161–170 of 415 posts
Well... I guess William Gibson laughs last, after all!
The squeeze is real even at the SME level. We recently wanted to add another TB of memory to several servers (we do EDA chip design, which eats a lot of memory). Quotes came back to about €200k for 48 x 96GB DDR5-5600 RDIMMs. Mind you, this is for refurbished memory with 1 year warranty. I'm still figuring out if this is FU-pricing or just how things are going to be from now on. Spec-ing and buying servers has become…
That’s about right, sadly. We were buying servers with 1TB DDR5 standard, no longer. Quotes are 7 days max, lead times fluctuating out months, and often now have language they can choose to not honor the quote for any reason due to price fluctuations.
When it comes to server RAM, I got quoted double a previous quote within the span of a week.
Buying servers is basically quote roulette now.
And if you're wondering, who's throwing out DDR5 systems? A local healthcare company. The boxes for some units are crushed and have water stains on them, and I imagine others don't meet their exacting requirements in some minor way (though they look and work OK to me, regardless of scratches and dings on the case).
Steam Deck had a huge price increase (~40-50%) but it still sold out in 24 hours.
All it would take is for everyone not to pull the trigger on buying things for a little bit and prices would fall but instead enough people are buying things at a crazy markup. If anything that's a signal to sell things at higher prices. Of course AI is amplifying this problem but realistically people are still buying consumer hardware at these prices which lets businesses know people will pay this price.
I'm on a machine built from parts in 2014 and it's all very good for me to do every day development so I'm not posting this from a machine I won't have to touch for another 10 years.
How much of is this is actually due to the AI hype cycle, and what's the impact of the global energy clusterfuck that is the Strait of Hormuz?
I want a more complete picture of why prices are so high from articles like this. Is supply actively constrained, or is this mostly in anticipation of future shortages? How much of this is a mix of panic buying and price gouging on bad news? I care more about the secondhand market. Prices are nuts for old used gear, but that also tracks with patterns I've been seeing since roughly the pandemic where more and more sec…
Supply is both already constrained and AI companies have pre-purchased enough HBM at enough of a premium that most of the wafers are allocated to them. All the intermediaries are jacking up their prices so their inventory doesn't empty too quickly, because they may not be able to refill it. It is hard to overstate the damage that the infinite money being poured into AI is doing to the wider economy. Anything involved…
I get what you're saying but medium term this is an extremely funny sentiment. This money being poured is likely to end up being a huge boon for a lot of economic sectors, including in the US. Most commodity shortages like this end in a glut, with a medium term win for consumers, even if we have 1-2 (more) years of pricing pain. Meanwhile expensive RAM has so far left stock for people that really need it. Calling this kind of demand economic damage is odd.
I'm playing the newest games on ddr3 with a 2080 and a 4790k. It's a simple life.
Some might call this a boomer build but the 4790k is an absolute beast of a CPU and still holds up.
Price should send a signal to manufacturers to build more capacity. I wonder if they will though, it takes quite a bit of time, and it's not certain that the demand will continue to exist once built.
We are down to 3 manufacturers thanks to RAM boom and bust cycles. The remaining ones are the one that know how not to over invest.
I work in the refurb department of an e-waste recycling company. I've been collecting some DDR5-based systems for months, but with the prices, they're probably more than what most people are looking to spend on a technically second-hand computer (even if they are like new and still under warranty). I've priced them at about what the CPU + RAM + SSD would sell for separately, and I'm not willing to go much lower than…
Some people need to buy at these inflated prices anyway, and are ultimately willing to spend. Maybe it differs in your area but there's no risk in listing these on Facebook Marketplace or similar platforms and see the interest.