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Framework Raises DDR5 Memory Prices by 50% for DIY Laptops

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Re: Framework Raises DDR5 Memory Prices by 50% for DIY Laptops

#201

Post by embedding-shape »

officeplant wrote: post #87
embedding-shape wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And also because Korean companies apparently fear US retribution if they start producing DDR4. I don't feel like "OpenAI bought half the supply" tells the entire story when the companies that used to produce DDR4 with the left over machines no longer dare to do so. Probably the prices wouldn't spike as they're doing right now if the ones who used to produce the older RAM generations actually continued doing so.

What do you mean by this? From everything I can find points towards other companies winding down DDR4 production because of China's cheaper DDR4 production lines.

It was brought up in a different HN submission about a week ago, here's the specific quote from the article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46169499

> Budget brands normally buy older DRAM fabrication equipment from mega-producers like Samsung when Samsung upgrades their DRAM lines to the latest and greatest equipment. This allows the DRAM market to expand more than it would otherwise because it makes any upgrading of the fanciest production lines to still be additive change to the market. However, Korean memory firms have been terrified that reselling old equipment to China-adjacent OEMs might trigger U.S. retaliation…and so those machines have been sitting idle in warehouses since early spring. - https://www.mooreslawisdead.com/post/sam-altman-s-dirty-dram...

Every one seems so focused on that one company supposedly had "fake demand" just to ruin it for competitors, while the supply also seemingly is being suppressed, and no one seems to be talking about that. To me that seems like a much bigger deal, because then the market can't even restore the supply...

Re: Framework Raises DDR5 Memory Prices by 50% for DIY Laptops

#202

Post by embedding-shape »

tick_tock_tick wrote: post #150
embedding-shape wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And also because Korean companies apparently fear US retribution if they start producing DDR4. I don't feel like "OpenAI bought half the supply" tells the entire story when the companies that used to produce DDR4 with the left over machines no longer dare to do so. Probably the prices wouldn't spike as they're doing right now if the ones who used to produce the older RAM generations actually continued doing so.

Why would the USA care if Korean makes legacy DDR? You're going to have to give some kind of context to this completely wild statement.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46253185

Re: Framework Raises DDR5 Memory Prices by 50% for DIY Laptops

#203

Post by dontlaugh »

pmdr wrote: post #145
acephal wrote: post #49

Altman should be jailed for this. Single-handedly crashing consumer spending in an entire sector of the economy. At the very least for the reason that that was supposed to happen _after_ they had the AI in hand to supplant majority white collar labor, not before.

This is a dystopia no one really thought about. A handful of people anointed to spend borrowed money on a (so far unprofitable) quest to destabilize the world's economy, alienate the working class and make everything we've enjoyed the past 15-20 years a luxury.

How so?

The drive towards monopoly, tendency of the rate of profit to fall, over and under production and cyclical ever worsening crises are aspects of capitalism well studied and understood over a century ago.

Re: Framework Raises DDR5 Memory Prices by 50% for DIY Laptops

#204

Post by beAbU »

scottLobster wrote: post #104

Don't worry, on the other side of the AI bubble pop the market will be flooded with used DDR5 sticks from unprofitable datacenters.

Nope. Check again. All the manufacturers are switching to HBM, the market will be flooded with useless soldered on memory that nobody can use outside of running local inference.

The rest of us 'normal' memory plebes are fucked.

Re: Framework Raises DDR5 Memory Prices by 50% for DIY Laptops

#205

Post by drtgh »

andrekandre wrote: post #176
lenerdenator wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simple: they create value for the right people. Namely, politicians who get their donations, and a generation that, despite not having enough children to grow the economy organically, doesn't want to work any... er... wants to retire. Thus, they invest in retirement and pension funds, who in turn invest the money in businesses to earn a return. Since that return must increase constantly, and organic growth is no long…

> they invest in retirement and pension funds, who in turn invest the money in businesses to earn a return maybe not a popular opinion but, this is the original sin imo; putting retirement/pension on the market makes for so many perverse incentives to keep things growing at any cost...

The system is perverse per se,

you create money based on debt, and eternal growth, and devalue savings, and force people to bet in order to try to preserve savings value, then each ten or fifteen years you allow someones to harvest the rewards of the casino.

And when population start to decrease (on developed countries), you rise the alarm, "more population is needed due to the decline in the birth rate", promoting an eternal growth that would need the resources several planets if everyone had a decent standard of living.

Re: Framework Raises DDR5 Memory Prices by 50% for DIY Laptops

#206

Post by Y_Y »

mschuster91 wrote: post #127
Y_Y wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can play Counterstrike on a H100 if you really want to.

You can't, it doesn't have any video output port per the product brief [1]. Of course, if one is inclined, I'd take a wild guess and say you could try something like Steam Remote, but I wouldn't bet on that actually working out. And even if you could get it working - per an analysis of German newspaper Heise, the bloody thing has less shader compute capacity than the iGPU of AMD's Ryzen CPUs [2]. 30.000€ - and it'll…

That's a funny way of saying you don't know.

Re: Framework Raises DDR5 Memory Prices by 50% for DIY Laptops

#207

Post by checker659 »

reaperducer wrote: post #162
beeflet wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a dystopian world in which computer memory is sort of expensive, god save us

Maybe programmers will have to start making their programs efficient again. Maybe OpenAI's RAM monopoly is what kills Electron.

Electron is no match for a O(n^3) algorithm.

Re: Framework Raises DDR5 Memory Prices by 50% for DIY Laptops

#208

Post by gpm »

pratyushnair01 wrote: post #194
gpm wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, we're just hitting the limits of current manufacturing not some fundamental limit like the availability of raw materials. Either demand will wane and the prices will go down, or manufacturing will scale up and prices will go down, eventually. That "eventually" does some work, but it's not remotely a case of "a point of no return". In fact long term this might well make RAM cheaper than it otherwise would be, bec…

Correct if I'm wrong, but without any new entrants, the market effectively cornered by a few players and high demand from data centers, how will the prices come down? Just like the GPU prices post COVID and bitcoin demand, how will there be any incentive to bring down consumer prices? The only scenario I can think of is chinese firms catch up and swoop in to corner the market.

If demand stays high existing firms will increase capacity to make more money, and then will compete against eachother on price to sell their new extra capacity. They'll do the same to prevent new firms (in other counties or not) from having an opportunity to come into the market and undercut them.

An illegal price fixing cartel could defeat the first pressure on prices (though is unlikely to). The second pressure would exist regardless.

GPU prices have primarily stayed so high because there's kept being new surprising sources of excess demand that the market didn't anticipate. I.e. it has yet to reach "eventually". Also to some extent Nvidia's government enforced monopoly on CUDA (via copyright) has meant they don't have any competitors with equivalent products. And software creates a so called "natural monopoly" because it has zero marginal cost while hardware generally doesn't.

Re: Framework Raises DDR5 Memory Prices by 50% for DIY Laptops

#209

Post by walterbell »

krasin wrote: post #167
Marsymars wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't find specific examples, but I'm almost certain they have at some points in the past adjusted pricing of upgrades mid-cycle.

Apple raised iPad Pro prices in 2017 by $50 to address NAND memory chips price hikes from the vendors: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/13/ipad-pro-price-increase.html

Apple also raised iPad Pro prices when OLED screens were introduced.

Re: Framework Raises DDR5 Memory Prices by 50% for DIY Laptops

#210

Post by iteria »

beeflet wrote: post #196
wpm wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Memory today Water tomorrow This is the natural consequence of letting individual psychos control more money than most world economies.

I am not convinced by this whole AI water scare. Doesn't the water just evaporate? It's not a finite resource like oil. If the problem is that these companies are creating an externality by straining the local water supply, then maybe we should simply tax water more where appropriate? I don't think any sort of shame will be effective. For the past decade water has been mismanaged in inefficient farming practices, lik…

Fresh water is a finite resource. It replenishes extremely slowly in certain forms. Like ground water. Lakes and rivers can run dry if you pull too much from them, see: Iran. AI data centers are making the problem of overuse worse. We were already pulling too much water in areas. With these data centers, some places that didn't have a problem are starting to.
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