161–170 of 402 posts
The silver lining is that hopefully it’ll become too expensive to ship new Electron apps
I'm joking, but only kind of. It's not a domain that I do a lot of, but I haven't touched Qt in so long that it would basically be starting from scratch if I tried to write an app with it; I could write an Election app in like an hour.
I bought 32GB of DDR5 SODIMM last year for 108€ on Amazon. The exact same product that I bought back then is now 232€ on Amazon. I don't like this ride.
I guess I'm glad I bought when I did; didn't realize how good of a deal I was getting.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Manufacturing is based on anticipating demand. Unforseen things like the pandemic hurt profits. Letting things go this unmanaged with a 3 year run way for AI demand seems a little hard to understand. In this case, not anticipating demand seems to creates more profit.
I find it hard to believe the pandemic hurt the profits of computing hardware, demand went up from it not down.
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…
Maybe that is the answer to how things are supposed to work if AI replaces everyone and no one can afford to buy their stuff. Things being too cheap allows money to pool at the bottom in little people's hands in the forms of things like "their homes" and "their computers" and "their cars". You don't really want billions in computing hardware (say) being stashed down there in inefficient, illiquid physical form, you w…
To me the #1 most important factor in a maintaining a prosperous and modern society is common access to tools by the masses, and computing hardware is just the latest set of tools.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually, this seems to be mostly a spike in retail prices, not wholesale DRAM contracts that are only up 60% or so in the past few months according to Samsung. So we should most likely place at least some fraction of the blame on our fellow consumers for overreacting to the news and hoarding RAM at overinflated prices. DRAM sticks are the new toilet paper.
> Actually, this seems to be mostly a spike in retail prices, not wholesale DRAM contracts that are only up 60% or so in the past few months according to Samsung. So we should most likely place at least some fraction of the blame on our fellow consumers for overreacting to the news and hoarding RAM at overinflated prices. DRAM sticks are the new toilet paper. What is your source on that? Moore's Law is Dead directly…
Tom’s Hardware: “Samsung raises memory chip prices by up to 60% since September as AI data-center buildout strangles supply,” Nov 2025. https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/samsung-raises-me...
Note the consistent "up to 60% since September" figure in the above recent reports. That's for one module capacity, with others being up 30% to 50% - and it certainly isn't the 200% or more we're apparently seeing now in the retail market. That's pure panic hoarding, which is actually a very common overreaction to a sudden price spike.
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…
Maybe that is the answer to how things are supposed to work if AI replaces everyone and no one can afford to buy their stuff. Things being too cheap allows money to pool at the bottom in little people's hands in the forms of things like "their homes" and "their computers" and "their cars". You don't really want billions in computing hardware (say) being stashed down there in inefficient, illiquid physical form, you w…
In case anyone else wanted to check, PS5 has[1]: > Memory: 16 GB GDDR6 SDRAM So unless the RAM price jumps to 4x the price of a PS5, getting a PS5 is not the most cost efficient way to get to 64 GB of RAM. In comparison, PS3 has been used to build cheap clusters[2]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_5 [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_cluster
Yes, stupid comparison really. Also 64GB is pretty high-end from a consumer perspective. Most would do just fine with 32 as 2x16GB.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. I don't agree with this sentence. Why would not the same apply advice to oil and gas contracts? If you look at the size and duration of oil and gas contracts for major energy importers, they often run 10 years or more. Some of the contracts in Japan and Korea are so large…
Because oil & gas suppliers only ever sell one product, and memory fabs can dynamically switch product mix in response to supply & demand to optimize profits. The same sand, power and water can make DDR4, HBM or DDR5
This is purely price gouging because these rams are not ECC and server grade.
> Despite server-grade RDIMM memory and HBM being the main attractions for hardware manufacturers building AI servers, the entire memory industry, including DDR5, is being affected by price increases. The problem for consumers is that memory manufacturers are shifting production prioritization toward datacenter-focused memory types and producing less consumer-focused DDR5 memory as a result.
But I'm sure the hysteria around that isn't helping prices come back down either.