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Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

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Re: Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

#151

Post by energy123 »

CraigJPerry wrote: post #147
energy123 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> First come first served is a better principle than "surge pricing". This is called a price ceiling, and it's a bad idea with a track record of failure and significant harm. I'd rather pay extra and get what I need with 100% chance than get what I need cheaply with 5% chance and otherwise be forced to go without or buy from scalpers for the same price I would have paid anyways. This is the purpose of prices. So the…

> This is called a price ceiling The act of eliminating surge pricing is not a price ceiling. That's a different thing. That requires more than simply swapping surge pricing with first come first served. You've created a strawman. > I'd rather pay extra and get what I need with 100% chance False dichotomy. Neither approach increases supply. Of course according to economists who can hand wave away bullwhip effects wit…

> The act of eliminating surge pricing is not a price ceiling.

If you force companies to price products lower than what they want, then you have a price ceiling by definition.

> Neither approach increases supply.

I didn't mention or allude to supply at all, although it's true that price ceilings also decrease supply (less so if there is monopoly or collusion, but they still do).

I was talking about resource allocation. The person who needs a new system because their previous computer broke will be willing to pay the extra money, but the person who already has a DDR4 system with a 5950x that runs their games well enough will be content to hold off on their AM5 upgrade to DDR5 because the marginal improvement isn't worth the extra $400.

If you have a price ceiling like what you proposed, the person with the DDR4 system may buy the DDR5 that they don't really need 1 day earlier than the person who actually needs the DDR5, creating a misallocation of resources.

(that's an example of the more abstract principle at play).

Theoretical arguments aren't even needed here. The empirical history of price ceilings is there for you to google.

If you didn't know that what you were proposing is a price ceiling, and you thought that I was talking about supply instead of resource allocation, then I mean this with no offence intended but you should study elementary economics before forming confident opinions on the subject. Society is in a vulnerable point with cost of living pressure and we don't need more energy behind these harmful populist ideas.

Re: Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

#152

Post by krackers »

thescriptkiddie wrote: post #60
mxfh wrote: post #7

To put this in long term relation. Even current DDR4 3200 DIMM prices are at an all time high. These are 6+ year old chip specs now! I even thought stuff was overpriced four years ago in mid-2021 already, but this is a whole new level. Some sample long term data for those: https://geizhals.eu/?phist=2151624&age=9999

anyone want to buy a 2x16 GB DDR4-3200 kit that only fails memtest86 some of the time?

I wonder if semi-reliable RAM could be made to work for training. After all gradient descent already works in a stochastic environment, so maybe the noise from a few flipped bits doesn't matter too much.

Re: Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

#153

Post by altmanaltman »

sksksk wrote: post #144
Maxion wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simple web pages can be made small with modern tooling, e.g. AstroJS. The problem is that most web pages these days fundamentally are not simple. Rather than trying to make web pages small, the real effort would be in designing web pages to be simple. The large majority of software devs, PMs and the like don't really know how to do anything else than a Node + React webapp.

I've come to the opinion that for the vast majority of apps I've built, it could all be built using HTML + CSS (all built server side). I can sprinkle in little bits of interactivity using something like HTMX. And I'll have a website that is very easy to optimise, has phenomenal backwards compatibility, and gets rid of a whole class of issues associated with SPAs. I often regret in my career not pushing back more on…

I guess you're right, but it's more of a curve, though. Once you get to any decent level of complexity, it actually helps to have a framework instead of just going all HTML+CSS. Also it helps having something standard as react (that every web developer should fundamentally understand) than doing your custom stuff if other people will be working on it in the future.

There's a lot to say about the side effects of frameworks but there's a reason why everything converges towards that.

Re: Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

#154

Post by zarzavat »

mike_d wrote: post #115
zarzavat wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's not collusion to ask for more money from OpenAI if you hear that they are trying to buy 40% of the world's supply. Increased demand leads to higher prices, that's normal. OpenAI, by doing simultaneous deals, hid the true demand from the suppliers, thus lowering their price and raising everyone else's.

What?? Replace DRAM with peaches or table legs and you have the exact example they give you during management training to explain implicit collusion.

That's when you raise prices without a change in the market conditions.

OpenAI is creating more demand, therefore the price must go up, if it didn't then there'd be shortages.

Re: Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

#155

Post by gloxkiqcza »

Snoozus wrote: post #121

Maybe it's time we make a simple web page 100KB again? Is there some kind of CDN minification, adblocking and compression service? Maybe even server side rendering of websites? Then a smartphone would work fine with 1GB of RAM and everyone could be happy.

Obligatory mentions:

https://motherfuckingwebsite.com

http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com

Re: Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

#156

Post by rolandog »

I wonder who the "visionaries" were that set the marked increase trend of max prices near 2024-12-09 for DDR4-3600 2x32GB and DDR4-3600 2x16GB?

I think that acted as a dog whistle for the rest of the market signalling there'd be no consequences for ripping other people off.

Also relevant: https://youtu.be/B7sB1-8jKno

Re: Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

#157

Post by zozbot234 »

gloxkiqcza wrote: post #155
Snoozus wrote: post #121

Maybe it's time we make a simple web page 100KB again? Is there some kind of CDN minification, adblocking and compression service? Maybe even server side rendering of websites? Then a smartphone would work fine with 1GB of RAM and everyone could be happy.

Obligatory mentions: https://motherfuckingwebsite.com http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com

Obligatory mention: https://www.downloadmoreram.com

Re: Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

#158

Post by [deleted] »

somenameforme wrote: post #79

I don't understand this. I'm looking at prices on some Asian store fronts and it's nowhere even remotely near these. I'm looking at DDR5-6000 2x16 for about $130, with no apparent limits. Even with tariffs, transport, and other fees, you could get this to the US for way less than $400. I doubt the market could be this inefficient - in other words I don't think I just found a get rich quick scheme. So, what gives?

[deleted]

Re: Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

#159

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

throwthrow_ wrote: post #148

I asked ChatGPT if it can generate a bunch of RAM for me. He says this is some kind of famous joke or something. (I’m sorry I couldn’t resist)

"Downloading RAM" is more feasible than people think.

The seek time of a consumer-grade hard disk is said to be on the order of 10 ms. That's roughly the latency of a very high quality FTTH connection. Meaning that if you run a HDD rather than an SSD, a swap file in the cloud could potentially be faster than a local one (especially when you consider multiple reads/writes that could be done in parallel).

It's not exactly downloading more RAM but decently close to call it that for the joke.

Re: Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

#160

Post by sophrosyne42 »

franga2000 wrote: post #136
zozbot234 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just surge pricing to manage demand, not "price gouging". Being able to buy RAM at high prices is a lot better than being unable to source it at all because everyone else is panic-hoarding.

Is it better? As with all price gouging, better for those who can afford it, sure, but not for those who can't. The proper way to combat scalping is to implement fair allocation methods (for a start purchase quantity limits) and punish people for scalping. Look at how most places handled war-time gasoline shortages. Rationing coupons, purchase limits, demand leveling (like the odd-even system), price or profit contro…

The high prices ("price gouging") perform a social function because some cannot afford it; they prioritize what matters to them more, and ram is left available to those who absolutely require it. Trying to get around that by forcing prices below the market price simple encourages scalping behaviors. If prices are below the market price, but at the market price you would prefer the cash in your pocket over the ram stick, then you have every reason to sell it higher than you bought it because people are willing to buy it. It is those willing to buy it that are the main culprit in establishing the true price.

In reality, it is almost never a true binary of "afford" or "cannot afford" like critics of surge pricing make it out to be; people evaluate the price according to their circumstance and make a trade off. It is because of these decisions, the state of demand, that surge pricing is possible, not because of the machinations of evil price scalpers. That is why manufacturers couldn't lower prices even if they wanted to; gpu msrp being a great example of gpu vendors being caught between consumer ignorance about economics and the facts of reality that gpus are scarce enough to warrant higher prices.

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