Generative “AI” data centers are gobbling up trillions of dollars in capital, not to mention heating up the planet like a microwave. As a result there’s a capacity crunch on memory production, shooting the prices for RAM sky high, over 100 percent in the last few months alone. Multiple stores are tired of adjusting the prices day to day, and won’t even display them. You find out how much it costs at checkout.
Im still running off DDR3
Finally set up my proxmox server, been procrastinating for a year. Thought on a whim, “I’m only using 2 of my 4 slots, and I could benefit from a bit more RAM. It’s DDR4, can’t be that expensive”.
Yeah… It was that expensive. More expensive than when I bought the stuff originally when this computer was new.
Lived in the Silicon Valley in the 1990’s, when the price of RAM exploded with the web, armed robberies of manufacturing plants and warehouses for RAM became a thing for a few years.
Insert <Aw shit, here we go again . meme>
I think that in the long run, the RAM shortage will turn into a glut of much faster and larger DDR5 RAM sticks. Provided if you can wait for the transition to AM6, an AM5 endgame system will have pretty good RAM.
They are going to pivot all that processing to the next snale oil scheme. Do you think its a coincidence that rhe AI hype came immediately after crypto crashed?
I view AI to be like the printing press: It is good for the everyman…if that everyman was willing to own and make use of it. By ceding AI to oligarchs, society would be allowing the 1% to have more tools to do stuff, while denying the public from making effective use of them.
The answer isn’t to reject AI, but to fund publicly developed and owned AI. Every minority who has 95% of Disney’s legal acumen in their pocket, will be able to more effectively resist Kavenaugh Stops in court. An AI can scour the web and spot discounted goods that a person actually wants, and create a shopping list that is cheap and convenient. People can have a competent teacher, if their rural household lacks a school. All these things lend a little extra agency to ordinary people.
My point, is that we shouldn’t refuse tools. Instead, we should adopt them on OUR terms, not the techbro’s.
LoL, LLM’s aren’t capable of being “competent” at anything. Not law, not teaching, not even coding. They are pure garbage at nearly everything they are applied to. Yes, some of these things have had some limited success at finding patterns in the noise. But those successes are grossly outweighed by the absolute failure of them to do anything else.
https://tech.co/news/list-ai-failures-mistakes-errors
Guess I should have bought the 128GB 3600 kit earlier.
Are DDR4 also affected?Ddr4 is apparently out of manufacturing at a lot of places now, so it’s even more affected (at least in my market, prices rose more then ddr5)
Yeah, just checked the 2 sites I use for computer components.
1 had no RAM listed.
The other had 32GB DDR4 at 2x the price and no 128GB kit (96 was the highest, 64 for DDR4)
As someone buying load of secondhand tech, you don’t need the latest and greatest
I can never get people to understand this. I’ve got servers running on i7 8th gens, with stock 16GB ram. I could upgrade, but no need. People thinking they need 128GB to plays games are delusional.
To run games, you might need at least 32Gb. 64 Gb is sufficient in most cases. Still expensive af
Yeah but even second hand drives are stupid-priced today. No, I dont want to buy your 2014 1TB drive for 25€ + shipping.
I can’t wait for this to pop, I mean if it does in a way that produces selloffs.
No, I dont want to buy your 2014 1TB drive for 25€ + shipping.
well damn that’s a steal. I’d buy it.
If this bubble doesn’t pop soon, I expect a memory card thefts to start making the headlines. Small and easier to carry off while being more expensive than some jewelry of the same size.
First they came for the hard drives, and I did not speak out because I didn’t need a hard drive. Then they came for the GPUs and I did not speak out because I had a pretty dope GPU. Then they came for my 8gb of ram and there was nobody left to speak out for me.
I have 128gb of corsair ddr5 in my closet. IM RICH!
Just did a quick check, it’s worth double what I paid for it. I’ll just let it sit in my closet until it’s worthless.
I also have 128gb of ddr5 ram
And 64gb of ddr5 ram
And some laptop ddr5 ram
I’m going to wrap them all in Saran Wrap and stick them up my ass so my brain works faster
Ah, but you see, if you wrap it in Saran wrap, they won’t be able to make contact. You’d be better off using contact grease for that easy insertion
Of course. That must be why it didn’t work the last time. Thank you kindly for that wonderful advice.
Is it sitting on top of a pile of beanie babies?
If it’s new it genuinely might be worth 2k. Looked at the prices yesterday and corsair had 64gb for ~1k.
This is nothing new. I worked at a small computer shop in a small town between 2005-2007. The owner treated memory as a commodity. He checked national ram module prices daily. Buying low, and selling high. He sometimes adjusted the module price on a per-customer basis.
I get that it’s much harder to do that with online stores, where prices are published to multiple places, and for chain stores where the price needs to be consistent between locations.
If you want to see a good set of graphs on pricing over time, PC Parts Picker does some good ones. It’s absolutely INSANE how bad it’s getting. The graphs in question.
I was like DDR4 doesn’t count
One well-documented memory industry trend that is behind the price increases seen is said to be makers shutting down their DDR4 production in favor of DDR5 and other more profitable lines. In February, we noted that the likes of Micron, Samsung, and SK hynix were being rudely elbowed out of the DDR4 market by Chinese players (such as CXMT and Fujian Jinhua) ruthlessly undercutting them in this segment.
Samsung was seen to flinch in late April, as reports circulated that the South Korean technology and manufacturing giant had scheduled to cease DDR4 production in early June.
Now there are indications that oversupply from Chinese ‘dumping’ is at an end, as CXMT has been instructed by the Chinese government to abandon DDR4 manufacturing. Thus, the reported spikes in DDR4 pricing in recent weeks may stem from a perfect storm of the above supply-side factors all exerting an effect over a relatively short period of time.
But still ouch :)
Oh no.
So even if I manage to somehow get DDR4 for lower prices, I can’t expect the SK Hynix modules.Guess it’s going to be a few more years before I can get a RAM upgrade, or maybe never at all.
It might end up being similar to how DDR3 ended up being more expensive than DDR4 for multiple years.Sells st a lower price: the web: they were Ruthlessly undercutting!!
They even don’t need to lower prices to “undercut”, just not raise them too much!
I swear there’s a new gold rush every time I want to upgrade my pc.
because we’re in an era where there always will be a gold rush for a specific component. upgrades have slowed down considerably in the past 10 years, my laptop is 4 years old and still kicks like the first day, I still game on my 8 year old laptop which is permanently attached to the TV and running as a steam machine with more than decent performance.
this wasn’t even thinkable in the 00’s
I’m pretty sure after hard disks, GPUs, rams the next shortage is either Arm CPUs or a specific future type of PSUs
It wouldn’t be quite so bad if the previous gold rush ended first, but they seem to just be stacking up.
This AI bubble needs to explode yesterday, Wall Street be damned.
Speak for your self - scored a nice GPU upgrade during the crypto crash, maybe something similar will be achievable after this insanity hits the brakes.
I thought they weren’t using gaming gpus this time though?
Until the next crisis…
This is why I’m still running ddr4. Every time I think about upgrading a generation, there’s a run on some integral component.
Did I tell you about using arch?
AM4 is gonna last until the 2030s at this rate…
With how good my 5600x still performs, I could very well see it lasting that long. Assuming it doesn’t randomly kill itself after a few years like my previous ryzen 5.
I was silly and got myself a 5950X. But I feel less silly about it now tbh. It’s gonna become my new homelab core whenever I get the chance to do a new gaming build again that’s not a high 4-figure investment.
Totally worth it with how good ryzens have held up performance wise. Unless you’re doing some really CPU heavy stuff or have a beast of a GPU, you probably won’t get bottlenecked by the CPU for at least 5 more years.
Unless you’re using windows in your homelab. I assume you’re not since you have a home lab.
Nope - proxmox is the way
5800x3d was probably my best cpu purchase of all time, damn
Why wouldn’t it?
In a sane world, the limitations of a CPU socket would be reached, and then newer SKUs would no longer be release and all stock for prospective builders would be second hand.
That’s clearly not the case here. AM4 continues to get new CPU releases and parts are still available new from retail, years after the support officially ending. That’s a good thing for variety and entry level machines, but such dependency means a future CPU could be limited in featureset/performance if it releases on AM4 instead of AM5, which there may be enough demand to force designers to downgrade chips for AM4 compatibility.
I dki so too - just upgraded my X2600 with a shiny X5950, the nicest cpu my aging mainboard can run. with 16 cores and 64 gigs of ram i see a future when i simply replace the entire machine for daily use and make this one a very nice server.
It’s why I started treating computers as commodities — I rarely upgrade anymore; just wait the 5 years and by an entirely new system.
Same except for me it’s 10 years.
Yeah, i think the correct response to planned obsolescence from the side of computer manufacturers is to exclusively buy products from companies who have produced long-living machines in the past.
That gives manufacturers an incentive to make the machines they produce last longer, instead of shorter to sell newer products more frequently.
This is about my upgrade cadence, except for storage. I ran my Ryzen 1600 until the 7000 series dropped and upgraded mobo+RAM at once for about $600.
I then moved the old parts to another case to use as a low load server only for both the motherboard and CPU die within a few weeks. 🫡
I feel like the luckiest person because I built my last PC right before the crypto hype and my current one right before the AI bubble.
So it’s your fault…
Multiple stores are tired of adjusting the prices day to day, and won’t even display them. You find out how much it costs at checkout.
Someone should tell them about those e-paper price tags…
How else they gonna bait you to buy?
Huh?
For not using e-paper.
Lol pricing computer parts like they do fish in an expensive restaurant.
What a time to be alive.
In paris there was this street “rue Montgallet” selling computer stuff like that around y2000, the prices for the most sold things were printed on a cheap paper daily or you had to ask. Guarantee? Yes, but it stops when you leave the shop, or so was the saying.
Thing is, this isn’t new in the slightest.
I remember calling around to different PC stores in the 90s and early 00s to find the cheapest RAM and hard drive prices.
Before that, I remember my grandfather, an IBM employee in the 60s-90s calling places looking for best pricing on 64k-128k SIPP memory for an ibm pizzabox 286.
That was the norm before it was so easy to buy online from across the country, local stores set their own prices and a few minutes of calling to find the best deal is like searching on Google for a few minutes to find the best deal… But they weren’t doubling in price in a couple months, that I can recall anyway.
I’ll never forget the time someone in my neighborhood found out one of the local PC shops had a deal on 8MB of RAM for like 100 bucks. That’s not a typo kiddies 8 Megabytes. We were so excited, a bunch of us piled into one car and rushed over there before they sold out!
