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

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

#81

Post by loloquwowndueo »

librasteve wrote: post #55

I used to sell 64kbit (yes, bit) DRAM at $7 in 1982. 1 year later was The memory business is a pure commodity and brutally cyclic. Big profit => build a fab => wait 2 years => oh shit, everyone else did it => dump units at below cost. Repeat.

Then you have “acts of God” like that time when a flood or fire or something caused the only factory in the world that produced some obscure part of memory chips to stop production and memory costs double almost overnight. I remember my 4 -> 32 MB back in the 90s cost a fortune because of this.

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

#82

Post by huseyinkeles »

librasteve wrote: post #55

I used to sell 64kbit (yes, bit) DRAM at $7 in 1982. 1 year later was The memory business is a pure commodity and brutally cyclic. Big profit => build a fab => wait 2 years => oh shit, everyone else did it => dump units at below cost. Repeat.

A great example for the pork cycle.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pork_cycle

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

#83

Post by Aurornis »

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.

It's a valid question if you're not familiar with the RAM market. Sorry you're getting downvoted for it.

The manufacturers make the individual chips, not the modules (DIMMs). (EDIT: Some companies that make chips may also have business units that sell DIMMS, to be pedantic.)

The R in RDIMM means register, aka buffer. It's a separate chip that buffers the signals between the memory chips and the controller.

Even ECC modules use regular memory chips, but with extra chips added for the ECC capacity.

It can be confusing. The key thing to remember is that the price is driven by the price of the chips. The companies that make DIMMs are buying chips in bulk and integrating them on to PCBs.

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

#84

Post by merelysounds »

In case anyone else wanted to check, PS5 has[1]:

> Memory: 16 GB GDDR6 SDRAM

So unless the RAM price jumps to 4x the price of a PS5, getting a PS5 is not the most cost efficient way to get to 64 GB of RAM.

In comparison, PS3 has been used to build cheap clusters[2].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_5

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_cluster

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

#85

Post by timschmidt »

Aurornis wrote: post #77
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…

> Hopefully the shortage leads large purchasers to engage in long-term contracts with the memory manufacturers which give them the confidence to invest in new fabs and increased capacity. Most DRAM is already purchased through contracts with manufacturers. Manufacturers don't actually want too many extremely long term contracts because it would limit their ability to respond to market price changes. Like most commodi…

> Are you referring to complete home-grown DRAM designs? That, too, was already in the works.

Yes, via cxmt as discussed by Asianometry here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mt-eDtFqKvk

As I mentioned, various groups within China have been working on China-native DRAM since the '70s. What's new are the margins and market demand to allow them to be profitable with DRAM which is still several years behind the competition.

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

#86

Post by keyringlight »

jkingsman wrote: post #18
theginger wrote: post #15

When did a PS5 become a unit of cost? For reference seems to be about 0.002 London buses

I think it's intended as a comparison of cost when building a gaming-capable computer vs. a console of somewhat equivalent power. It used to be a general rule of thumb that you could build a computer of roughly equivalent power for the cost of a game console, or a little more — now the memory costs more than the whole console.

It doesn't help that GPUs have also generally gone up over the past decade because there's more market for them besides gaming, along with how they benefit from being hugely parallel and the larger you can make them the better, and fabrication costs are shooting up. I think there was a GamersNexus video at the launch of one of the previous GPU generations that noted that there was a move from "more for your money" each generation towards "more for more", i.e. keeping the value roughly static and increasing the amount they charged for a more capable product.

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

#87

Post by venturecruelty »

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…

I guess we'll just have to stop making computer memory if it ceases to be profitable. The market is so efficient.

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

#88

Post by venturecruelty »

timschmidt wrote: post #50
SirFatty wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

It's not just predictable, it's illegal. Of course, if you have an executive that actually cares about enforcing the law.

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

#89

Post by teach »

retrac wrote: post #79
debo_ wrote: post #65

The oft-snickered-at "smuggling 3mb of hot RAM" line from Neuromancer may have been prophetic after all.

If you are a scifi author, it's a mistake to give any hard numbers in real-world units. You will, most likely, greatly underestimate. Even trying to greatly overestimate, you will underestimate. Commander Data's specifications in the Star Trek TNG episode The Measure of a Man from 1989: 800 quadrillion bits of storage, computing at 60 trillion operations per second. 100 petabytes. That's a big machine. A very big mac…

That's fun! To further prove your point I saw this and thought "yeah maybe 100 PB is more common these days but 60 trillion ops / second seems like a lot"

Then I did some googling and it turns out that a single 5090 GPU has a peak FP32 performance of over 100 TFLOPS!

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

#90

Post by venturecruelty »

cwbriscoe wrote: post #34
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 wish I would have done what you did. Especially since I wanted 128GB. Now I am probably going to settle for 64GB or maybe 96GB.

The better play would've been to buy Bay Area real estate in the 1970s, but what're you gonna do? lights cigarette
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