Quick reminder that DRAM futures have existed since the 1980s so you all could have protected your price with calls.
where?
PS5 now costs less than 64GB of DDR5 memory. RAM jumps to $600 due to shortage
211–220 of 402 posts
Re: PS5 now costs less than 64GB of DDR5 memory. RAM jumps to $600 due to shortage
#212Lots 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.
It’s not speculation, but it could also be both.
Re: PS5 now costs less than 64GB of DDR5 memory. RAM jumps to $600 due to shortage
#213So, 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…
> What's next? Electricity? Yes. My electricity prices jumped 50% in 3 years.
Rooftop solar doesn’t get more expensive over time.
Re: PS5 now costs less than 64GB of DDR5 memory. RAM jumps to $600 due to shortage
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
One can see it that way, granted. When I zoom all the way out, all of consumer computation has existed as sort of an addendum or ancillary organ to the big customers: government, large corporations, etc. All our beloved consumer tech started out as absurdly high priced niche stuff for them. We've been sold the overflow capacity and binned parts. And that seems to be a more-or-less natural consequence of large purchas…
> When I zoom all the way out, all of consumer computation has existed as sort of an addendum or ancillary organ to the big customers: government, large corporations, etc. Perfectly stated. I think comments like the one above come from a mentality that the individual consumer should be the center of the computing universe and big purchasers should be forced to live with the leftovers. What's really happening is the b…
Advances in video cards and graphics tech were overwhelmingly driven by video games. John Carmack, for instance, was directly involved in these processes and 'back in the day' it wasn't uncommon for games, particularly from him, to be developed to run on tech that did not yet exist, in collaboration with the hardware guys. Your desktop was outdated after a year and obsolete after 2, so it was a very different time than modern times where you example is not only completely accurate, but really understating it - a good computer from 10 years ago can still do 99.9% of what people need, even things like high end gaming are perfectly viable with well dated cards.
Re: PS5 now costs less than 64GB of DDR5 memory. RAM jumps to $600 due to shortage
#215Re: PS5 now costs less than 64GB of DDR5 memory. RAM jumps to $600 due to shortage
#216Everyone should unsub from this AI frenzy, this is ridiculous
Sign me up. Where do I turn it off?
Re: PS5 now costs less than 64GB of DDR5 memory. RAM jumps to $600 due to shortage
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
Gaming drove the development of GPUs which led to the current AI boom. Smartphones drove small process nodes for power efficiency.
SGI and 3Dfx made high-end simulators for aerospace in the beginning. Gaming grew out of that. Even Intel's first GPU (the i740) came from GE Aerospace.
Wolfenstein 3d was released before 3DFx existed, was purely CPU rendered, and generally considered the father of modern 3d shooters. Even without the scientific computing angle, GPUs would have been developed for gaming simply because it was a good idea that clearly had a big market.
Re: PS5 now costs less than 64GB of DDR5 memory. RAM jumps to $600 due to shortage
#218Lots 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.
Perhaps the memory manufacturers have seen how much Apple gets away with charging for the memory on their laptops and have decided to copy them ;-)
Re: PS5 now costs less than 64GB of DDR5 memory. RAM jumps to $600 due to shortage
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
> When I zoom all the way out, all of consumer computation has existed as sort of an addendum or ancillary organ to the big customers: government, large corporations, etc. Perfectly stated. I think comments like the one above come from a mentality that the individual consumer should be the center of the computing universe and big purchasers should be forced to live with the leftovers. What's really happening is the b…
Advances in video cards and graphics tech were overwhelmingly driven by video games. John Carmack, for instance, was directly involved in these processes and 'back in the day' it wasn't uncommon for games, particularly from him, to be developed to run on tech that did not yet exist, in collaboration with the hardware guys. Your desktop was outdated after a year and obsolete after 2, so it was a very different time th…
yes. a good reason to upgrade was PCIe 4.0 for I/O. GPU and SSD needs caused PCIe 5.0 to follow soon after.
Re: PS5 now costs less than 64GB of DDR5 memory. RAM jumps to $600 due to shortage
#220So, 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…
> What's next? Electricity? Yes. My electricity prices jumped 50% in 3 years.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mikesimoncasey_our-team-at-re...?
How much is due to long overdue infrastructure upgrades and greed by providers, vs the cost of energy?
Also, consumer prices _have_ risen (mine included), but it's not clear that this is only because AI. While EV charging is not at the scale of all data centers combined, it seems to grow even faster than the datacenter's consumption, and is expected to eclipse the latter around 2030. Maybe sooner due to missing solar incentives.
Also, to rant on: According to [1], an average Gemini query costs about 0.01 cents (Figure 2 - say 6000 queries per kWh at 60 cents/kWh, which is probably more than the industrial consumers pay). The same paper says one other providers is not off by that much. I dare say that at least for me, I definitely save a lot of time and effort with these queries than I'd traditionally have to (go to library, manually find sources on the web, etc), so arguably, responsibly used, AI is really quite environmentally friendly.
Finally: Large data centers and their load is actually a bit fungible, so they can be used to stabilize the grid, as described in [2].
I would think it would be best if there were more transparency on where the costs come from and how they can be externalized fairly. To give one instance, Tesla could easily [3] change their software to monitor global grid status and adjust charging rates. Did it happen ? Not that I know. That could have a huge effect on grid stability. With PowerShare, I understand that vehicles can also send energy back to power the house - hence, also offload the grid.
[1] https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/measuring_the_envi...
[2] https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7358514...
[3] that's most likely a wild exaggeration