In addition to the demand from AI data centres, I believe this also contributes to the high price.
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/ssds/intel-samsun...
PS5 now costs less than 64GB of DDR5 memory. RAM jumps to $600 due to shortage
141–150 of 402 posts
Re: PS5 now costs less than 64GB of DDR5 memory. RAM jumps to $600 due to shortage
#142So, 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 ne…
It’s not hyperbole
Re: PS5 now costs less than 64GB of DDR5 memory. RAM jumps to $600 due to shortage
#143Noticed SSDs went up too. There's a "black friday" sales price for a 4TB crucial external drive that's at its highest price in 90 days. Bad time if you need to build a computer.
Article says: Looking at it optimistically, you're probably going to find DDR5 at bargain prices again in 2027. When do you think prices will recede again?
never fully, like with GPU, it a semi-cartel, it's in everything including you high performance SSD (as cache) they have a reason for them being supper high for ~2 years then they will go down but only "somewhat", lets say if the peak it >2x pricing the price in 2027 will be ~1.5x-1.8x price.
And because everything needs prices expect all electronics to be ~20%-80% more expensive in 2027 compared to today, naturally this includes the profit margin.
and naturally every regulation related companies don't like will supposedly be at fault for this (e.g. right to repair)
at least that is a wild speculation on my side
Re: PS5 now costs less than 64GB of DDR5 memory. RAM jumps to $600 due to shortage
#144Potentially unpopular take: memory manufacturers have been operating on the margins of profitability for quite a while now. Their products are essentially an indistinguishable commodity. Memory from Samsung or Micron or another manufacturer may have slight differences in overclockability, but that matters little to folks who just want a stable system. Hopefully the shortage leads large purchasers to engage in long-te…
> Hopefully the shortage leads large purchasers to engage in long-term contracts with the memory manufacturers which give them the confidence to invest in new fabs and increased capacity. Most DRAM is already purchased through contracts with manufacturers. Manufacturers don't actually want too many extremely long term contracts because it would limit their ability to respond to market price changes. Like most commodi…
> Manufacturers don't actually want too many extremely long term contracts because it would limit their ability to respond to market price changes.
Except silicon, power, and water (and a tiny amount of plastic/paper for packaging), what else does a fab need that only produces DRAM? If true, then power is far and away the most variable input cost.
Re: PS5 now costs less than 64GB of DDR5 memory. RAM jumps to $600 due to shortage
#145Built 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
Just checked my invoice from last year, $316 CAD for 2x32GB 5600MHz DDR5 ECC UDIMMs.
I'm now seeing $480 CAD for a single stick.
Re: PS5 now costs less than 64GB of DDR5 memory. RAM jumps to $600 due to shortage
#146Potentially unpopular take: memory manufacturers have been operating on the margins of profitability for quite a while now. Their products are essentially an indistinguishable commodity. Memory from Samsung or Micron or another manufacturer may have slight differences in overclockability, but that matters little to folks who just want a stable system. Hopefully the shortage leads large purchasers to engage in long-te…
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…
>We all had supercomputers in our pockets.
You still do. There is no "AI movement" you need to participate in. You can grab a copy of SICP and a banged up ten year old thinkpad and compute away, your brain will thank you. It's like when people complain that culture is unaffordable because the newest Marvel movie tickets cost 50 bucks, go to the library or standardebooks.org, the entire Western canon is free
Re: PS5 now costs less than 64GB of DDR5 memory. RAM jumps to $600 due to shortage
#147So, 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…
"Where the f*k is all the abundance that AI was supposed to bring into the world?"
more money for shareholder, 5 Trillion Nvidia???? more like a quadrillion for nvidia market cap
Re: PS5 now costs less than 64GB of DDR5 memory. RAM jumps to $600 due to shortage
#148It's crazy how much RAM has inflated in the last month. I checked the price history of a few DDR5 kits and most have tripled since September .
Why specifically just now? It doesn't seem that much has materially changed very recently.
It's due to every hyperscalar building out new AI datacenters. For example you have Google recently saying things like "Google tells employees it must double capacity every 6 months to meet AI demand", and that they need to increase capacity by 1000x within 4-5 years.
Re: PS5 now costs less than 64GB of DDR5 memory. RAM jumps to $600 due to shortage
#149Lots of people are speculating that the price spike is AI related. But it might be more mundane: I'd bet that a good chunk of the apparently sudden demand spike could be last month's Microsoft Windows 10 end-of-support finally happening, pushing companies and individuals to replace many years worth of older laptops and desktops all at once.
I worked in enterprise laptop repair two decades ago — I like your theory (and there's definitely meat there) but my experience was that if a system's OEM configuration wasn't enough to run modern software, we'd replace the entire system (to avoid bottlenecks elsewhere in the architecture).
Re: PS5 now costs less than 64GB of DDR5 memory. RAM jumps to $600 due to shortage
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
The thing about being annoyed about the top of the range prices, for me, it irritates as it feels like it drags the lower models prices upwardsz
But it’s not like the lower priced models are subsidizing the high-end models (probably the opposite; the high-end ones have greater margins).