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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

#271

Post by oblio »

jack_pp wrote: post #247
amarcheschi wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly can't wait to use used gpus as lego bricks similar to what kids in Weimar republic did with cash

Never gonna happen. Cash has no intrinsic value exccept maybe for use in fire / toiler paper. GPUs while currently inflated in price will always find enough value. Their price might go down 50-75% but never 99%

> GPUs while currently inflated in price will always find enough value.

What is the instrinsic value of one of millions of GPUs, if the world only needs 15-20% of them?

Re: Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

#272

Post by H8crilA »

merpkz wrote: post #260

If things go the way they are, I wonder how long until buying a used Playstation 4 (8GB DDR5 RAM) at around 100USD a piece to put Linux on it and use as a server in cluster will become viable thing to do? Bring back console clusters! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_cluster

Or just remove the RAM and put it in more useful hardware.

Re: Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

#273

Post by spacebanana7 »

AndrewDavis wrote: post #186
Aurornis wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big news story this cycle is that OpenAI secured two large contracts with two separate DRAM companies at the same time, carefully timing the deals so that neither DRAM company knew about the deal with other. Had either company known about the true demand from OpenAI they would have charged a lot more, but each only saw about half. In other words, there was no collusion between the DRAM manufacturers. They were bo…

To those who haven't heard how colossal the size of OpenAIs contracts are. 900,000 wafers monthly. Tom's hardware estimates that is equal to 40% of global dram production capacity. https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/dram/openais-star...

This also creates massive risk.

Financial trouble at OpenAI - even minor stuff where they slow purchases by 25% - could have a big impact on global prices.

Re: Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

#274

Post by bobson381 »

greatgib wrote: post #261

Somehow another sign that our world is collapsing. We have more and more wars, less free trade and international spirit, freedom and privacy is going down the sink, "everything is going down", and now ram is a good example of things that use to be abordable and with price going down, becoming expensive luxury good. One could say that RAM price is just a special temporary event not related to our down trend but a deca…

Net energy surplus had to end sometime, we have just decided to speed run it for some reason. Looking forward to sledding down the other side of the carbon pulse!

Re: Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

#275

Post by oblio »

zorked wrote: post #269
cm2187 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One difference that strikes me with the .com bubble is that I don't remember the .com companies having sustained multi-billions losses / cash burn. They were not profitable but this is quite different. If (or when) the music stops, won't OpenAI go bust immediately? That's quite a counterparty risk those companies are taking.

Dotcom companies were basically stuff like pets.com, not things considered strategic with de-facto government backing.

Cisco was very much not "stuff like pets.com". Most of the money lost in the dotcom crash wasn't in pets.com, it was the infrastructure companies like Cisco and Sun.

Re: Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

#276

Post by letmetweakit »

dist-epoch wrote: post #268
K0balt wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the price increases we are seeing are a direct result of the skepticism about AI scale viability. The big dram houses aren’t increasing capacity, due to the risks you mention. So demand from other sources has to be suppressed through being priced out in order to meet those supply promises made to OAI in ignorance of their true scale. This is OAI doing suppliers dirty by making economy distorting moves without…

> The big dram houses aren’t increasing capacity, due to the risks you mention. Except they are > SK hynix to boost DRAM production by a huge 8x in 2026, still won't be enough for RAM shortages > It's also not just SK hynix that is boosting DRAM production capacity, with both Samsung and Micron rapidly increasing their respective DRAM production numbers. https://www.tweaktown.com/news/109011/sk-hynix-to-boost-dram...

Is this new capacity or will some kind of other chip type suffer?

Re: Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

#277

Post by oblio »

M95D wrote: post #262
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.

> 1GB of RAM and everyone could be happy I remember a time when I was surfing the web with 256MB and a 5KB/s modem.

True, but I don't want to go back to that. Bloated web pages suck. But hi-res, true color images and videos don't suck.

Re: Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

#278

Post by HenriTEL »

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #159
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 exac…

Increasing swap is more like adding more HDD. It won't help memory pressure issues.

Re: Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

#279

Post by m4rtink »

Maken wrote: post #263
gbil wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now thinking of this from the other side, 2 big DRAM producers are taking the risk to dedicate a very big part of their production to AI and if we assume they also have similar deals with other AI companies or big datacenters, what is their risk profile if the AI bubble bursts? Are they viable as companies then ? What is their plan B ?

Their risks are none. They are not increasing capacity, only selling the available one to the highest bidder. Whenever these AI companies run out of money, these producers can simply resume their regular business.

Not sure about DRAM companies, but many businesses would still go under if they sold their annual production to a company that then goes bankrupt and won't pay anything for the delivered goods.

Re: Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

#280

Post by paol »

atwrk wrote: post #230
AndrewDavis wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To those who haven't heard how colossal the size of OpenAIs contracts are. 900,000 wafers monthly. Tom's hardware estimates that is equal to 40% of global dram production capacity. https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/dram/openais-star...

I find it very telling that both Samsung and SK Hynix already stated that they don't plan to expand capacity - officially to prevent overcapacity in the future. It would also be plausable that both doubt OpenAI will follow through with the contract.

They don't need to expand capacity to fulfill this contract.

They would want to expand capacity if they believed this increase in demand is long lasting - the implication is therefore that they don't believe it, or not enough to risk major capital expenditures.

You saw the same with GPU makers not wanting to expand capacity during the Cryptocurrency boom. They don't want to be left holding the bag when the bubble pops.

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