations typically only have two grades of fuel stored in tanks. Mid-grade gas is mixed at the pump from the other two.
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