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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

#331

Post by stackghost »

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.)

For me it's primarily the ability to run a full TCP/IP stack. For hobby projects, I'd rather use a Pi or a Beaglebone with IRC or HTTP for data egress than, say, I2C or SPI. The ease of debugging alone makes it worth it.

Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market

#332

Post by HDBaseT »

KPGv2 wrote: post #285
ttul wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This time is different. https://ca.pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/#ram.ddr5.60... The price for a couple of 32GB sticks is now over $1200 after being stable at about $200 for several years until last September. That's not a blip; that's 6-fold hike and there is no sign it is slowing down any time soon.

I am not a hardware guy, so I am asking this in good faith: excluding people with corporate backing, who actually needs DDR5 RAM? Gamers? Why is DDR4 or DDR3 not good enough?

Because modern CPUs are on platforms that support only DDR5.

If you are a gamer, chances are you want one of the AMD X3D CPUs. Whilst AMD did produce 5600X3D, 5700X3D and the highly sought after 5800X3D, these are effectively unobtainable now (outside of the Used Market, which is already about 2X MSRP).

You are effectively forced into AM5 (or whatever Intel is doing) and they require DDR5. You don't have the "choice" to use DDR4 anymore in most circumstances.

If your question is more of a hypothetical (assuming we could use newer CPUs with DDR4 or even DDR3) the answer is a bit more blurred, but at least in a lot of gaming workloads, you aren't memory speed bound. There is some performance regressions, sometimes up to 15%, but a lot of this is negated with the X3D chips anyways (:

Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market

#333

Post by charcircuit »

chromacity wrote: post #260
charcircuit wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an apples to oranges comparison. Might as well bring up how people pay thousands of dollars for FPGA boards.

No. Many hobbyists default to SBCs whether they need them or not. No one defaults to FPGA if they don't need it.

My point is that the FPGA boards are several orders of magnitude more expensive than the actual chip. To be fair you should be comparing between the cost of the SoC and the microcontroller.

Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market

#334

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

The Raspberry Pi 4B 2GB is $55 on CanaKit, PiShop, Seeed Studio, and MicroCenter.

The Raspberry Pi 3B 1GB is $35 on CanaKit, Adafruit. The 3B+ is on PiShop for $40.

The Raspberry Pi 3A+ 512MB is $25 on CanaKit, Adafruit, PiShop, SparkFun.

The Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W is $16.35 on CanaKit, $17.25 on PiShop.

We are unavoidably headed at financial collapse, authoritarianism, and potentially the collapse of Western civilization. And ya'll are worried that you won't have 8GB of RAM in an embedded GPIO computer for your hobby? Maybe it's time to make the ultimate sacrifice: use less RAM.

Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market

#335

Post by stackghost »

NooneAtAll3 wrote: post #325
bombcar wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v5.0/driver-api/gpio/index.h...

You can usually find libraries for your language of choice to speak GPIO and expose the pin's state as a variable in your code.

Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market

#336

Post by drmidnight »

throwatdem12311 wrote: post #204
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…

My iPhone 11 hanging on for dear life…

hanging in there with you. Its a great phone.

Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market

#337

Post by fpoling »

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…

I wonder if manufacturers opt to install less memory.

Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market

#338

Post by nnevatie »

KPGv2 wrote: post #285
ttul wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This time is different. https://ca.pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/#ram.ddr5.60... The price for a couple of 32GB sticks is now over $1200 after being stable at about $200 for several years until last September. That's not a blip; that's 6-fold hike and there is no sign it is slowing down any time soon.

I am not a hardware guy, so I am asking this in good faith: excluding people with corporate backing, who actually needs DDR5 RAM? Gamers? Why is DDR4 or DDR3 not good enough?

Who really needs more than warmth, shelter and something to eat and drink?

Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market

#339

Post by ivolimmen »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #334

The Raspberry Pi 4B 2GB is $55 on CanaKit, PiShop, Seeed Studio, and MicroCenter. The Raspberry Pi 3B 1GB is $35 on CanaKit, Adafruit. The 3B+ is on PiShop for $40. The Raspberry Pi 3A+ 512MB is $25 on CanaKit, Adafruit, PiShop, SparkFun. The Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W is $16.35 on CanaKit, $17.25 on PiShop. We are unavoidably headed at financial collapse, authoritarianism, and potentially the collapse of Western civiliza…

Maybe it will even trigger that we software developers get more time to optimize our RAM usage while developing instead of implementing that new user tracking feature that is being pushed by the business...

Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market

#340

Post by DeathArrow »

zozbot234 wrote: post #180
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…

Smartphones are widely available on the used goods market though, perhaps even more so than second-hand SBCs or old PCs. The "low and mid range" can be filled by the former high end.

>Smartphones are widely available on the used goods market though, perhaps even more so than second-hand SBCs or old PCs. The "low and mid range" can be filled by the former high end.

When new cars got more expensive, used cars got more expensive, too. I expect the same to happen with the phones.

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