what are the barriers to new DRAM supply coming online?
Huge capital outlays and no guarantee the prices stay high.
It would be sort of odd for computer parts historically to do so? but that sounds like a job for a futures contract.
DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market
561–570 of 592 posts
Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market
#562Earlier 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.)
You jest, but I ended up getting a lot of use out of being able to do this in software for a dimmable LED lamp. Dimming the LED required PWM, and the potentiometer resistance -> PWM frequency map ended up fairly intricate to make the knob "feel right." Now what I would have loved to have done is come up with some crazy analog circuit to implement an arbitrary transfer function from potentiometer input to LED voltage,…
Yeah, PWM on an Arduino is easy enough (no need for the Pi).
Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market
#563Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have to agree. You only have to look at car and junk food inflation from after covid. The prices make no sense, but that doesn't matter, they got away with it and are fighting to hold onto high prices, even as consumers balk. Their solution? Ditch poorer consumers. New cars and (branded) junk foods are luxury items now, apparently.
When weren't new cars luxury items exactly?
My last car was new and I bought it in for about $13,000 in late 2016. How is that a luxury?
Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market
#564Bought a couple of 32gb SBCs before this all hit the fan. And also built a SSD NAS before the wave hit. So timed that all pretty great. What worries me is my desktop is up for a full new buy somewhere around early '28. That could be a train wreck depending on how taiwan situation goes
> So timed that all pretty great. What worries me is my desktop is up for a full new buy somewhere around early '28 That's a very specific date / timeline. How do you decide to do a full new buy? I ask because I own a desktop that I built 15 years ago which I was flirting with replacing completely last year, but unfortunately I didn't pull the trigger ... oops :( My old rig is still going strong. The motherboard can…
>That's a very specific date / timeline.
It's aimed at roughly hitting Zen 6 and switching to high refresh rate 4K gaming.
Was really hoping I could hop to ddr6 and pcie 6 too, but that seems less plausible
>How do you decide to do a full new buy?
Gut feel, it's a 2019 build that had a mid life refresh so 2028 is near a decade, which for a gaming rig is good going. Gaming also means a big VRAM GPU makes sense for toying with LLMs because I get dual use out of it. Plus I don't think the 3090 much as I like it will drive 4K high refresh.
...If it wasn't for gaming I could definite keep this rig till 2030+. It's comically overspec'd for browsing and casual dev stuff. Hell it's even got an optane boot drive so that'll last till the end of time
Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market
#565Earlier quoted context omitted.
I didn't say "Criminal conspiracy" nor "Capitalism is bad" (although I'm not a fan, and not because of the DRAM price spike). What mean by collusion is that OpenAI apparently agreed with Samsung and Hynix to secure 40% of global DRAM output, for their own exclusive use. See coverage here: https://bizety.com/2025/12/28/the-dirty-dram-deal-how-openai... https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/dram/openais-star...
I don't think an above board negotiation to purchase in bulk is correct to refer to as collusion. In lieu of other details it's just a purchase agreement.
Collude is originally a combination of Latin words, isn't it? "co"/"com" which means with, or togther, plus "lude" or "ludere", like means something like "to fight" or "to play" I believe. But - I'm not a native speaker so maybe I should have used another term.
Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market
#566Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, it's exactly how docker works if you use it for where it matters for a hobbyist - which is where you are installing random third-party apps/containers that you want to run on your SBC locally. I don't know why people instantly forget the context of the discussion, when their favorite way of doing things gets threatened. :) Context is hobbyists and SBC market (mostly various ARM boards). Maybe I'm weird, but I re…
> where it matters for a hobbyist you dont get to define "where it matters" for a hobbyist > which is where you are installing random third-party apps/containers that you want to run on your SBC locally this is such a consoomer take. for those of us who actually build software, we have actual valid reasons for using it during development > they're completely different architectures, so I can't avoid the differences a…
No I don't have a fundamental misunderstanding. In the entire thread I'm talking about docker, not "containers" in general. You seem to have a misunderstanding apparently.
I've been working with "containers" since before docker existed, and I also wrote several applications that use basic technologies so called "docker containers" are based on in Linux. You can use these technologies (various namespaces, etc.) in a way that does not waste RAM. That will not happen for common docker use, where you don't control the apps and base OS completely. You can if you try hard make it efficient, but you have to have a lot of control. The moment you start pulling random dockerfiles from random sources, you'll be wasting colossal amounts of resources compared to just installing packages on your host OS, to share maximum amount of resources.
And for all these "let's have just a big static binary and put it into a container" containers, that don't really have/or need a real full OS userspace under them, there's barely any difference deployment wise from just running them without docker. In fact docker is just a very complicated additional duplicated layer in this case for what systemd does, that most people already have on their OS. So that's another RAM waste and additional overhead from what is now reduced to a service manager in this use case scenario.
Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market
#567Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think an above board negotiation to purchase in bulk is correct to refer to as collusion. In lieu of other details it's just a purchase agreement.
Collude is originally a combination of Latin words, isn't it? "co"/"com" which means with, or togther, plus "lude" or "ludere", like means something like "to fight" or "to play" I believe. But - I'm not a native speaker so maybe I should have used another term.
"Collude" carries a strong negative connotation, possibly but not necessarily criminal; certainly within a grey area though and at least somewhat secretive. For above board dealings in the open perhaps "cooperate". If it took opponents by surprise and left them disadvantaged then perhaps "outmaneuvered". If it was open and legal it could nonetheless still be "objectionable" or "callous".
Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market
#568Earlier quoted context omitted.
Vibe coding might be a positive here since there's no need to optimize for DX over perf when the clanker is the one reading/writing code.
This is my theory: we're going to see a lot of languages with straightforward and obvious semantics, high guard rails, terrible dx, and great memory allocation and performance behavior out of the box. Assembler or worse, but with extremely strong typing bolted on in a way that no human would ever tolerate, basically, something in that vibe.
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Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market
#569Earlier quoted context omitted.
Vibe coding might be a positive here since there's no need to optimize for DX over perf when the clanker is the one reading/writing code.
This is my theory: we're going to see a lot of languages with straightforward and obvious semantics, high guard rails, terrible dx, and great memory allocation and performance behavior out of the box. Assembler or worse, but with extremely strong typing bolted on in a way that no human would ever tolerate, basically, something in that vibe.
You can get more forward thinking than that: AI will output machine code, compiling it directly.
Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market
#570Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
That's an illogical analogy, and I'm confident you can do better but were just being disrespectful.
A more apt analogy is "do you really need a 28 SEER rated air conditioning system when there's a much cheaper 21 SEER available?"