Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months • Hacker News Board

Re: Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

#331

Post by chrisweekly » Thu, Dec 04, 2025, 3:34 PM UTC

z3t4 wrote: post #200

altmanaltman wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess you're right, but it's more of a curve, though. Once you get to any decent level of complexity, it actually helps to have a framework instead of just going all HTML+CSS. Also it helps having something standard as react (that every web developer should fundamentally understand) than doing your custom stuff if other people will be working on it in the future. There's a lot to say about the side effects of frame…

I think it's the other way around, a framework will get you up and running quickly, but then it becomes technical dept, and if your app is complicated you will end up fighting the framework. If you write something from scratch it will take a while to reach to the abstraction level where you can work fast. But then you have a fully custom abstraction layer that is not a "one size fits all" but custom tailored for your…

Good luck with hiring, onboarding, and maintenance of your bespoke solution. Also with your resume when seeking your next gig. For any serious project, ignore community and ecosystem health at your peril. To be clear, we're talking about framework selection, not leftpad vs DIY.

Re: Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

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Post by Dylan16807 » Thu, Dec 04, 2025, 3:34 PM UTC

jdxcode wrote: post #321

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.

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

You don't maximize profit by maximizing sales.

Re: Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

#333

Post by marcosdumay » Thu, Dec 04, 2025, 3:36 PM UTC

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #205

loeg wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One way or another. Either the AI stuff cools off, or the RAM people spin up more fabs.

Well there's like 4 RAM manufacturers, so probably they will spin up new fabs but continue to collude to keep prices high.

They were previously colluding into the most profitable production volume. If demand stays high, the most profitable volume increases.

That means that yes, it will probably by more expensive than before this raise, but no, not nearly as much as today.

Re: Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

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Post by jorvi » Thu, Dec 04, 2025, 3:39 PM UTC

Aurornis wrote: post #300

jorvi wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"prevent overcapacity" is just a fancy way of saying "we prefer to gouge consumers at little risk to us." Hopefully the Chinese manufacturers ram(p) up rapidly and spike Hynix and Samsung with heavily undercut prices.

> 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.

If you present an operating profit of €25 billion USD, yes, in a healthy true market competition would force you to either A) eat into your profit margin by reducing prices or B) invest in R&D and capacit-

Actually, let me eat my words, you are right. As I typed this I saw some news from an hour ago[0] about SK Hynix planning to invest about $500 billion into 4 more fabs. I imagine [hope] Samsung will follow, and together with Chinese memory fabs ramping up both in capacity and technology, prices will return to earth in 2027, maybe 2028.

Guess I am just a little too bitter because GPU prices finally seemed to normalize after half a decade of craziness. Topped with corporations in the West usually forgoing investment and using profits like these to do massive stock buybacks and dividends, souring my expectations.

[0]https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/memory/hot-on-the-heels-of-...

Re: Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

#335

Post by benlivengood » Thu, Dec 04, 2025, 3:44 PM UTC

darkstar_16 wrote: post #107

Semaphor wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

July: 172,38 € for a 2x32GB DDR5-6000 kit Best price for the same one now: 689,55 €

I've been meaning to get more components for a diy NAS since atleast the last year and just been pushing it lazily. I'm literally kicking myself now when I actually started looking up deals for this black friday.

Depending on how many disks you need, buying old PCs on eBay is the way to go because there are still some Xeon E3 ECC models available cheap ($100) with plenty of RAM (16GB) and four SATA ports for a NAS.

Re: Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

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Post by tuetuopay » Thu, Dec 04, 2025, 3:53 PM UTC

kllrnohj wrote: post #292

tuetuopay wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what HBM is actually. The memory dies are directly next to the GPU die, on the same substrate. The main difference between Apple SoC and GPUs is the former use regular LPDDR while GPUs use HBM. One of the key points of HBM is that dies are stacked up with many, MANY, more signals and channels. That's how NVIDIA has a memory bandwidth an order of magnitude higher than M4: 550GB/s for the M4 Max, 4.6TB/s for H20…

> while GPUs use HBM. some GPUs use HBM. Most use GDDR. AMD and Nvidia still extract huge bandwidth from GDDR via high bus speeds + wide buses (like the 1.79 TB/s on the 5090)

Indeed! I implied "AI GPUs" since that’s where HBM is commonly used (despite AMD pioneering it on some consumer cards). And yeah, thousand-bit wide busses get close in performance.

Re: Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

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Post by noboostforyou » Thu, Dec 04, 2025, 3:59 PM UTC

blackenedgem wrote: post #237

wtallis wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Between inflation generally, and DDR4 being obsolete and unsupported by current desktop or server CPUs, it would be unsurprising for DDR4-3200 DIMMs to be at an all-time high even without the current DRAM price shock. You can never count on old memory types dropping to bargain prices, because the major manufacturers are always eager to migrate the bulk of their production capacity to current-generation memory.

Yeah the cheapest time to buy old tech is always just when the new stuff has come out. That's when suppliers are trying to shift old stock at cheaper margins. You can take a look at the 5800X3D and how it was at its cheapest about 2 years ago when AMD was winding down production and Zen 4 had been launched.

To further your point, a used 5800X3D still goes for ~$300 when you can get a brand new 7800X3D for the same if not slightly cheaper (was on sale at MC for $280). I assume the high cost of DDR5 is pushing more people to not upgrade to AM5 and stay on AM4 for as long as possible. And most people are avoiding Intel chips out of principle after the chip degradation debacle - you can see that based on how much lower Intel motherboards are even though they have considerably better feature sets than the AMD equivalents.

Re: Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

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Post by tim333 » Thu, Dec 04, 2025, 4:02 PM UTC

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.

I was a bit shocked the other day when Chrome gave me a complaint about memory shortage and said I had something like 200GB in website data on my 256GB laptop(!) All put there by various web pages without my knowledge.

Re: Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

#339

Post by officeplant » Thu, Dec 04, 2025, 4:09 PM UTC

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

8GB GDDR5* Ram. Huge difference and one of the reasons the PS4 slapped the Xbox One around.

Re: Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

#340

Post by jandrese » Thu, Dec 04, 2025, 4:11 PM UTC

llama052 wrote: post #48

walterbell wrote: post #39

https://www.mooreslawisdead.com/post/sam-altman-s-dirty-dram... On October 1st OpenAI signed two simultaneous deals with Samsung and SK Hynix for 40% of the worlds DRAM supply... the shock wasn’t that OpenAI made a big deal, no, it was that they made two massive deals this big, at the same time, with Samsung and SK Hynix simultaneously! In fact, according to our sources - both companies had no idea how big each other…

The cynic in me thinks this would be a convenient way for these memory producers to manufacture demand, while also making OpenAI look good on paper. It’s not like they haven’t been caught price fixing in the past. Win win for these companies and a loss for everyone else.

> while also making OpenAI look good on paper

On paper this makes OpenAI look like absolute assholes. Like they have realized that all of their potential competitors will be memory constrained and have poured billions of dollars into making sure that happens instead of using that money to improve their own product.