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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

#391

Post by torginus »

genxy wrote: post #351
helsinkiandrew wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Helium supply issues are only going to make this worse. I believe helium, although important constitutes a small percent of the cost of semiconductors, so its effect on price will be less severe. It will be more noticeable in other uses of helium though - party balloons could get very expensive etc.

> although important constitutes a small percent of the cost of semiconductors, so its effect on price will be less severe You should think about this some more.

--reasoning_effort: xhigh

Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market

#392

Post by zozbot234 »

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?

If you only need DDR3-like throughput you can keep a minimum of RAM for booting and caching, and set up swap on an Intel Optane drive: they're widely available and cheap (at least cheaper than RAM) on the second-hand market.

(For read only workloads (no writes or only very rare writes) any ordinary SSD would suffice; the point of resorting to Optane is its unique wearout resistance.)

Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market

#393

Post by joe_mamba »

karimf wrote: post #371
reenorap wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 huge problem for developing countries. Most people here have $100-$200 phones. iPhone is a luxury.

Forget developing countries, iPhone is a luxury even in some European countries, when rent is 500+ Euros and your take home pay is ~1000. After all the other bills you're not left with iPhone money, which is why 100-200 Euro models of Chinese brands are doing so well.

It's easier to name the countries where iPhone ISN'T a luxury, as you can count them on very few hands.

Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market

#396

Post by joe_mamba »

sureMan6 wrote: post #307
TheScaryOne wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My Samsung Galaxy S3 died after 8 years. EMMC failure. Just started boot looping while I was asleep. Everything gone. Known issue. My Samsung Galaxy S8 died at 7 years. Some kind of thermal failure, I was able to recover my data by keeping the phone in the freezer while I copied. Known issue. My Samsung Galaxy S21? I figure I've got another year or two in it before it, too, dies. Having beautiful dead phones that hav…

I bought a used Samsung and it started boot looping almost immediately, all these issues seem very specific to Samsung

>I bought a used Samsung and it started boot looping almost immediately

Maybe that's why the previous owner sold it.

Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market

#397

Post by joe_mamba »

21asdffdsa12 wrote: post #369
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…

Its going to be interesting, when big the big AI bubble directly attacks via pricing the government by preventing the sale of surveillance devices. So the bubble will pop- not because it can not sustain, but because its existence is adversarial to government demands for surveillance.

Government will bail out the big tech companies related to the AI bubble when that pops, that's why they're all massive donors to TRUMP INC.

Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market

#399

Post by brandnewideas »

Waterluvian wrote: post #253

If I spent a bajillion dollars on massive data centres I would be delighted if personal computing were also crippled for a while. It would allow me to further own your ability to do compute tasks and to help kill the concept of doing it yourself for a while.

Crippling personal computing isn't a side-effect of massive investments in data centers, but rather one of the primary drivers for it.
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