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Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

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Re: Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

#91

Post by adrianN »

antisthenes wrote: post #81
kragen wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we measure the value of the dollar against megabytes of RAM, well, in 01987, the difference between a StarBoard with "2 megs space" and a StarBoard with "2 megs installed" was US$484 ( https://archive.org/details/amazing-computing-magazine-1987-... ), so a "meg" of RAM cost US$242. Today https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/ says "DDR4-3200 2x8GB" costs US$108; if that means 16GiB, as in 16384 "megs", a "m…

> If we measure the value of the dollar against megabytes of RAM We should be measuring it by the amount of RAM in a typical household PC in 1987 and today. Even though a "meg" of RAM costs less than 1 cent today, I can't do anything useful with it. Even if we are generous and buy a whole $1 of RAM today, it only gets us 150 MB of RAM, which, while infinitely more useful than 1MB, is still completely useless for runn…

You can still run software from 1987 on a megabyte of ram, it just does different things from a modern browser.

Re: Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

#92

Post by cncjchsue7 »

somenameforme wrote: post #79

I don't understand this. I'm looking at prices on some Asian store fronts and it's nowhere even remotely near these. I'm looking at DDR5-6000 2x16 for about $130, with no apparent limits. Even with tariffs, transport, and other fees, you could get this to the US for way less than $400. I doubt the market could be this inefficient - in other words I don't think I just found a get rich quick scheme. So, what gives?

Aus stock was cheap a couple of weeks ago, it's caught up though. I'd snatch it up if you need it.

Re: Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

#93

Post by nodja »

somenameforme wrote: post #79

I don't understand this. I'm looking at prices on some Asian store fronts and it's nowhere even remotely near these. I'm looking at DDR5-6000 2x16 for about $130, with no apparent limits. Even with tariffs, transport, and other fees, you could get this to the US for way less than $400. I doubt the market could be this inefficient - in other words I don't think I just found a get rich quick scheme. So, what gives?

The current prices are a response to future stock, not current. It's 100% retailers price gouging with their current stock that they got for cheap because they know there will be limited stock in the near future. Asian retailers may be more honest and keep their margins the same, but will catch up in a month or two.

Re: Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

#94

Post by Semaphor »

lmc wrote: post #87

I just checked my go-to stores in Europe. Holy shit. I bought a 5200-speed 16GB DDR5 kit in October for 55 eur. Now it's selling for 240 eur. The 6000-speed model is now 390 eur.

July: 172,38 € for a 2x32GB DDR5-6000 kit

Best price for the same one now: 689,55 €

Re: Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

#95

Post by zozbot234 »

nodja wrote: post #93
somenameforme wrote: post #79

I don't understand this. I'm looking at prices on some Asian store fronts and it's nowhere even remotely near these. I'm looking at DDR5-6000 2x16 for about $130, with no apparent limits. Even with tariffs, transport, and other fees, you could get this to the US for way less than $400. I doubt the market could be this inefficient - in other words I don't think I just found a get rich quick scheme. So, what gives?

The current prices are a response to future stock, not current. It's 100% retailers price gouging with their current stock that they got for cheap because they know there will be limited stock in the near future. Asian retailers may be more honest and keep their margins the same, but will catch up in a month or two.

It's just surge pricing to manage demand, not "price gouging". Being able to buy RAM at high prices is a lot better than being unable to source it at all because everyone else is panic-hoarding.

Re: Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

#96

Post by hypercube33 »

swatcoder wrote: post #22
ggm wrote: post #3

the other side of the AI bubble are a huge amount of 2nd hand parts of all kinds going to come onto the market?

A lot of the goods won't be essily repurposible for consumer or small business work loads. Imagine if auto manufacturers all refitted their factories and supply chains to produce military vehicles for a war effort. New family cars would run dry, and when the war ended, some folks would figure out make clever use of some surplus military vehicles for street travel and commerce, but most of the surplus would just be sh…

AliExpress has been selling 2010 or whatever Intel xeons in dual socket desktop board kits for gaming. they are fairly affordable and hold up to almost modern games so people that can't afford new gen systems.

Re: Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

#97

Post by HenryMulligan »

walterbell wrote: post #39

https://www.mooreslawisdead.com/post/sam-altman-s-dirty-dram... On October 1st OpenAI signed two simultaneous deals with Samsung and SK Hynix for 40% of the worlds DRAM supply... the shock wasn’t that OpenAI made a big deal, no, it was that they made two massive deals this big, at the same time, with Samsung and SK Hynix simultaneously! In fact, according to our sources - both companies had no idea how big each other…

Sounds like OpenAI might be trying their hand at TPUs, like what Google has. They are one of Google's biggest advantages in AI right now. It would also give them insurance against Nvidia being everybody's hardware supplier.

Re: Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months

#100

Post by kragen »

antisthenes wrote: post #81
kragen wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we measure the value of the dollar against megabytes of RAM, well, in 01987, the difference between a StarBoard with "2 megs space" and a StarBoard with "2 megs installed" was US$484 ( https://archive.org/details/amazing-computing-magazine-1987-... ), so a "meg" of RAM cost US$242. Today https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/ says "DDR4-3200 2x8GB" costs US$108; if that means 16GiB, as in 16384 "megs", a "m…

> If we measure the value of the dollar against megabytes of RAM We should be measuring it by the amount of RAM in a typical household PC in 1987 and today. Even though a "meg" of RAM costs less than 1 cent today, I can't do anything useful with it. Even if we are generous and buy a whole $1 of RAM today, it only gets us 150 MB of RAM, which, while infinitely more useful than 1MB, is still completely useless for runn…

Math says that's stupid. You can still do everything with a "meg" of RAM that you could do in 01987. In fact, the "meg" of RAM you get now is enormously faster, and you can interface it to other things that you couldn't get at the time, such as SSDs, so you can do strictly more with it.

Economics says you're spending newly abundant resources freely in order to conserve those that are still scarce. Economics also predicts that people will adapt to RAM prices doubling by using RAM more frugally, spending more of other resources to compensate.

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