Any new fabs on the horizon or do the powers that be expect the music to stop sooner than that?
I believe they've been building them like crazy since covid, but it takes a looong time for them to come online (like 5-10 years?)
Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months
61–70 of 587 posts
Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months
#62I noticed that resellers on ebay of used server equipment that I keep an eye on in Germany pulled all their DDR4 from surplus and used server racks and now list it separately for sale, at jacked up prices. Where you used to be able to see a used Gigabyte server listed with "128GB" "256GB" etc listed in the title, they now all say "0GB". They took extra effort, to pull used ram from older servers, and list it separate…
> So... did they list the "0GB" racks with removed ram cheaper you ask?
Could this be an indication that there's a supply shortage/price increase of the remaining components in the rack? Or do you interpret it as people just trying their luck out of sheer greed?
Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
My evga 1000w has been going strong for 11 years now. Cheaper power supplies fail often but if you buy quality and oversized they’ll outlast all your other components as they don’t become outdated.
It’s the caps that fail. Electrolytic caps have the highest failure rate of any passive component. My team tries to avoid them in our designs as much as possible. But you’re right, caps in a good design can easily last 20 years, making a power supply the longest lasting component of most builds.
My go to source for reviews was always jonnyguru.com but he closed up shop. Not sure who’s actually doing in-depth performance and component reviews these days.
Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months
#64I still hope all this will come crashing down, there will be an oversupply of components and RAM will be cheaper than paper.
While I share your optimism, I still don't fully understand why a crash will necessarily lead to an oversupply and lower prices for regular consumers. The components / RAM you are referencing are for enterprise use / data centers which in my limited understanding is not a 1:1 swap for the kind of components that your smartphone / car / fridge / gaming rig use. I would love for someone more informed than me to spell o…
Datacentre NVMe disk is still usable in a standard desktop. Sever memory less so, but essentially if there were no 'new' server market whatsoever then you could redirect 100% of memory production to consumer chips without enormous upheaval.
By the way I personally think this scenario is very unlikely to happen.
Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
While I share your optimism, I still don't fully understand why a crash will necessarily lead to an oversupply and lower prices for regular consumers. The components / RAM you are referencing are for enterprise use / data centers which in my limited understanding is not a 1:1 swap for the kind of components that your smartphone / car / fridge / gaming rig use. I would love for someone more informed than me to spell o…
My understanding is that it's fundamentally a fab capacity limit. At a given node size/technology (think 7nm, etc) they can only output so many wafers. If AI data centers are generating enormous demand for memory, then that's what those wafers are going to be used to for, unless they can be outcompeted, hence higher prices. I'm not actually sure if enterprise designated memory is equivalent or not to consumer designa…
Typically (not always!) server memory is 'registered' so won't work with consumer CPUs which run on un-registered.
Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months
#66I bought an RX 6600 for $450 during the GPU shortage a few years ago. I know the AI boom is different than the crypto/COVID boom, but still. Don't be me.
I got a 3060 ti for like $900 at that time
Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months
#67The situation is absolutely awful for anybody who needs significant memory or storage (or devices incorporating such). Even people who think they have enough for the next few years already could end up with an unpleasant surprise if they e.g. have a stick or two of RAM go bad or a GPU fry. I have a few machines with aging sticks that I'm hoping will manage to hold out until when/if things improve.
I'm saving a ton of money by simply not upgrading. I used to do upgrades every 1-2 years just to keep up on things, pass the old box down to my son or otherwise donate it. Now I intend to keep my current setup for 7+ years. Its 2 years old next month. I may even stay with it longer. I just see no reason to upgrade with things how they are. I considered a Mac Studio a couple months ago. Price was up but might have pul…
I'm running a 12 year old i5 3.2ghz CPU with 16 GB of memory, an SSD and an AMD RX 480 (8 GB) GPU. Currently using a 100% scaled 4k monitor and a 2nd 1440p monitor. I keep the machine on 24 / 7. It's great for software development along with video + image editing and casual gaming. Everything feels fast and snappy.
I will use this until the hardware stops. There's a 0% chance I'd buy hardware at the current prices.
Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm saving a ton of money by simply not upgrading. I used to do upgrades every 1-2 years just to keep up on things, pass the old box down to my son or otherwise donate it. Now I intend to keep my current setup for 7+ years. Its 2 years old next month. I may even stay with it longer. I just see no reason to upgrade with things how they are. I considered a Mac Studio a couple months ago. Price was up but might have pul…
There also seems to have been a major shift in strategy from AMD / Intel / Apple / NVidia due to this, as I was used to CPU / GPU / chipset upgrades coming out more regularly with double-digit percentage improvements each year, but that seems to be basically over for the consumer space now that everyone is just trying to build as much AI hardware as fast as possible for enterprise markets. I also used to rebuild my d…
> There also seems to have been a major shift in strategy from AMD / Intel / Apple / NVidia due to this, as I was used to CPU / GPU / chipset upgrades coming out more regularly with double-digit percentage improvements each year, but that seems to be basically over for the consumer space now that everyone is just trying to build as much AI hardware as fast as possible for enterprise markets.
I believe all of them realized nobody really needs more than 16c32t on a desktop, and architectural changes nowadays can only go so far to bump performance. The biggest changes across generations in the last ~5 years were the introduction of specialized instructions for wider vectors (AVX512/AVX2, and even then you need specialized workloads to use them), bigger L3 caches and/or efficiency cores to lower power draw. The double-digits gains recently were in memory bandwidth, frequency and locality, because you can make a 5GHz CPU and make it go 10% faster than the previous generation, but you also need to supply the extra data for the CPU to make useful work so that it's not data-starved.
> I also used to rebuild my desktop every 1-2 years and upgrade laptops every 2-3 years, but I'm currently a bit past that and have no plans to refresh anything in the near future. I'll probably wait another CPU and GPU generation or two to even consider it, especially with prices being this ridiculous.
I built my desktop in 2019 (right before the COVID madness, luckily) and I was also used to 1-3 year cycles. I upgraded the CPU and GPU since then, but the performance is still that of a workstation, even though perhaps a little bit behind in pure single-core benchmarks. I plan to keep this until either CPU, RAM or MB fall out (hopefully another 5y at least), and then I'll make a huge leap, instead of making 4x smaller ones which deliver little uplift anyway.
Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
OpenAI (Stargate) kicked off the price increases a year ago by locking up 40% of the global supply of RAM output. https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/dram/openais-star...
And watch … $5 says they have nothing to do with the ram because even if there was enough power there’s no use case for this much spend If I had to guess they’re just buying up ram to keep others from having it same way meta, Google, etc hired up engineers to keep others from having them
I’ve been wondering this if you buy up all the memory you can ensure the competition cannot compete with huge investment raising the bar for competition. Of course this all sounds all conspiracy theory. Though without a place to power this or put it makes me wonder this.
Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm saving a ton of money by simply not upgrading. I used to do upgrades every 1-2 years just to keep up on things, pass the old box down to my son or otherwise donate it. Now I intend to keep my current setup for 7+ years. Its 2 years old next month. I may even stay with it longer. I just see no reason to upgrade with things how they are. I considered a Mac Studio a couple months ago. Price was up but might have pul…
I'm running a 12 year old i5 3.2ghz CPU with 16 GB of memory, an SSD and an AMD RX 480 (8 GB) GPU. Currently using a 100% scaled 4k monitor and a 2nd 1440p monitor. I keep the machine on 24 / 7. It's great for software development along with video + image editing and casual gaming. Everything feels fast and snappy. I will use this until the hardware stops. There's a 0% chance I'd buy hardware at the current prices.
It really depends on what the task at hand is.
I have a baseline iMac Pro and custom built tower with similar specs (3.2Ghz Xeon W-2140B, 32GB RAM, Vega Pro 56 and i7-6700K, 32GB, 5700XT respectively) and they're both perfectly responsive. For many day to day things the difference between them and newer machines is negligible. For other things, my 5950X tower and M5 Max MBP run circles around them.
Both the 5950X tower and M5 Max MBP are deep into diminishing returns territory regardless, however. Aside from some extreme niche workloads like LLMs I can't imagine needing anything more powerful. They both have a ridiculous amount of headroom for the overwhelming majority of anything most people might want a computer for.