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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

#321

Post by jdxcode »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #305
Aurornis wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> prevent overcapacity" is just a fancy way of saying "we prefer to gouge consumers at little risk to us." No it’s not. Memory business has been cyclical for years. Over expansion is a real risk because new manufacturing capacity is very expensive and takes a long time to come online. If they could make new manufacturing come online quickly they would do it and capture the additional profit of more sales.

Additional profit? They're making a lot more money right now than if they had more supply. The risk of overexpansion is real but I really doubt they want to expand much in the next couple years. They don't have to worry about being undercut by small competitors so they can enjoy the moment.

at these prices, there are certainly potential customers not purchasing when they otherwise would have

Re: Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

#322

Post by energy123 »

baq wrote: post #208
Havoc wrote: post #161

Really hoping this comes down again soonish. My desktop doesn’t have many years left :/

it's a commodity, it'll come down eventually, but soonish? depends completely on if/when AI bubble deflates and datacenter projects get cancelled.

12-24 months is my best guess. I bought some at inflated prices today at a retailer that failed to update to the latest market price by 15%. I'm not waiting that long only to be faced with a dilemma about waiting even longer for DDR6 to become reasonably priced.

Re: Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

#323

Post by Nevermark »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #305
Aurornis wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> prevent overcapacity" is just a fancy way of saying "we prefer to gouge consumers at little risk to us." No it’s not. Memory business has been cyclical for years. Over expansion is a real risk because new manufacturing capacity is very expensive and takes a long time to come online. If they could make new manufacturing come online quickly they would do it and capture the additional profit of more sales.

Additional profit? They're making a lot more money right now than if they had more supply. The risk of overexpansion is real but I really doubt they want to expand much in the next couple years. They don't have to worry about being undercut by small competitors so they can enjoy the moment.

No they are making higher margins, but not getting as much profit as they could have.

Look at the standard Econ 101 supply-demand curve.

If they could make and sell twice as many chips, it would not cut there margins anywhere near half. They would be making much more.

When demand spikes up and down there will be pain. Because booms are not predictable, in timing, size or duration. And accelerating supply expansion is very expensive, slow, and risky.

Many boom prompted RAM supply expansions have ended in years of unprofitable over capacity.

Re: Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

#324

Post by adventured »

K0balt wrote: post #253
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 ?

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…

> This is OAI doing suppliers dirty by making economy distorting moves without transparency, intentionally distorting the market in an effort to hurt competitors. Yet another example of the “free market” creating destruction for the general public.

At the speed OpenAI is growing, it's far more likely they're trying to protect themselves first, not harm competitors. The market only exists because it's free / semi free. Were it controlled by statist bureaucrats - which is the sole alternative back in reality - the situation would be drastically worse. Just ask Soviet Russia. You'd get your meager once every ten year DRAM ration and you'd like it.

The general public isn't the standard of morality or good. Invoking it is meaningless.

Re: Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

#325

Post by deltoidmaximus »

kasabali wrote: post #303
deltoidmaximus wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried underclocking or loosening the timings?

my experience is if even memtest86 fails the memory is truly borked.

Well, it kind of depends. With XMP (which is overclocking) I've found plenty of kits on Ryzen not passing memtest with the XMP settings. Different CPUs seem to be able to run their memory controller harder without error.

And then there are other factors like more sticks of ram stressing things further. I had to downclock to get memtest stable when running 4 sticks even though each kit ran fine on it's own. But that is expected as well as 4 sticks stresses the memory controller even further.

I confess I don't have any real recent experience with DDR5 though, mostly with DDR4 on Ryzen 1000-5000 series.

Re: Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

#326

Post by kevindamm »

energy123 wrote: post #40
tstrimple wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They seem to fail to capture a whole lot of things. Supposedly $1 in 2000 is worth $1.88 in 2025. So 88% inflation over the 25 years. Meanwhile the median home price has increased by 150%. Family insurance by 350%. Median college tuition by 225%. Childcare costs have risen by 200%. But sure. We can buy super cheap 65" tvs now. Hurray for us! Literal kings who lived hundreds of years ago couldn't possibly imagine a wo…

The inflation basket only represent a hypothetical average person, who doesn't even exist. It's more useful to construct multiple separate inflation measures that represent different types of people. Like a "typical renter" inflation figure vs a "typical homeowner" inflation figure. It wouldn't be hard to do and would shine a light on inequality and help explain the rise of populism in certain segments of society. An…

You can go one step further than that and calculate a fairness measure using something like the Gini coefficient (*) and analyze how much it has changed over time.

[*] https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient

Re: Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

#327

Post by Aurornis »

CraigJPerry wrote: post #149
Aurornis wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> First come first served is a better principle than "surge pricing" First come first serve must means enterprising individuals would buy as much as they could afford and then immediately relist it on Facebook Marketplace for the actual market rate. Thinking that retailers could keep RAM prices low and also keep it in stock for you is irrational.

>> Thinking that retailers could keep RAM prices low and also keep it in stock for you is irrational. Not a claim i made

If your goal isn’t to make cheap RAM available to you, then what even is your goal?

Are you just angry that retailers are making a little extra temporary profit on their in-stock inventory? Is the goal to punish them for behaving rationally and understanding basic economics?

Re: Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

#328

Post by Aurornis »

CraigJPerry wrote: post #291
energy123 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The act of eliminating surge pricing is not a price ceiling. If you force companies to price products lower than what they want, then you have a price ceiling by definition. > Neither approach increases supply. I didn't mention or allude to supply at all, although it's true that price ceilings also decrease supply (less so if there is monopoly or collusion, but they still do). I was talking about resource allocatio…

>> you have a price ceiling by definition Price ceiling definition: a government-imposed legal maximum price My original comment: First come first served is a better This is not a legal maximum price, this is a legal maximum in the derivative of price. > I didn't mention or allude to supply at all >> get what I need with 100% chance than get what I need cheaply with 5% chance How do you square these two statements? O…

> My original comment: First come first served is a better

Retailers are first come first serve. The first customer to buy product gets the next unit of inventory.

If you’re trying to argue that retailers need to be forced to set a retail price for each unit of in-stock inventory and then be forced to sell each unit at that price later no matter what the market rate does in the mean time, that’s an awful idea.

I’m sure you don’t mind when retailers decide to give discounts or put things on sale, do you? If the market price drops, they reduce selling price. Same thing when market rate goes up.

Forcing retailers to price things how you want doesn’t change supply and demand. It would only force retailers to add extra margin into their prices to account for the added risk of the government forcing their hand in sale prices.

Re: Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

#329

Post by Dylan16807 »

cedilla wrote: post #212
kolinko wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenAI is ten years old, dotcom companies were 2-3 years old. Some dotcom-boom companies that survived also had sustained multi billion dollar losses afair - Amazon and Uber for example.

Uber was founded half a decade after the dot com bubble.

"half" confused me but okay 2001 and 2009 makes sense.

Re: Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

#330

Post by Dylan16807 »

Nevermark wrote: post #323
Dylan16807 wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Additional profit? They're making a lot more money right now than if they had more supply. The risk of overexpansion is real but I really doubt they want to expand much in the next couple years. They don't have to worry about being undercut by small competitors so they can enjoy the moment.

No they are making higher margins, but not getting as much profit as they could have. Look at the standard Econ 101 supply-demand curve. If they could make and sell twice as many chips, it would not cut there margins anywhere near half. They would be making much more. When demand spikes up and down there will be pain. Because booms are not predictable, in timing, size or duration. And accelerating supply expansion is…

> If they could make and sell twice as many chips, it would not cut there margins anywhere near half. So they would be making much more.

You really think that? I would expect their margins to drop down to a small percentage if they doubled production. Maybe even less.

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