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RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung

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Re: RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung

#271

Post by the__alchemist »

vlovich123 wrote: post #241
the__alchemist wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What kinds of applications do you use that require CUDA? Molecular dynamics simulations, and related structural bio tasks.

Is the CUDA compat layer AMD has that transparently compiled existing CUDA just fine insufficient somehow or buggy somehow? Or are you just stuck in the mindshare game and haven’t reevaluate whether the AMD situation has changed this year?

I haven't checkout out AMD's transparency layer and know nothing about it. I tried to get vkFFT working in addition to cuFFT for a specific computation, but can't get it working right; crickets on the GH issue I posted.

I use Vulkan for graphics, but Vulkan compute is a mess.

I'm not in a mindshare, and this isn't a political thing. I am just trying to get the job done, and have observed that no alternative has stepped up to nvidia's CUDA from a usability perspective.

Re: RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung

#272

Post by ponector »

redwall_hp wrote: post #190
asenna wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know it's not the same. But I think a lot of people had a similar feeling going from Intel-Macbooks to Apple Silicon. An insane upgrade that I still can't believe.

I usually use an M2 Mac at work, and haven't really touched Windows since 2008. Recently I had to get an additional Windows laptop (Lenovo P series) for a project my team is working on, and it is such a piece of shit. It's unfathomable that people are tolerating Windows or Intel (and then still have the gall to talk shit about Macs). It's like time travelling back to 2004. Slow, loud fans, random brief freezes of the…

There will be not so big difference if you compare laptops in the same price brackets. Cheap PCs are crap.

Re: RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung

#273

Post by kube-system »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #219
The-Bus wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a business can't pay a living wage, it's not really a successful business. I, too, could become fabulously wealthy selling shoes if someone just have me shoes for $1 so I could resell them for $50.

Classically, not all jobs are considered "living wage" jobs. That whole notion is something some people made up very recently. A teenager in his/her first job at McDonald's doesn't need a "living wage." As a result of forcing the issue, now the job doesn't exist at all in many instances... and if it does, the owner has a strong incentive to automate it away.

A teenager is presumably also going to school full time and works their job part time, not ~2000 hours per year.

If we build a society where someone working a full time job is not able to afford to reasonably survive, we are setting ourselves up for a society of crime, poverty, and disease.

Re: RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung

#274

Post by crote »

sneak wrote: post #25
nickjj wrote: post #18

I'm running a box I put together in 2014 with an i5-4460 (3.2ghz), 16 GB of RAM, GeForce 750ti, first gen SSD, ASRock H97M Pro4 motherboard with a reasonable PSU, case and a number of fans. All of that parted out at the time was $700. I've never been more fearful of components breaking than current day. With GPU and now memory prices being crazy, I hope I never have to upgrade. I don't know how but the box is still g…

Am I crazy for thinking that anyone using computers for doing their job and making their income should have a $5k/year computer hardware budget at a minimum ? I’m not saying to do what I do and buy a $7k laptop and a $15k desktop every year but compared to revenue it seems silly to be worrying about a few thousand dollars per year delta. I buy the best phones and desktops money can buy, and upgrade them often, becaus…

Sorry, but that's delusional.

For starters, hardware doesn't innovate quickly enough to buy a new generation every year. There was a 2-year gap between Ryzen 7000 and Ryzen 9000, for example, and a 3-year gap between Ryzen 5000 and Ryzen 7000. On top of that, most of the parts can be reused, so you're at best dropping in a new CPU and some new RAM sticks.

Second, the performance improvement just isn't there. Sure, there's a 10% performance increase in benchmarks, but that does not translate to a 10% productivity improvement for software development. Even a 1% increase is unlikely, as very few tasks are compute-bound for any significant amount of time.

You can only get to $15k by doing something stupid like buying a Threadripper, or putting an RTX 4090 into it. There are genuine use-cases for that kind of hardware - but it isn't in software development. It's like buying a Ferrari to do groceries: at a certain point you've got to admit that you're just doing it to show off your wealth.

You do you, but in all honesty you'd probably get a better result spending that money on a butler to bring your coffee to your desk instead of wasting time by walking to the coffee machine.

Re: RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung

#275

Post by venturecruelty »

dmix wrote: post #265
venturecruelty wrote: post #234

It's unfortunate that we will soon not have computers because it is not profitable enough. Alas. Too bad the market is so efficient.

I'd much rather be in a country where the odd temporary shortage happens due to a massive new market appearing than one where supply/demand is always fixed and static because nothing new gets built without extreme careful planning. AI is not going away, but there will be a correction and things will plateau to a new higher level of demand for chips and go back to normal as always. There's too much money involved for…

>AI is not going away, but there will be a correction and things will plateau to a new higher level of demand for chips and go back to normal as always. There's too much money involved for this not to scale up.

What will they do when people continue to not pay for this crap and investors demand their pound of flesh? Because uh, nobody's paying for this, and when people are gambling with trillions of dollars...

>Markets can't adapt overnight to tons of data centers being built all of a sudden but it will adapt.

Which data centers?

Re: RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung

#276

Post by venturecruelty »

potato3732842 wrote: post #61

You make more money selling the good stuff. It's like this in just about every industry.

Why bother selling to regular consumers at all then? One or two big companies can have everything, and the rest of us can have nothing. And we will like it.

Re: RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung

#277

Post by snickerbockers »

nickjj wrote: post #18

I'm running a box I put together in 2014 with an i5-4460 (3.2ghz), 16 GB of RAM, GeForce 750ti, first gen SSD, ASRock H97M Pro4 motherboard with a reasonable PSU, case and a number of fans. All of that parted out at the time was $700. I've never been more fearful of components breaking than current day. With GPU and now memory prices being crazy, I hope I never have to upgrade. I don't know how but the box is still g…

>For general computer usage, SSDs really were a once in a generation "holy shit, this upgrade makes a real difference" thing.

I only ever noticed it on my windows partition. IIRC on my linux partition it was hardly noticeable because Linux is far better at caching disk contents than windows and also linux in general can boot surprisingly fast even on HDDs if you only install modules you actually need so that the autoconfiguration doesn't waste time probing dozens of modules in search of the best one.

Re: RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung

#278

Post by dmix »

venturecruelty wrote: post #275
dmix wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd much rather be in a country where the odd temporary shortage happens due to a massive new market appearing than one where supply/demand is always fixed and static because nothing new gets built without extreme careful planning. AI is not going away, but there will be a correction and things will plateau to a new higher level of demand for chips and go back to normal as always. There's too much money involved for…

>AI is not going away, but there will be a correction and things will plateau to a new higher level of demand for chips and go back to normal as always. There's too much money involved for this not to scale up. What will they do when people continue to not pay for this crap and investors demand their pound of flesh? Because uh, nobody's paying for this, and when people are gambling with trillions of dollars... >Marke…

> Because uh, nobody's paying for this, and when people are gambling with trillions of dollars...

I pay for 3 different AI products and every person on my team is paying for at least one. Just because some enterprise sales teams rushed to oversell some half-baked AI products they duct taped together doesn't mean there isn't a huge market.

> Which data centers?

Microsoft https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2025/09/18/inside-the-world... Anthropic https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/data-center-construction... Twitter https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/elon-musks-twitte... CoreSite https://www.coresite.com/news/coresite-launches-ny3-data-cen...

Meta, Google, and Oracle are scaling theirs up too

Re: RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung

#279

Post by sejje »

microtonal wrote: post #112
kube-system wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've never been more fearful of components breaking than current day. The mid 90s was pretty scary too. Minimum wage was $4.25 and a new Pentium 133 was $935 in bulk.

That's kinda like saying the mid-20s were pretty scary too, minimum wage was AMOUNT and a MacBook M4 Max was $3000. . In the mid-90s me and my brother were around 14 and 10, earning nothing but a small amount of monthly pocket money. We were fighting so much over our family PC, that we decided to save and put together a machine from second-hands parts we could get our hands on. We built him a 386 DX 40 or 486SX2 50 o…

Linux notoriously runs on worse hardware than almost anything, especially in the 90s

Re: RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung

#280

Post by arprocter »

sevensor wrote: post #266
arprocter wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On Dell you'll probably be stuck with the original mobo, and their SFFs don't take standard PSUs

In favor of their SFFs, they get retired 10k at a time, so you might as well pick up a second one for spares.

Not a bad call, although you'll probably need to upgrade the PSU to add a GPU (if you can find one small enough to fit the SFF case)
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