Apple ram prices suddenly started to look a little reasonable.
Who am I kidding, but the such a high increase means these changes are here to stay, it’s not a progressive change at all.
Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening
281–290 of 449 posts
Re: Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
Last night, while writing a LaTeX article, with Ollama running for other purposes, Firefox with its hundreds of tabs, multiple PDF files open, my laptop's memory usage spiked up to 80GB RAM usage... And I was happy to have 128GB. The spike was probably due to some process stuck in an effing loop, but the process consuming more and more RAM didn't have any impact on the system's responsiveness, and I could calmly quit…
> Is there even a case where more RAM is not really better, except for its cost? RAM uses power.
It also consumes more physical space. /s
Re: Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening
#283If we're going to see retailers price-gouging on DDR5, maybe people will be willing to buy slightly older gear with DDR4 (and corresponding motherboard and CPU). Especially for systems for which the workloads are actually bound by GPU compute, network, or storage.
I've just looked up the current price of 2x8GB DDR4 I bought from CCL back in June for a basic PC for my mother. Was £34, now £75. That's nuts. Interesting to know the old stuff currently has value though.
Re: Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening
#284So AI drives prices up, directly and indirectly. I am not happy, in part because I actually need to purchase new hardware (eventually, and unfortunately quite soon, probably next year already, again).
I think there must be a tax of all those AI corporations - they cost us as society WAY too much. We need to bring this into the discussion; right now lobbyists such as the orange king want to ban all discussions therein aka making AI investments exempt from numerous things. This is leeching on the general taxpayers, in all countries. It is not acceptable.
Re: Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening
#285I'm so mad about this, I need DDR5 for a new mini-PC I bought and prices have literally gone up by 2.5x.. 128GB used to be 400$ in June, and now it's over $1,000 for the same 2x64GB set.. I have no idea if/when prices will come back down but it sucks.
Yeah you are not alone here being annoyed. I think we need to penalise all who drive the prices up - that includes the manufacturers but also AI companies etc...
Those price increases are not normal at all. I understand that most of it still comes from market demands but this is also skewing the market now in unfair manners. Such increases smell of criminal activity too.
Re: Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
> produce more mature technology ... DDR3/4 ...except current peak in demand is mostly driven by build-out of AI capacity. Both inference and training workloads are often bottlenecked on RAM speed, and trying to shoehorn older/slower memory tech there would require non-trivial amount of R&D to go into widening memory bus on CPU/GPU/NPUs, which is unlikely to happen - those are in very high demand already.
Even if AI stuff does really need DDR5, there must be lots of other applications that would ideally use DDR5 but can make do with DDR3/4 if there's a big difference in price
I mean, AI is currently hyped, so the most natural and logical assumption is that AI drives these prices up primarily. We need compensation from those AI corporations. They cost us too much.
Re: Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening
#287I'm especially annoyed that this is most likely intentional. (Not at all)openAI saw they are getting behind their competitors (gpt 5 and 5.1 were progressively worse for my use case - actual problem solving and tweaking existing scripts) are getting better. (Claude and sonnet were miles ahead and I used gpt only due to lower price). Now not only open weights models like Qwen3 and kimik2 exceeded their capability and…
Uh, the argument ended in some sort of stroke there. Kinda curious how the story
I assume they're saying blow up the hardware marked so they can liquidate assets efficiently?
Re: Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening
#288My 2022 GPU has 24GB of ram. It's like 50% more than what is similarly affordable today. It's fucked up and I'd rather slow down my spending and see the whole market go down than get scammed by hype.
> I'd rather slow down my spending
And that will result in even more resources being allocated into the "big spenders". We are for a long time, in a death spiral for the whole PC field. If it was not crypto mining (multiple times), then it was HDD mining, then it was pandemic, and now its AI.
What used to be a stable market, that was predictable, has become ultra expensive. And now the whole SSD / DDR pricing are going to hurt even more.
Worst of all is, that a lot of resources are now going to enterprise hardware. So even if the AI bubble goes down, its not like the market will be flooded with cheap NVMEs or cheaper DDR sticks, as that production will have gone into 2.5" U.3 drives and LPDDR memory or the likes.
Re: Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening
#289Well, patience as a consumer might pay off in the next year or so when the music stops and hyperscalers are forced to dump their inventories. There still isn't a clear path to profitability for any of these AI products and the capital expenditure has been enormous.
> Well, patience as a consumer might pay off in the next year or so when the music stops and hyperscalers are forced to dump their inventories. Their inventories are not what consumers use. Consumer DDR5 motherboards normally take UDIMMs. Server DDR5 motherboards normally take RDIMMs. They're mechanically incompatible, and the voltages are different. And the memory for GPUs is normally soldered directly to the board…
> Consumer DDR5 motherboards normally take UDIMMs. Server DDR5 motherboards normally take RDIMMs. They're mechanically incompatible, and the voltages are different.
All you need is a fixed-latency, dumb translator bridge where the adapter forces everything into a simplified JEDEC-compliant mode.
CA/CK Line Translator with a Fixed Retimer as the biggest mismatch between RDIMM/UDIMM is the command/address path.
RDIMMs route CA/CK to RCD to DRAM, and the UDIMMs route CA/CK to DRAM directly, take the UDIMM CA/CK, delay + buffer + level shift it, feed it into a "RCD" like input using a delay locked loops (DLL).
Throw in a SPD translator, PMIC and voltage correction, DQ line conditioning and some other stuff into a 10–12-layer PCB, retimer chips, vrm, and level shifters.
It would cost about $40 million to fab and about $100 per adapter but would make bank with all the spare UDIMMs when the bubble bursts.
Re: Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening
#290Earlier quoted context omitted.
Doesn't the same factory produce enterprise (i.e. ECC) and consumer (non-ECC) DRAM? If there is high demand for the former due to AI, they can increase production to generate higher profits. This cuts the production capacity of consumer DRAM, and lead to higher prices in that segment too. Simple supply & demand at work.
Conceptually, you can think of it as "RAID for memory". A consumer DDR5 module has two 32-bit-wide buses, which are both for example implemented using 4 chips which each handle 8 bits operating in parallel - just like RAID 0. An enterprise DDR5 module has a 40-bit-wide bus implemented using 5 chips. The memory controller uses those 8 additional bits to store the parity calculated over the 32 regular bits - so just li…
That makes sense, thank you.