131–140 of 158 posts
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If demand is high and supply is fixed (generally the case) you can also pull a DeBeers, grab everyone by the balls, and charge 3x (or more) the already high prices everyone would already get when you sell out your inventory.
To the extent that demand is price inelastic, which in practice means a lack of substitutes and the product serving an essential need.
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Like drug or oil cartels (OPEC), the reasons are obvious and reasonable, but also we don’t like to be grabbed by the balls. Both parties can have perfectly rational reasons to both exist and hate each other at the same time.
>but also we don’t like to be grabbed by the balls. They also don't like being "grabbed by the balls" in a few years time when demand inevitably recedes. It's pretty obvious that people here are throwing a temper tantrum because they need to pay more, and companies aren't rushing in to raise supply, even if they themselves admit such actions would be dumb.
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Do people really still upgrade so often? I mean it made sense pre 2015 for desktops, and pre 2020 for laptops... But since... Not much has changed from a performance standpoint. Even gpus hardly advanced since 2022 (4090) and the next generation is at least 1++ years off. Likely 2-3... And it's unclear wherever it will actually be an upgrade or more of the AI shenanigans they released with the 50 generation.
Laptops are pretty fragile, especially with how a lot of people treat them. Replacement is due to breakage, not obsolescence.
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If you make something that's as smart as a sloppy intern and costs ten thousand dollars an hour to run, you're not going to make any money off of it.
But if you make something that's as smart as a sloppy intern and costs even a small amount less, you're making an unbelievable amount of money off it.
Also an intern gains experience, while it's wage doesn't automatically.
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I bought a refurbished laptop with 64gb ddr4 (so-dimm) last week. It was just slightly more expensive than the 32gb variant with same specs. I guess the seller was not yet aware of the high memory prices. In a week or two I might be able to make a profit by just selling the memory.
There's cheap adapters that allow you to use SO-DIMM memory in desktop DIMM slots. Of course performance will suffer compared to native DIMM sticks, but if you happen to have SO-DIMM laying around that you aren't currently using, this might be a nice use for it.
This conjures up vivid memories of being in the middle 1990s, with my first Pentium build on a Triton (FX) chipset board. The motherboard only accepted 72-pin SIMMs, but those were still pretty rare and expensive for me.
Instead of buying new expensive RAM, I used memory adapters I used to get that going. IIRC, they were branded SimmVerter.
Each adapter allowed a person to install four 30-pin SIMMs (which were very cheap and common) into one 72-pin SIMM socket on a motherboard.
I had four such adapters, and they were each of different shape: One for each variation of tall-vs-short, and also for left-vs-right. These shapes allowed for all four of the adapters to be used concurrently on a motherboard with 4 72-pin slots without them physically interfering with eachother.
It was so much fun back then to try to get all sixteen 30-pin SIMMs to function reliably.
Things became even more fun when I decided to mix in some 72-pin EDO SIMMs, and get each of them working with their respective features enabled.
(And I said all of that with a lot of sarcasm, but: I did eventually get it all to work reliably-enough for my purposes back then. I also learned a ton of stuff about cleaning electrical contacts, maintaining fast mechanical alignment, conclusively identifying problematic modules through testing, and optimizing physical layouts. These are skills that I've been able to get out and productively use on occasion during the 30-ish years that have subsequently passed.
While I can look back on that with a bit of positivity, I'm not sure that people are ready for that kind of thing today. A lot of folks weren't ready for it back then, either -- adapters like that, while being a [mostly] electrically-sound concept, were popularly considered to be cursed.)
What's happening right now is very different than what happened back during the dot com crash. When they were doing price fixing it was because there was a glut of supply and demand was tanking. Prices were falling and they coordinated to keep prices from falling less. Right now demand for DRAM is extremely high bordering on endless. Prices are going up . The incentive for one of the big players to undercut the other…
The stuff they ordered might even be so custom to be useless to be sold by the creditors, leaving the RAM manufacturers hanging dry with unpaid invoices and idle capacity.
So they just do the old cartel thing and wait it out - with the added benefit of selling the same stuff they have been making for twice the price!
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> Right now demand for DRAM is extremely high bordering on endless Why is demand extremely high right now when it wasn't a couple of months ago? What changed since then that caused it to triple overnight?
People pulling their heads out of their ass as to how to actually deploy these systems at scale (AKA to do this effectively, you need to do more than just throw pallets of GPU's at it, such as properly considering Topologies of both NVMe-over-Fabric and PCIe roots/lanes [0]) combined with advances in various technologies (eg RDMA, CXL, cuDF/BaM/GPUD2S/etc) that meaningfully enhance how system ram can be integrated an…
Yeah something people don't understand is that the models have become so big it can take minutes to load them from SSDs. If you need to restart a CUDA process for whatever reason, you'd rather want to load the model files from RAM. This means for every GB of VRAM, you also need a GB of system RAM. Then there are things like prefix caching and multi user KV caching. Users generally don't do all their requests one after the other in a short window of time. This means you are better off freeing up VRAM after a minute has passed. If the user sends another request, using the system RAM as cache is still more energy, time and VRAM efficient than recalculation. DDR5 based DRAM is incredibly cheap.
>Regarding the hype of the day: AI specifically, part of it is the rise of wrappers and agents and inference in general that can run on CPU's/leverage system ram.
It has more to do with the dominance of mixture of expert models. Due to expert sparsity the required memory bandwidth drops quite significantly. It is possible to run gpt-oss 20B on a computer with 32GB RAM, a segment that used to be reserved for enthusiasts and developers has now become the mainstream amount of RAM on desktop PCs and mini PCs.
Yeah so if I had to summarize, the problem is that DDR4 is EOL, shifting demand to DDR5. AI demand means people want more than 16GiB RAM (there is actually a flood of used 2x8 GB kits in the laptop DDR5 market). DRAM manufacturers switch to supplying AI data centers and stopped resupplying retailers. Retailers are running out of inventory, leading to a sharp rise in prices. Early production of DDR6 will be out in 2026 with consumer availability in 2027, so there is zero incentive to expand production for DDR5.
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> then during spikes in demand (or alleged spikes in demand) they coordinate to keep the price from dropping. Why would they need to coordinate to keep the price from dropping during a spike in demand? a spike in demand will obviously not be expected to lower prices regardless of collusion
>Why would they need to coordinate to keep the price from dropping during a spike in demand? They wouldn't you're right. But I would expect for them to follow the sorts of behavior we've observed in other markets - egg prices, gasoline prices. When a spike occurs, even if as brief as a lightning strike, they will only very slowly drop prices, when in a purely capitalistic world the price drop ought to be equally fast…
That is not obvious. When demand is higher than supply, it is clearly good move to raise prices. But when demand is lower than supply it us not clear than lowering prices would raise volumes to compensate for lower margins.
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>Why would they need to coordinate to keep the price from dropping during a spike in demand? They wouldn't you're right. But I would expect for them to follow the sorts of behavior we've observed in other markets - egg prices, gasoline prices. When a spike occurs, even if as brief as a lightning strike, they will only very slowly drop prices, when in a purely capitalistic world the price drop ought to be equally fast…
> when in a purely capitalistic world the price drop ought to be equally fast That is not obvious. When demand is higher than supply, it is clearly good move to raise prices. But when demand is lower than supply it us not clear than lowering prices would raise volumes to compensate for lower margins.