Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

PS5 now costs less than 64GB of DDR5 memory. RAM jumps to $600 due to shortage

tomshardware.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 402 posts

Re: PS5 now costs less than 64GB of DDR5 memory. RAM jumps to $600 due to shortage

#41

Post by embedding-shape »

wkat4242 wrote: post #26
timschmidt wrote: post #16

Potentially unpopular take: memory manufacturers have been operating on the margins of profitability for quite a while now. Their products are essentially an indistinguishable commodity. Memory from Samsung or Micron or another manufacturer may have slight differences in overclockability, but that matters little to folks who just want a stable system. Hopefully the shortage leads large purchasers to engage in long-te…

Well, what really prompted this crisis is AI, as well as Samsung shutting down some production (and I have to say I don't think they mind that the pricing has skyrocketed as a result!) But yes we're going to need more fabs for sure

> Well, what really prompted this crisis is AI,

If the shortage of RAM is because of AI (so servers/data centers I presume?), wouldn't that mean the shortage should be localized to RDIMM rather than the much more common UDIMM that most gaming PCs use? But it seems to me like the pricing is going up more for UDIMM than RDIMM.

Re: PS5 now costs less than 64GB of DDR5 memory. RAM jumps to $600 due to shortage

#43

Post by amiga-workbench »

dsiddharth wrote: post #20
Someone1234 wrote: post #8

It will be interesting to see the knock on effect of some upcoming consumer electronics; for example Apple was rumored to be working on a cheaper MacBook that uses an iPad CPU, and Valve is working on a SteamOS based gaming machine. Both will likely live/die based on price .

edit: looks like i had the wrong understanding, thanks to the comments below for explaining ~~~~~helps that Apple's SoC has the RAM on the main die itself. They're probably immune from these price hikes, but a lot of the PC/Windows vendors would, which would only make Apple's position even stronger~~~~

Perhaps on the same package (stacked) but absolutely not on the same die.

Re: PS5 now costs less than 64GB of DDR5 memory. RAM jumps to $600 due to shortage

#44

Post by caycep »

timschmidt wrote: post #16

Potentially unpopular take: memory manufacturers have been operating on the margins of profitability for quite a while now. Their products are essentially an indistinguishable commodity. Memory from Samsung or Micron or another manufacturer may have slight differences in overclockability, but that matters little to folks who just want a stable system. Hopefully the shortage leads large purchasers to engage in long-te…

It's a sad trend for "the rest of us" and history in general. The economic boom of the 80's thru the 2010s has been a vast democratization of computation - hardware became more powerful and affordable, and algorithms (at least broadly if not individually) became more efficient. We all had supercomputers in our pockets. This AI movement seems to move things in the opposite direction, in that us plebeians have less and less access to RAM, computing power and food and...uh...GPUs to play Cyberpunk; and are dependent on Altermanic aristocracy to dribble compute onto us at their leisure and for a hefty tithe.

I am hoping some of that Clayton Christensen disruption the tech theocracy keep preaching about comes along with some O(N) decrease in transformer/cDNN complexity that disrupts the massive server farms required for this AI boom/bubble thing.

Re: PS5 now costs less than 64GB of DDR5 memory. RAM jumps to $600 due to shortage

#45

Post by bradfa »

embedding-shape wrote: post #41
wkat4242 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, what really prompted this crisis is AI, as well as Samsung shutting down some production (and I have to say I don't think they mind that the pricing has skyrocketed as a result!) But yes we're going to need more fabs for sure

> Well, what really prompted this crisis is AI, If the shortage of RAM is because of AI (so servers/data centers I presume?), wouldn't that mean the shortage should be localized to RDIMM rather than the much more common UDIMM that most gaming PCs use? But it seems to me like the pricing is going up more for UDIMM than RDIMM.

Because manufacturers transitioned fab and assembly lines from low margin dram to higher margin products like hbm, hence reducing dram supply. But the demand for consumer grade dram hasn’t changed much so prices for it go up.

Re: PS5 now costs less than 64GB of DDR5 memory. RAM jumps to $600 due to shortage

#46

Post by caycep »

dawnerd wrote: post #7

Noticed SSDs went up too. There's a "black friday" sales price for a 4TB crucial external drive that's at its highest price in 90 days. Bad time if you need to build a computer.

bc some people up top loved the idea of the old Smoot Hawley thing

Re: PS5 now costs less than 64GB of DDR5 memory. RAM jumps to $600 due to shortage

#47

Post by wiredfool »

pseudosavant wrote: post #6

Built my son's first gaming PC 2 months ago. Figured it would be cheaper around Black Friday, but the prices were reasonable enough that we didn't wait. Turned out to be a huge savings to buy that fast DDR5 in September.

I just got one of the last beelink ser-8s with 64gb for $750. They sold out by the time my order arrived. The newer ones are starting around 830 for a 32gb machine (admittedly with newer everything)

Re: PS5 now costs less than 64GB of DDR5 memory. RAM jumps to $600 due to shortage

#48

Post by Havoc »

geerlingguy wrote: post #2

Ouch. Wondering if homelabs will be scavenged for unused RAM as even DDR4 is going up in price :(

I’ve been selling the ddr4 I had lying around. Also consider removing some from desktop since I don’t really use 64gb.

Re: PS5 now costs less than 64GB of DDR5 memory. RAM jumps to $600 due to shortage

#49

Post by [deleted] »

embedding-shape wrote: post #41
wkat4242 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, what really prompted this crisis is AI, as well as Samsung shutting down some production (and I have to say I don't think they mind that the pricing has skyrocketed as a result!) But yes we're going to need more fabs for sure

> Well, what really prompted this crisis is AI, If the shortage of RAM is because of AI (so servers/data centers I presume?), wouldn't that mean the shortage should be localized to RDIMM rather than the much more common UDIMM that most gaming PCs use? But it seems to me like the pricing is going up more for UDIMM than RDIMM.

[deleted]

Re: PS5 now costs less than 64GB of DDR5 memory. RAM jumps to $600 due to shortage

#50

Post by timschmidt »

SirFatty wrote: post #39
timschmidt wrote: post #16

Potentially unpopular take: memory manufacturers have been operating on the margins of profitability for quite a while now. Their products are essentially an indistinguishable commodity. Memory from Samsung or Micron or another manufacturer may have slight differences in overclockability, but that matters little to folks who just want a stable system. Hopefully the shortage leads large purchasers to engage in long-te…

"memory manufacturers have been operating on the margins of profitability for quite a while now." The manufacturers are scumbags is more likely answer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing_scandal

I don't disagree per-se, but this is the sort of thing which happens when only a few businesses exist in a commodity market with high entry costs. IOW, it's not great, but it is predictable. See: Oil.
Post reply on HN