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DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market

jeffgeerling.com

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Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market

#321

Post by gzread »

nullbyte808 wrote: post #312
est31 wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This one might last longer. The AI race is on, and the US tries its best to make it as expensive for China as possible to participate in it. Every dollar China spends on GPUs they get at markup is one not spent on building navy ships. If there is an escalation over Taiwan, then that will cause the loss of most of the world's high grade chip manufacturing capacity. TSMC is busy doing technology transfers into the US,…

Hypothetically what would happen if China took over Tawain and TSMC?

All modern technology becomes unobtainable.

Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market

#322

Post by saidinesh5 »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #205
fidotron wrote: post #4

OTOH things which belong on microcontrollers are now being pushed back to microcontrollers for cost reasons, so there is a win to be found there.

Yeah, never understood why I would want an entire OS running just to blink an LED. I was going to make a pro-Arduino comment but I guess my LED example warrants little more than an R/C circuit and a transistor, ha ha. (Anyway, I still remember the thrill of writing assembly for a 68HC11 and getting a pair of hobby servos to respond.)

Mostly for the network stack. Economics, also, sometimes.

These days, with ESP32, Pi Pico W etc... things have changed a lot.

But before they got popular, Why deal with MCU + wiring some weird peripheral for wifi / ethernet when you get a Pi Zero W / Clone with built in wifi for the same price?

Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market

#323

Post by jeromegv »

andrekandre wrote: post #212
JollySharp0 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone will come in when the price goes up enough. It will take time, but it will happen. What people are complaining about is that the time for this to happen is too long. Oh look, there is a player coming into the market it seems: https://economy.ac/news/2026/02/202602288291#:~:text=If%20eq... EDIT: In fact many other chinese companies are now expanding into DRAM because of the high prices. Which confirms exactly…

> chinese companies are now expanding into DRAM because of the high prices a good sign, but im guessing at some point these companies are gonna be tariffed heavily...

Reminder the whole world is not the United States of America. While you make the choice of voting for someone who thinks tariffs are good for the local market, no other country joined your bandwagon.

Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market

#324

Post by saidinesh5 »

bombcar wrote: post #254
JKCalhoun wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, never understood why I would want an entire OS running just to blink an LED. I was going to make a pro-Arduino comment but I guess my LED example warrants little more than an R/C circuit and a transistor, ha ha. (Anyway, I still remember the thrill of writing assembly for a 68HC11 and getting a pair of hobby servos to respond.)

Familiarity - it’s easy for us Linux dweebs to build a pi that can flip an LED, but programming an arduino is an entire new area.

With micropython or some of the js based frameworks for microcontrollers, it's really not that new/different.Especially with ESP32/Pi Pico W/their clones...

In fact it's a lot more straight forward to not have to deal with Network Manager config files or systemd unit files or read only rootfs headaches of Linux world.

Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market

#325

Post by NooneAtAll3 »

bombcar wrote: post #254
JKCalhoun wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, never understood why I would want an entire OS running just to blink an LED. I was going to make a pro-Arduino comment but I guess my LED example warrants little more than an R/C circuit and a transistor, ha ha. (Anyway, I still remember the thrill of writing assembly for a 68HC11 and getting a pair of hobby servos to respond.)

Familiarity - it’s easy for us Linux dweebs to build a pi that can flip an LED, but programming an arduino is an entire new area.

asking as a casual non-poweruser... how does one do that on linux exactly?

Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market

#326

Post by a10c »

lexcamisa wrote: post #319

been building a home server recently and the ram prices really caught me off guard. 32gb kits are almost double what they were last year

I have a receipt from August last year that prices 2x 48GB DDR5 modules at $179 AUD a piece. Same vendor has them currently at $708 AUD EACH!

Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market

#327

Post by jfim »

KPGv2 wrote: post #280
jfim wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pretty trivial to do so on Arduino though. void setup() { pinMode(LED_BUILTIN, OUTPUT); } void loop() { digitalWrite(LED_BUILTIN, HIGH); delay(1000); digitalWrite(LED_BUILTIN, LOW); delay(1000); }

Well first you have to learn the Arduino programming language. And the stdlib.

It's C++, and basically what Arduino gives you is

  int main() {
    setup();
    for(;;) loop();
  }
As well as a GUI to easily flash devices and view the output from the serial port, as well as import libraries that do all of the hard work like say making a serial port on any microcontroller pin or control external devices like light strips or displays.

I'd assume the average user on HN should be able to figure it out pretty easily.

Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market

#328

Post by alsetmusic »

reenorap wrote: post #314
nl wrote: post #165

In the Dwarkesh podcast with Semi-Analysis's Dylan Patel they forecast the phone market will shrink by 50% this year because of RAM prices: But that’s the high end of the market, which is only a few hundred million phones a year. Apple sells two or three hundred million phones annually. The bulk of the market is mid-range and low-end. It used to be that 1.4 billion smartphones were sold a year. Now we’re at about 1.1…

This is an extinction event for the low-cost cell phone companies. How are they going to survive if they can't sell their $100 phones profitably for 2 years? I think many of the low-end companies will simply sell their allocations of RAM and close up shop.

This is my greatest concern. So many small players will be wiped out. Consolidation is assured. Always great for consumers to be under the thumb of increasingly large companies.

Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market

#329

Post by stackghost »

bashtoni wrote: post #95

Helium supply issues are only going to make this worse. I feel like for the first time in our lives we might have seen peak technology for the next few years. Everyone is going to have to make do instead of depending on ever increasing performance.

>I feel like for the first time in our lives we might have seen peak technology for the next few years.

This happened for a while with CPUs in 2004 or 2005, IIRC. At the end of the Pentium 4 era clock speeds and TDPs were so high that we hit a wall. Nobody was pushing past 4 GHz even with watercooling (I tried).

Dual-core processors were neither widely available nor mainstream yet, and those that were available had much lower clock speeds. It definitely felt like we hit a lull, or a stagnation, in those years. It picked back up with a fury when Intel released the Core 2 Duo in 2006, though.

Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market

#330

Post by fizwidget »

h4kunamata wrote: post #297
jmyeet wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had an iPhone 11. It was a good phone. It started giving up in early 2024. I held on with poor battery life until the new iPhones that year and bought the 16 Plus. I'm glad actually because they're discontinued the Plus models, annoyingly. But I'm glad I don't need to upgrade for the next couple of years. I honestly want to get 4-5 years out of any phone going forward. There's basically no difference between models…

>But I'm glad I don't need to upgrade for the next couple of years. Said the user who didn't learn the lesson. Apple, you do not own anything, if Apple wanna release an update next month that makes your current phone useless, there is nothing you can do to prevent it. Apple was caught hacking battery level, hacking users GPS signal, etc. You don't own an Apple device, Apple owns you!!!

What? Apple support their phones for a very long time. I got 8 years out of my previous iPhone.
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