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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

#571

Post by KPGv2 »

HDBaseT wrote: post #332
KPGv2 wrote: post #285

Earlier 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?

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"…

Gotcha. So it's really just because of a failure of interop.

CPUs don't support previous generation, so even if you don't need the RAM, you don't have a choice (assuming you need the latest CPU).

Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market

#572

Post by vegadw »

Havoc wrote: post #564
stuxnet79 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 toy…

I suspect there's a lot of people on the 2028 refresh train. If you bought a 1700 in 2017/2018 - which a lot of people did, because it was so good $/perf, you could ride the AM4 platform to a 5900(x/xt) now and be still pretty happy, but AM4 is a dead end now and the X570 motherboards are hard to find. So, if you want more PCIe, DDR5, etc. it'll be time to jump once it starts to feel sluggish for high end tasks (gaming, etc.) around that time.

Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market

#573

Post by karlgkk »

megous wrote: post #566
karlgkk wrote: post #554

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 w…

> 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 said modern containers. and you do have a FUNDAMENTAL MISUNDERSTANDING. you are repeating falsehoods throughout this entire thread.

> That will not happen for common docker use

again you are asserting a "common" use of software, when the people youre replying to are clearly using it for development

> where you don't control the apps and base OS completely

stopping saying "you" to me. id tell you to speak for yourself but you seem incapable of doing that

> 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.

ironically enough it does have differences, glaring big differences. like ironically the deployment differences are about the only reason to use docker in this situation

another stark example of you popping off with incorrect assertions. and yes there are reasons not to do use docker for this as well but it depends on multiple factors

> 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.

there are so many misconceptions in there asserted as if theyre the entire truth. yes people can use docker containers poorly but its not everyone.

> 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.

its a good thing that I'm not doing that! ive already stated that im using them to build software, not just "pulling random dockerfiles from random sources"

you are digging your heels in and you are now trying to assert a set of conditions and situation in which youre correct, even though youre dead wrong for the use cases that the people youre replying to are describing

you have repeated falsehoods as fact repeatedly and seem unable to adjust to people telling you "im not doing that thing youre complaining about"

frankly, i think youre out of your depth on this subject and youre trying to do anything you can justify your original claim that 1GiB is enough, or whatever

TLDR

feel free to have the last word, im sure youll have lots of them. maybe youll get lucky and a few will be correct. im exiting this conversation

Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market

#574

Post by Havoc »

vegadw wrote: post #572
Havoc wrote: post #564

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 toy…

I suspect there's a lot of people on the 2028 refresh train. If you bought a 1700 in 2017/2018 - which a lot of people did, because it was so good $/perf, you could ride the AM4 platform to a 5900(x/xt) now and be still pretty happy, but AM4 is a dead end now and the X570 motherboards are hard to find. So, if you want more PCIe, DDR5, etc. it'll be time to jump once it starts to feel sluggish for high end tasks (gami…

> X570 motherboards are hard to find

They're alive and well in ebay land. The SSD NAS I mentioned was a x570 ebay build because they can do full ECC and ebay was full of old AM4 gaming builds aging out.

>more PCIe,

Yeah that's the sticking point, though a good x570 can do 7x nvme and 8x sata...so plenty for a NAS if you're up for colouring outside the lines a bit.

Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market

#575

Post by megous »

karlgkk wrote: post #573
megous wrote: post #566

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

> 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 said modern containers. and you do have a FUNDAMENTAL MISUNDERSTANDING. you are repeating falsehoods throughout this entire thread. > That will not happen for common docker use again you are asserting a "common" use of software, when the people…

there are no real deployment differences, eg. systemd has portable services, full containers via nspawn, etc. and there are many other ways to realize what docker does with or without containers (eg. what yandex does internally by just packaging their internal software and parts of configuration into debian packages, and manage reproducibility that way)

and you don't provide any other technical arguments

what remains is you strongly telling me something I already acknowledged in the previous post (that you can perhaps make efficient use of docker, but it's hard to make it not waste resources in general use case)

Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market

#576

Post by megous »

Expurple wrote: post #483
megous wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs are great at C, probably because C is historically the most popular language in the world, by far. It only declined slightly very recently. But there's insane amount of code written in it.

But are they "no UB in the code" great? For my use, Opus is absolutely good enough at Rust

You don't need to rely on UB in C code either.

Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market

#577

Post by wolvoleo »

jeffreygoesto wrote: post #420
lelanthran wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Will it be such a big deal though? Currently people are swapping out their phones for another model that's exactly the same but with a different number at the end of the name every 12 months. I don't think they do that at the low-end (nor the high-end, though that doesn't matter here - higher-end manufacturers have a small margin they can eat into). People on the low-end phones want a new phone, they just cannot af…

But why? I just replaced my Huawei P20 after eight years and only because nobody cares about app sizes and compatibility.

It is pretty insane to have an 800MB app where you need to create an account, just to be able to change two settings on a DJI microphone.

Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market

#578

Post by wolvoleo »

znpy wrote: post #454
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 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? This is a great thing to happen, actually. Those phones are all essentially trash that ends up in a landfill within a year or so. They should not exist at all.

No they don't. I know people that use them for many years. They exist not as a gimmick but for people who seriously can't afford anything better. Those people won't have the funds to replace them on a whim either.

Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market

#579

Post by wolvoleo »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #379
AngryData wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Helium is almost all captured from gas wells by cryogenically liquefying the nitrogen out of it. I guess you could do technically do that with the fab's air but it is a LOT of volume of air to liquefy and likely costs more than even inflated helium prices. Most helium from most wells is simply vented because it is expensive to separate even with its relatively high concentration, and I imagine even the best case scen…

> Helium is almost all captured from gas wells by cryogenically liquefying the nitrogen out of it. This is wild. I never thought about how they separated gases from natural gas fields. The carbon footprint of each kg of that helium must be astonishingly large.

Well yes but that's only if you consider the helium to be the only reason for the natural gas extraction which is obviously isn't.

It's more of a byproduct in that sense.

Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market

#580

Post by pfannkuchen »

yread wrote: post #376
alsetmusic wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is my greatest concern. So many small players will be wiped out. Consolidation is assured. Always great for consumers to be under the thumb of increasingly large companies.

Are there really that many small players? Aren't they all just subbrands of Xiaomi, Lenovo and Oppo?

Is it a coincidence that Oppo sounds a lot like how Chinese people sound when they say Apple?
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