[HN Gopher] PS5 now costs less than 64GB of DDR5 memory. RAM jum...
___________________________________________________________________
PS5 now costs less than 64GB of DDR5 memory. RAM jumps to $600 due
to shortage
Author : speckx
Score : 186 points
Date : 2025-11-24 19:29 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.tomshardware.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.tomshardware.com)
| geerlingguy wrote:
| Ouch. Wondering if homelabs will be scavenged for unused RAM as
| even DDR4 is going up in price :(
| Havoc wrote:
| I've been selling the ddr4 I had lying around. Also consider
| removing some from desktop since I don't really use 64gb.
| Hamuko wrote:
| I'm personally waiting for the first DDR5 heist. Breaking into
| a computer store and taking all of the RAM that isn't soldered
| down.
| StableAlkyne wrote:
| It's crazy how much RAM has inflated in the last month. I checked
| the price history of a few DDR5 kits and most have tripled since
| _September_.
| georgefrowny wrote:
| Why specifically just now? It doesn't seem that much has
| materially changed very recently.
| lousken wrote:
| Everyone should unsub from this AI frenzy, this is ridiculous
| radicality wrote:
| I just checked how much I paid around 12 months ago for Crucial
| 96GB kit (2x48GB ddr5 5600 so-dimm). Was $224, same kit today I
| see listed at $592, wild :/
| NewsaHackO wrote:
| I bought 2x 32 GB DDR5 in august for $150, Now its $440. I
| dodged a HUGE bullet.
| ThatMedicIsASpy wrote:
| 96GB 6400, 380EUR 2023-11
| pmdr wrote:
| Same, bought in August for $250 (EU), now it's ~$840. I ended
| up returning the laptop I'd bought it for and thought 'why hold
| on to the RAM, it'll only depreciate in value,' so I returned
| that too. Better hold on to my PS5, I guess.
| tucnak wrote:
| I did buy 384 GB worth of Samsung DDR5-4800 sticks for my
| homelab a few months ago. I was wondering at the time if I
| really needed it, well ended up using it anyway, and turns out,
| dodged a bullet big time.
| skwee357 wrote:
| This is insane!
|
| I got 2 sticks of 16GB DDR4 SODIMM for EUR65.98 back in
| February. The same two sticks in the same store now cost EUR186
| pseudosavant wrote:
| 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.
| EddieB wrote:
| Just went through this today for my daughter- struggled to find
| an i5 not on pre-order, and the RAM was crippling- ended up
| going Ryzen 7 for a first time and 2x8Gb DDR5 6000 @ PS119 -
| looking forward to building it with her!
| cwbriscoe wrote:
| 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.
| venturecruelty wrote:
| The better play would've been to buy Bay Area real estate in
| the 1970s, but what're you gonna do? _lights cigarette_
| vkou wrote:
| I bought 64GB of DDR5 two weeks ago. That same RAM is now twice
| the price.
| wiredfool wrote:
| I just got one of the last beelink ser-8s with 64gb for $750.
| They sold out by the time my order arrived. The newer ones are
| starting around 830 for a 32gb machine (admittedly with newer
| everything)
| mikesickler wrote:
| I bought 32GB x 2 of G.SKILL a year ago and paid $204. Now it's
| $600. Insane
| dawnerd wrote:
| Noticed SSDs went up too. There's a "black friday" sales price
| for a 4TB crucial external drive that's at its highest price in
| 90 days.
|
| Bad time if you need to build a computer.
| rkagerer wrote:
| Article says:
|
| _Looking at it optimistically, you 're probably going to find
| DDR5 at bargain prices again in 2027._
|
| When do _you_ think prices will recede again?
| StopDisinfo910 wrote:
| RAM prices are cyclical. We are in the under supply part of the
| cycle.
|
| People just have to wait. As prices are sky high, production
| capacity will likely increase. Some AI companies will go bust.
| Demand will plummet and we will buy RAM for pennies while the
| market consolidates.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| That's historically what happened when we had proper
| competition. Now we have a 3 party oligopoly and massive
| barriers to entry. Now at least 1 of the 3 is actively
| signalling than they're not going to not going to spend 100s
| of billions to expand fab capacity that will lower their
| profits because if one does it they'll all do it. It's a
| prisoner dilemma, and they're co-operating. When they co-
| operate we all lose.
| timschmidt wrote:
| The entry of Chinese DRAM into the market may spur
| increased competition. If not for competition's sake alone,
| for national security and domestic supply chain integrity
| concerns.
| nicolaslem wrote:
| That is also somewhat true for GPUs, hard drives and SSDs.
| They all usually have different cycles but today AI is making
| them peak all at the same time.
| venturecruelty wrote:
| Great, we can eat the RAM when we're all unemployed.
| Modified3019 wrote:
| I built 4 systems between Jan-May for myself and family, very
| fortuitous timing, because no way would I be doing it now.
| caycep wrote:
| bc some people up top loved the idea of the old Smoot Hawley
| thing
| Someone1234 wrote:
| It will be interesting to see the knock on effect of some
| upcoming consumer electronics; for example Apple was rumored to
| be working on a cheaper MacBook that uses an iPad CPU, and Valve
| is working on a SteamOS based gaming machine. Both will likely
| live/die based on _price_.
| dsiddharth wrote:
| edit: looks like i had the wrong understanding, thanks to the
| comments below for explaining
|
| ~~~~~helps that Apple's SoC has the RAM on the main die itself.
| They're probably immune from these price hikes, but a lot of
| the PC/Windows vendors would, which would only make Apple's
| position even stronger~~~~
| arjie wrote:
| How does that make a difference? It's not like the price
| change is on DIMMs. The price change is on the DRAM, which is
| a commodity item. It's not like someone is going to discount
| it if you tell them "nah, I'm going to solder this one to my
| SoC".
|
| If Apple is insulated it is likely because Apple signs big
| contracts for large supply and manufacturers would prefer to
| be insulated from short-term demand shocks and have some
| reliability that their fabs can keep running and producing
| profitable chips.
| 201984 wrote:
| Which Apple product is this? Memory dies and logic dies
| require entirely different factories to make, so I doubt this
| SoC exists.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| They're probably immune for a while because they're probably
| using a long term contract, but when it comes time to renew
| they'll have to offer close to market price to convince the
| manufacturers not to use that fab space for more profitable
| memory.
| amiga-workbench wrote:
| Perhaps on the same package (stacked) but absolutely not on
| the same die.
| hoherd wrote:
| I also had that misunderstanding, so after seeing this
| comment I looking up info. In this article you can see the
| xray of the m1 chip composited onto the photo of the chip,
| which has external memory components. You can also see in the
| architecture diagram that the memory is attached from outside
| the area where the Fabric, CPU, GPU, NPU, cache, and some
| other unlabeled things are located.
| https://www.macrumors.com/guide/m1/
|
| And in this article you can see a photo of the memory chips
| attached outside of the Apple component
| https://www.gizmochina.com/2020/11/19/apple-mac-mini-
| teardow...
| Aurornis wrote:
| It's way too early to assume these prices are permanent. It's a
| supply crunch meeting a demand spike. The market will find
| equilibrium.
|
| Big manufacturers also order their DRAM in advance with
| contractually negotiated pricing. They're not paying these spot
| market prices for every computer they ship.
| Yokolos wrote:
| I bought 32GB of DDR5 SODIMM last year for 108EUR on Amazon. The
| exact same product that I bought back then is now 232EUR on
| Amazon. I don't like this ride.
| HacklesRaised wrote:
| AI is a net negative fnyor anyone not in on the grift.
| pmdr wrote:
| Hang in there, abundance is on its way! /s
| theginger wrote:
| When did a PS5 become a unit of cost? For reference seems to be
| about 0.002 London buses
| Yokolos wrote:
| Give it a month or two and it might be cheaper to get the bus.
| jkingsman wrote:
| 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.
| AuthAuth wrote:
| It still is a rule of thumb, you dont need DDR5 for a gaming
| computer let alone 64gb. A low end am4 cpu + 16gb of DD4 3600
| and a decent gpu will beat a ps5 in performance and cost. I
| dont understand why the headline made this strange
| comparison.
| Krutonium wrote:
| To be fair, if this keeps up, expect the price of a PS5 to
| skyrocket too.
| Hamuko wrote:
| Hopefully Sony has long-term contracts for their
| components. I presume they have an idea of how many PS5s
| they're going to be making still.
| keyringlight wrote:
| 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.
| bhelkey wrote:
| > I think it's intended as a comparison of cost when building
| a gaming-capable computer vs. a console of somewhat
| equivalent power.
|
| The PS5 has 16GB of RAM. One can buy 16GB of RAM for ~$100
| [1].
|
| [1] https://pcpartpicker.com/product/9fgFf7/kingston-fury-
| beast-...
| silisili wrote:
| Seems like an American thing. We measure distances in football
| fields and volumes in olympic pools, seems we now measure money
| in PS5s. It tracks...
| whalesalad wrote:
| The tech equivalent to the Big Mac index?
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Mac_Index
| zorked wrote:
| It's a more stable unit than US dollars.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > When did a PS5 become a unit of cost? For reference seems to
| be about 0.002 London buses
|
| Gaming consoles are something people buy. Any parent or gamer
| has an idea what they cost.
|
| People do not buy London Buses themself
| hn92726819 wrote:
| Approximately the instant when a single component (RAM) of a
| comparable product (Gaming PC) became more expensive than the
| entirety of said product.
|
| I wonder what you'd think if bus tires exploded in price and
| started costing .25 London busses per tire.
| DrammBA wrote:
| It think it's intentionally obtuse while being tangentionally
| related simply to generate engagement
| timschmidt wrote:
| 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-term contracts with the
| memory manufacturers which give them the confidence to invest in
| new fabs and increased capacity. That would be great for
| everyone. Additionally, we're likely to see Chinese fab'd DRAM
| now, which they've been attempting since the '70s but never been
| competitive at. With these margins, any new manufacturer could
| gain a foothold.
|
| If LLMs' utility continues to scale with size (which seems likely
| as we begin training embodied AI on a massive influx of robotic
| sensor data) then it will continue to gobble up memory for the
| near future. We may need both increased production capacity _and_
| a period of more efficient software development techniques as was
| the case when a new 512kb upgrade cost $1,000.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| 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
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > 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.
| bradfa wrote:
| Because manufacturers transitioned fab and assembly lines
| from low margin dram to higher margin products like hbm,
| hence reducing dram supply. But the demand for consumer
| grade dram hasn't changed much so prices for it go up.
| dboreham wrote:
| Same chips in both, made in the same fabs. Any relative
| price difference is like the difference between regular and
| premium gas/petrol.
| dylan604 wrote:
| wait, are you saying that there's no difference between
| regular and premium gas?
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| no, but made in same place with mostly same ingredients,
| just different ratio to hit higher octane (and in some
| cases some extra additives).
|
| Also vary a bit between winter a summer, basically in
| winter they can get away with putting a bit more volatile
| compounds coz it's colder
| wmf wrote:
| UDIMM and RDIMM use the same DRAM chips. And my
| understanding is that the fabs can switch between DDR5,
| LPDDR5, and maybe HBM as needed. This means high demand for
| one type can create a shortage of the others.
| Aurornis wrote:
| 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.
| consp wrote:
| > Even ECC modules use regular memory chips, but with
| extra chips added for the ECC capacity.
|
| Quite a few unbuffered designs in the past had a "missing
| chip". If you ever wondered why a chip was missing on
| your stick, it's missing ECC. Don't know if it's still
| the case with DDR5 though.
| buildbot wrote:
| I have not seen that yet DDR5, I think the signal
| integrity requirements are too high now to even have
| unused pads open. Most sticks don't appear to have many
| traces at all on the top/bottom sides, just big
| power/ground planes.
|
| Also with DDR5 each stick is actually 2 channels so you
| get 2 extra dies.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| The chips come from same factory. And difference betweeen
| those two is... a buffer chip. And extra ram die for ECC
| SirFatty wrote:
| "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
| timschmidt wrote:
| 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.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Looking forward to the "Organization of Processor-Etching
| Corporations".
| venturecruelty wrote:
| It's not just predictable, it's illegal. Of course, if you
| have an executive that actually cares about enforcing the
| law.
| testing22321 wrote:
| You mean "capitalists".
|
| Maximizing profit is the only sane way to play a rigged game
| caycep wrote:
| It's a sad trend for "the rest of us" and history in general.
| The economic boom of the 80's thru the 2010s has been a vast
| democratization of computation - hardware became more powerful
| and affordable, and algorithms (at least broadly if not
| individually) became more efficient. We all had supercomputers
| in our pockets. This AI movement seems to move things in the
| opposite direction, in that us plebeians have less and less
| access to RAM, computing power and food and...uh...GPUs to play
| Cyberpunk; and are dependent on Altermanic aristocracy to
| dribble compute onto us at their leisure and for a hefty tithe.
|
| I am hoping some of that Clayton Christensen disruption the
| tech theocracy keep preaching about comes along with some O(N)
| decrease in transformer/cDNN complexity that disrupts the
| massive server farms required for this AI boom/bubble thing.
| timschmidt wrote:
| One can see it that way, granted. When I zoom all the way
| out, all of consumer computation has existed as sort of an
| addendum or ancillary organ to the big customers: government,
| large corporations, etc. All our beloved consumer tech
| started out as absurdly high priced niche stuff for them.
| We've been sold the overflow capacity and binned parts. And
| that seems to be a more-or-less natural consequence of large
| purchasers signing large checks and entering predictable
| contracts. Individual consumers are very price sensitive and
| fickle by comparison. From that perspective, anything that
| increases overall capacity should also increase the supply of
| binned parts and overflow. Which will eventually benefit
| consumers. Though the intervening market adjustment period
| may be painful (as we are seeing). Consumers have also
| benefited greatly from the shrinking of component sizes, as
| this has had the effect of increasing production capacity
| with fixed wafer volume.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Gaming drove the development of GPUs which led to the
| current AI boom. Smartphones drove small process nodes for
| power efficiency.
| timschmidt wrote:
| SGI and 3Dfx made high-end simulators for aerospace in
| the beginning. Gaming grew out of that. Even Intel's
| first GPU (the i740) came from GE Aerospace.
| whizzter wrote:
| Flight simulators just had more cash for more advanced
| chips, but arcade games like the Sega Model 1 (Virtua
| Racing) was via Virtua Fighter an inspiration for the
| Playstation, and before that there was crude games on
| both PC and Amiga.
|
| Games were always going to go 3d sooner or later, the
| real pressure of the high volume competitive market got
| us more and more capable chips until they were capable
| enough for the kind of computation needed for neural
| networks faster than a slow moving specialty market could
| have.
| timschmidt wrote:
| > Flight simulators just had more cash for more advanced
| chips
|
| Yes. That is my point. The customers willing to pay the
| high initial R+D costs opened up the potential for wider
| adoption. This is always the case.
|
| Even the gaming GPUs which have grown in popularity with
| consumers are derivatives of larger designs intended for
| research clusters, datacenters, aerospace, and military
| applications.
|
| No question that chip companies are happy to take
| consumers money. But I struggle to think of an example of
| a new technology which was invented and marketed to
| consumers first.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > When I zoom all the way out, all of consumer computation
| has existed as sort of an addendum or ancillary organ to
| the big customers: government, large corporations, etc.
|
| Perfectly stated. I think comments like the one above come
| from a mentality that the individual consumer should be the
| center of the computing universe and big purchasers should
| be forced to live with the leftovers.
|
| What's really happening is the big companies are doing R&D
| at incredible rates and we're getting huge benefits by
| drafting along as consumers. We wouldn't have incredible
| GPUs in our gaming systems and even cell phones if the
| primary market for these things was retail entertainment
| purchases that people make every 5 years.
| immibis wrote:
| It's not like you need 64GB to have "democratized
| computation". We used to have 64MB and that was plenty.
| Unfortunately, software got slower more quickly than hardware
| got quicker.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > Unfortunately, software got slower more quickly than
| hardware got quicker.
|
| Hard disagree. A $600 Mac Mini with 16GB of RAM runs
| everything insanely faster than even my $5000 company-
| purchased developer laptops from 10 years ago. And yes,
| even when I run Slack, Visual Studio Code, Spotify, and a
| gazillion Chrome tabs.
|
| The HN rhetoric about modern computing being slow is
| getting strangely disconnected from the real world. Cheap
| computers are super fast like they've never been before,
| even with modern software.
| vel0city wrote:
| > We used to have 64MB and that was plenty.
|
| Bullshit. It was cramped and I wasn't able to do half of
| what I was wanting to actually do. Maybe it was plenty _for
| your usecases_ , but such a small amount of memory was weak
| for my needs in the late 90s and 2000s. 64MB desktops
| struggled to handle the photo manipulations I wanted to do
| with scanned images. Trying to do something like edit video
| on a home PC was near impossible with that limited amount
| of memory. I was so happy when we managed to get a 512MB
| machine a few years later, it made a lot of my home
| multimedia work a _lot_ better.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > This AI movement seems to move things in the opposite
| direction, in that us plebeians have less and less access to
| RAM, computing power and food and...uh...GPUs to play
| Cyberpunk; and are dependent on Altermanic aristocracy to
| dribble compute onto us at their leisure and for a hefty
| tithe.
|
| Compute is cheaper than ever. The ceiling is just higher for
| what you can buy.
|
| Yes, we have $2000 GPUs now. You don't have to buy it. You
| probably shouldn't buy it. Most people would be more than
| fine with the $200-400 models, honestly. Yet the fact that
| you _could_ buy a $2000 GPU makes some people irrationally
| angry.
|
| This is like the guy I know who complains that pickup trucks
| are unfairly priced because a Ford F-150 has an MSRP of
| $80,000. It doesn't matter how many times you point out that
| the $80K price tag only applies to the luxury flagship model,
| he anchors his idea of how much a pickup truck costs to the
| highest number he can see.
|
| Computing is cheaper than ever. The power level is increasing
| rapidly, too. The massive AI investments and datacenter
| advancements are pulling hardware development forward at an
| incredible rate and we're winning across the board as
| consumers. You don't have to buy that top of the line GPU nor
| do you have to max out the RAM on your computer.
|
| Some times I think people with this mentality would be
| happier if the top of the line GPU models were never
| released. If nVidia stopped at their mid-range cards and
| didn't offer anything more, the complaints would go away even
| though we're not actually better off with fewer options.
| ed_elliott_asc wrote:
| The thing about being annoyed about the top of the range
| prices, for me, it irritates as it feels like it drags the
| lower models prices upwardsz
| j45 wrote:
| Manufacturing is based on anticipating demand.
|
| Unforseen things like the pandemic hurt profits.
|
| Letting things go this unmanaged with a 3 year run way for AI
| demand seems a little hard to understand. In this case, not
| anticipating demand seems to creates more profit.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > 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 commodities, the price you see on places like Newegg
| follows the "spot price", meaning the price to purchase DRAM
| for shipment immediately. The big players don't buy their RAM
| through these channels, they arrange contracts with
| manufacturers.
|
| The contracts with manufacturers will see higher prices in the
| future, but they're playing the long game and will try to delay
| or smooth out purchasing to minimize exposure to this spike.
|
| > Additionally, we're likely to see Chinese fab'd DRAM now,
| which they've been attempting since the '70s but never been
| competitive at.
|
| Companies like Samsung and SK Hynix have DRAM fabs in China
| already. This has been true for decades. You may have Chinese
| fab'd DRAM in the computer you're using right now.
|
| Are you referring to complete home-grown DRAM designs? That,
| too, was already in the works.
| timschmidt wrote:
| > 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.
| venturecruelty wrote:
| I guess we'll just have to stop making computer memory if it
| ceases to be profitable. The market is so efficient.
| az226 wrote:
| https://videocardz.com/newz/chinese-cxmt-to-produce-ddr5-800...
| librasteve wrote:
| I used to sell 64kbit (yes, bit) DRAM at $7 in 1982. 1 year later
| was <$0.50.
|
| 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.
| dboreham wrote:
| Old enough here to remember Intel exiting the DRAM business.
| timschmidt wrote:
| Same! And then they made new eDRAM for a hot minute as part
| of Crystal Well. It'd be fun to see them get back into the
| game in a serious way, but their on-again-off-again attitude
| toward dGPUs does not give me confidence in their ability to
| execute on such long-term plans.
| kabdib wrote:
| Old enough here to remember Intel entering the DRAM business
| :-)
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| 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.
| huseyinkeles wrote:
| A great example for the pork cycle.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pork_cycle
| debo_ wrote:
| The oft-snickered-at "smuggling 3mb of hot RAM" line from
| Neuromancer may have been prophetic after all.
| retrac wrote:
| 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 machine. But
| supercomputers now have memories measured in petabytes.
|
| They never used "bits" again in any Star Trek script. It was
| kiloquads and gigaquads from then on.
| teach wrote:
| 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!
| dboreham wrote:
| Quick reminder that DRAM futures have existed since the 1980s so
| you all could have protected your price with calls.
| venturecruelty wrote:
| Call me old-fashioned, but I shouldn't have to have a stock
| broker to buy a computer. Maybe we could re-organize society to
| be a bit less ridiculous. "Quick reminder that you could've
| been born rich instead of a povvo."
| merelysounds wrote:
| 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
| nehal3m wrote:
| I picked up a PS5 today on a Black Friday deal for 350EUR. 32GB
| DDR5 is at around 280EUR at the moment.
|
| I have a gaming PC, it runs Linux because (speaking as a
| Microsoft sysadmin with 10 years under my belt) I hate what
| Windows has become, but on commodity hardware it's not quite
| there for me. Thought I'd play the PlayStation backlog while I
| wait for the Steam Machine.
| tapoxi wrote:
| Don't forget to play Astro's Playroom, it comes with the system
| and it's a blast.
| pmdr wrote:
| So, like, we were already pretty much priced out of higher-end
| graphic cards, and now it's happening to RAM. All this while jobs
| are disappearing, layoffs are ongoing and CEOs are touting AI's
| 'capabilities' left and right.
|
| Next is probably CPUs, even if AIs don't use them that much,
| manufactures will shift production to something more profitable,
| then gouge prices so that only enterprises will pay for them.
|
| What's next? Electricity?
|
| Where the f*k is all the abundance that AI was supposed to bring
| into the world? /rant
| tapoxi wrote:
| Electricity prices are already skyrocketing, it's present - not
| next.
| imglorp wrote:
| Yes electricity by more short-sighted, dirty methods
| (remember when crypto clowns bought an old fossil plant just
| for coin mining?) but more alarming, fresh water.
|
| That can be a bigger problem for civilization.
| amarcheschi wrote:
| The abundance is there, it just isn't for you or other working
| class people
| smallmancontrov wrote:
| In the share prices. Hope you're rich, because that's the only
| thing the economy cares about.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Actually, this seems to be mostly a spike in retail prices, not
| wholesale DRAM contracts that are only up 60% or so in the past
| few months according to Samsung. So we should most likely place
| at least some fraction of the blame on our fellow consumers for
| overreacting to the news and hoarding RAM at overinflated
| prices. DRAM sticks are the new toilet paper.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| "only" ? Nobody is hoarding RAM (at least yet, consumers seem
| mostly blindsided by it), this is directly caused by industry
| thirst for AI
| georgefrowny wrote:
| Maybe that is the answer to how things are supposed to work if
| AI replaces everyone and no one can afford to buy their stuff.
|
| Things being too cheap allows money to pool at the bottom in
| little people's hands in the forms of things like "their homes"
| and "their computers" and "their cars".
|
| You don't really want billions in computing hardware (say)
| being stashed down there in inefficient, illiquid physical
| form, you want it in a datacentre where it can be leveraged,
| traded, used as security, etc. If it has to be physically held
| down there, ideally it should be expensive, leased and have a
| short lifespan. The higher echelons seem apparently to think
| they can drive economic activity by cycling money at a higher
| level amongst themselves rather than looping in actual people.
|
| This exact price jump seems largely like a shock rather then a
| slow squeeze, but I think seeing some kind of reversal of the
| unique 20th century "life gets better/cheaper/easier every
| generation".
| EliteGadget wrote:
| Ram is a commodity they have spikes in demand/shortage of
| supply which drive the price up like this.
|
| I remember when there was a flood somewhere in Thailand in the
| 2011 and the prices of hardisks went up through the roof.
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/tomcoughlin/2011/10/17/thailand...
| lysace wrote:
| I'm waiting for the Apple TV 4k 4th gen. I think it might might
| be one or two more years, on top of the now three years from 3rd
| gen (2022).
|
| AI/LLM companies will pay TSMC more than Apple is willing to
| further subsidize this neat little box.
| ck2 wrote:
| for anyone looking for a deal, thank me later, buy asap
| ebay .com /itm/ 256168320806
|
| (no association, just trying to help, I am still using DDR4)
| gnarlouse wrote:
| "2026: Cost of manufacturing PC cases increases 60% due to
| increased demand from Optimus production line" or some other dumb
| shit
| luxuryballs wrote:
| but can 64GB of DDR5 memory run Crysis? ...I'll see myself out
| compumike wrote:
| Lots of people are speculating that the price spike is AI
| related. But it might be more mundane:
|
| I'd bet that a good chunk of the apparently sudden demand spike
| could be last month's Microsoft Windows 10 end-of-support finally
| happening, pushing companies and individuals to replace many
| years worth of older laptops and desktops all at once.
| mikepavone wrote:
| Wow, I only paid $265 for 96GB of DDR5 back in April. Same brand
| (G.SKILL) as the kit in the article too.
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