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32GB of DDR5 now costs $375 – AI shortage continues to squeeze PC building

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Re: 32GB of DDR5 now costs $375 – AI shortage continues to squeeze PC building

#92
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People want this, the demand is there. It's impossible to avoid using AI multiple times a day, just because it's forced into every product under the sun. That is NOT demand. None of those users WANT this.

You're wrong. There is demand. More and more people are exploring AI and getting real work done with it.

It's like how some people like listening to Ed Sheeran. So yes, there is demand. But nobody is "getting real work done" with these toy AI models.

Real AI is a geo-political threat, and will not be allowed to exist for the average person. So, enjoy your toy AI models, because that's all you're getting.

Re: 32GB of DDR5 now costs $375 – AI shortage continues to squeeze PC building

#93
I want a more complete picture of why prices are so high from articles like this.

Is supply actively constrained, or is this mostly in anticipation of future shortages? How much of this is a mix of panic buying and price gouging on bad news?

I care more about the secondhand market. Prices are nuts for old used gear, but that also tracks with patterns I've been seeing since roughly the pandemic where more and more secondhand sellers on the usual platforms setting pricing patterns are small businesses, not hobbyists.

Re: 32GB of DDR5 now costs $375 – AI shortage continues to squeeze PC building

#94
post #79
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People want this, the demand is there. It's impossible to avoid using AI multiple times a day, just because it's forced into every product under the sun. That is NOT demand. None of those users WANT this.

We can be cynics of AI without ignoring reality, if no one wanted this no one would be chatting with Claude or ChatGPT directly, but people obviously are. The fact is there are people that do in fact want this, and it isn't just CEO's hoping to cut jobs.

It's very, very questionable if people want the situation we have. I have yet to meet anyone in person who is really excited about AI. Of course it's useful, but at this cost?

Claiming people want this is like claiming that people wanted WW2 because look we're all enjoying the tech that was developed during it!

Re: 32GB of DDR5 now costs $375 – AI shortage continues to squeeze PC building

#96

AMD just brought the popular 5800X3D back out of retirement to give people maintaining the DDR4 based platforms something to buy. Last I checked used DDR4 was half the price of used DDR5 after the prices of both shot up.

Everyone re-releasing their old crap. Nvidia is remaking the 3060 too I believe because they can use cheaper older RAM on it.

Re: 32GB of DDR5 now costs $375 – AI shortage continues to squeeze PC building

#97

My bet is that the prices will crash once OpenAI (and/or Antrophic) IPO's have happened. Right now the biggest threat to their IPO's is that people realize that local models are good enough for whatever they're peddling, what's the most important factor to even running good enough models? RAM since you want the models in memory to not be total slogs.

You are saying there will be even more demand for RAM and that will cause the prices to crash?

Re: 32GB of DDR5 now costs $375 – AI shortage continues to squeeze PC building

#98
I built a little home server last year, and only put 32 of the total 64 GB I wanted. The rationale was that RAM is cheap, and I could spend that month's fun budget on a 8TB harddrive instead.

Boy do I ever regret that. Every time I compile some code and the VM I use goes OOM, I die a little bit inside knowing that less than 100 bucks or so would have fixed this if I just went for it.

Re: 32GB of DDR5 now costs $375 – AI shortage continues to squeeze PC building

#99
The squeeze is real even at the SME level. We recently wanted to add another TB of memory to several servers (we do EDA chip design, which eats a lot of memory). Quotes came back to about €200k for 48 x 96GB DDR5-5600 RDIMMs. Mind you, this is for refurbished memory with 1 year warranty. I'm still figuring out if this is FU-pricing or just how things are going to be from now on.

Spec-ing and buying servers has become quite the pain in the past year, at least at the relatively-small scale we operate at. It's "dynamic pricing" with most quotes being valid for 24 hours :(

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