RAM is so expensive that stores are selling it at market prices
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.
https://www.pcworld.com/article/2984629/ram-is-so-expensive-that-stores-are-selling-it-at-market-prices.htmlOpen linkView original on lemmy.nz725
Comments224
I swear there's a new gold rush every time I want to upgrade my pc.
It wouldn't be quite so bad if the previous gold rush ended first, but they seem to just be stacking up.
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.
Until the next crisis...
I thought they weren’t using gaming gpus this time though?
Gaming GPUs during normal crypto markets don't compute fast enough to mine crypto profitably, but if crypto prices get high enough such as during a boom cycle, it can become profitable to mine on gaming GPUs
Edit to add: For crypto there's basically a set speed that any given GPU mines at. The hash rate specifically. It really doesn't change noticably over time through software updates, nor does the power consumption of the GPU. Its basically a set cost per cryptocurrency mined with any given hardware. If the value earned by mining can exceed the cost to run the GPU then GPU mining can quickly start making sense again.
Yeah, even less so with gen AI though I think.
Machine learning models have much different needs that crypto. Both run well on gaming GPUs and both run even better on much higher end GPUs, but ultimately machine learning models really really need fast memory because it loads the entire weights into graphics memory for processing. There's some tools which will push it to system memory but these models are latency sensitive so crossing the CPU bus to pass 10s of gigabytes of data between the GPU and system memory is too much latency.
Machine learning also has the aspect of training vs inference, where the training portion will take a long time, will take less time with more/faster compute and you simply can't do anything with the model while it's training, meanwhile inference is still compute heavy it doesn't require anywhere near as much as the training phase. So organizations will typically rent as much hardware as possible for the training phase to try to get the model running as quickly as possible so they can move on to making money as quickly as possible.
In terms of GPU availability this means they're going to target high end GPUs, such as packing AI developer stations full of 4090s and whatever the heck Nvidia replaced the Tesla series with. Some of the new SOCs which have shared system/vram such as AMD's and Apple's new SOCs also fill a niche for AI developer and AI enthusiasts too since that enables large amounts of high speed video memory for relatively low cost. Realistically the biggest impact that AI is having on the Gaming GPU space is it's changing the calculation that AMD, Nvidia and Intel are making when planning out their SKUs, so they're likely being stingy on GPU memory specs for lower end GPUs to try to push anyone with specific AI models they're looking to run to much more expensive GPUs
This AI bubble needs to explode yesterday, Wall Street be damned.
There was a nice window from about a year or two ago to about 3 months ago where no individual components were noticably inflated. Monitors took the longest to recover since the pandemic shortages so that was arguably around the beginning of this year that they seemed to fully normalize
Its funny because at work we've been pushing hard on Windows 11 refreshes all year and warning that there will likely be a rush of folks refreshing at the last possible minute at the end of the year inflating prices. And we ended up being correct on the inflated prices part but it was actually the AI bubble that did it
That's the tariffs, now. GPUs had come down a bit before the dumbass
This is why I'm still running ddr4. Every time I think about upgrading a generation, there's a run on some integral component.
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.
The good thing about new AM4 boards being available at this point in time is you have options to keep older hardware running. Usually the CPU and memory will out-survive motherboard. Much like those new Chinese motherboards supporting 4th and 6th gen Intel CPUs, this is great for longevity and reduces how much production is needed
I'd argue that it would be best if computers were more like cars, a new platform gets released each decade or so, and small improvements are made to individual parts but the parts are largely interchangable within the platform and produced for a decade or two before production is retired. More interchangable parts, slower release cycle and more opportunities for repair instead of replacement
DDR4 is expensive as shit too now. I was trying to build out a new rack for my homelab and 256GB of ram went from like $300 6 months ago to $1500.
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.
Did I tell you about using arch?
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.
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. 🫡
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.
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
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.
Same. Got 3080 for $1,500 usd in late 2020
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.
brAIn power.
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.
Lol pricing computer parts like they do fish in an expensive restaurant.
What a time to be alive.
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!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II
Few people actually need a full 48KB of RAM, but if you have an extra $6k lying around, it can be awfully nice.
Yeah the "shopping around" aspect isn't even close these days. I remember ~25 years ago using price aggregator sites to pick up individual PC parts from all different websites.
Today the situation is flipped. It isn't difficult to find a really good price. If you buy all your parts from the same retailer, you'll be way closer to the minmaxed optimal price than in the past.
The problem is that right now the "good" prices are crazy.
EDIT: Snapper RAM for the man!
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.
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
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ddr4-prices-continue-surge-reportedly-122337204.html?fr=sycsrp_catchall
But still ouch :)
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!
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.
I mean since it's driven by demand from companies running AI models it's mostly impacting higher speed modules with lower speed/capacity kits being less significantly impacted. Granted that's also pushing demand up for those lower speed kits since for gamers quantity matters far more than speed, meanwhile AI really cares about speed most
I am going by mainly 2 points:
Here's some that's significantly cheaper than the graph would suggest: https://www.amazon.com/G-SKILL-Trident-64GB-SDRAM-Memory/dp/B0BSB94VC2
Not that it's a good price in general or anything, but if you absolutely must buy now...
Well that didnt last long at all!
For real. I've been building a completely brand new computer for my husband for a couple months now. Buying a new piece each paycheck, then I get paid this week and I discover I can't buy the RAM... It's fucking half way finished and the only 2 parts left to buy is GPU and RAM.
Unfortunately those are the most expensive parts right now because they both require memory chips. Perhaps consider buying used, might be tough to find DDR5 DIMMs but used GPUs are plentiful.
I'm definitely looking for used parts, especially in my local classifieds. I'm going to jump on the first affordable set of ddr5 ram I can find lol
It's sweet how much effort you're putting into it. When I was a kid I built my first computer one piece at a time with money I saved from mowing lawns, there's something so satisfying about earning a computer through dozens of shrewd bargains and months of dedicated labor. It's all worth it in the end, you've got this!
You may have to settle on DDR4 for now
LOL I wish. It's not compatible though, ty
Ffs I keep delaying a rebuild of my PC because of crap like this every year thinking the bubble will burst, but something new comes up. I don't use it for gaming nowadays, just regular browsing since I have a console but even Sony is bringing their stuff to PC so I was looking to upgrade. Now it's been pushed even more.
Hang in there my 8 GB ram PC with GTX 960...
so i switched myself and my parents to arch linux over the past 3-4 months and I can say definitively that those specs are fine for CachyOS (an Arch Linux distro). My mom is using my hand-me-down 970 with its lovely "we charged you for 4gb of vram but actually only 3.5 of it is fast haha sucker" and it runs great paired to an old i7 6700k.
If you have 8gb ddr4 you can probably get a decent deal on a used 8gig stick. Even that would be quite aboost.
I just received all the parts for the high end gaming PC I'm building for my son for xmas. And I'll have some uses for it too.
I didn't really feel like I could delay it arbitrarily because teaching him real computer stuff (including games because I'm a fun dad) matters a lot more to me than however many hundreds of dollars I might have eventually saved.
And man it HURT. The RAM isn't anywhere near the most expensive part, but it somehow stings the most. I like to err on the high side with memory and have never regretted it. But, this 2025 build is going to have the same 32GB memory size as my 2018 build did, and the prices for the kits was very similar for both purchases.
I'm tempted to splurge and swap for a 64GB kit before I start building, but it might be cheaper and easier to just wait a year. Or honestly never. The added memory would probably only help with my video editing, and that's not a big part of my computer usage.
If you got good internet you could look into GeForce Now as a stopgap / headstart.
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 the RAM manufacturers were found to be guilty of colluding/price-fixing in that case (maybe this case too).
Altman secretly secured 40 % of the world's DRAM manufacturing capacity last month. Supposedly Samsung and HK Hynix weren't aware they were both signing up for it.
That alone would be enough to call collusion if it wasn't an obvious play to strangle his competition by literally choking them out of hardware.
https://www.mooreslawisdead.com/post/sam-altman-s-dirty-dram-deal
OpenAI just bought the raw wafers? WTF.
But now the surveillance capabilities of both the state and large corporations have been ramped up to infinity and beyond. I'm expecting a partnership announcement between Micron and Raytheon any day now, where Raytheon gets free DDR5 and Micron gets armed and autonomous security drones.
Kind of \s, kind of not
As someone buying load of secondhand tech, you don't need the latest and greatest
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.
A friend of mine lives in Egypt and that would be a steal
Is it difficult to buy stuff trom Europe in Egypt?
Checking leboncoin (french place where people sell & buy stuff) there are lots of em for 20€ +p&p
But there are also these kinds, for 10€, I almost want to make a RAID6 with a bunch just to see
He said that receiving is the issue. So even if you buy it cheaply here, he might have to pay a huge sum in taxes
Ah yeah gotcha. Like stuff from england, 7€ tax + 16€ "tax handling fee"...
well damn that's a steal. I'd buy it.
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
16GB is fine for most games, 32GB is handy if you run a lot of poorly optimized mods, but also memory compression helps with that significantly. 8gb of memory gets pretty cozy for gaming these days though, but again memory compression makes a big difference.
Both my and my wife's computers have 32GB of RAM because it was cheap enough to not be worth worrying about, but if RAM is expensive you don't need a ton of it to enjoy your games
Yeah, this is my point and experience too. 32 is better, I'd say 16 min. But people crying about needing 128 should rethink their priorities for gaming, were in a recession lol. Save your money.
Are people throwing 128GB in for shits and giggles these days? I'm kinda out of the loop and still used to people arguing about if 32GB is excessive or not. Used to be only needed for media production and honestly it's still debatable for pure gaming systems if more than 16GB is overkill
It's not that it's excessive, that's a lot of money to spend right now with the way things are.
My husband and I have been using computers we built 15 years ago and we decided this year we'll finally build new computers... Lmao sucks to be us :( already built mine, his is almost done but missing a key component... RAM lmaooooo
Just get the least necessary and hope that prices will drop :(
This is crazy, not displaying the price of an item in a shelf or display is against consumer laws where I live. And if the price on display is not updated the store is required to sell by the price on display.
It's blatant price-gouging. Any stock in the store has already been sold to them at an agreed price. They can set a number and make their set margin.
Updating prices after each delivery might make sense (if their procurement department is absolute dogshit at negotiating contracts), but updating prices throughout the day is just someone trying to see how hard they can push their margins to drain every cent out of their customers.
That's probably one of those toothless laws that can be easily bypassed on a technicality. Like, just say the shelf is for "storage" and not "display".
Some places try to argue something like that, but if you push back a little they cave. The law estipulates a fine ranging from 74 to 1 000 000 USD for visible products in shelves or display without a visible price tag. And since its a fine, the government is eager to get his piece of the pie.
(Edit for misspelling)
What's stopping them from throwing a blanket over the shelf and just posting the same notice on the blanket? That's what I mean by toothless law.
So with things like fish that can change day to day are they required to just update it every day? that sounds nice.
@kieron115
Yes, otherwise how would buyers know the price?
@kurodriel
At restaurants here you would ask the host/waiter the market price before deciding to order.
That's a little different.
But it’s what the article is comparing to when they say “market prices”. This particular store is based out of California.
That's insane. I literally just got that same kit of memory free in a NewEgg bundle just 2 months ago! And the 32GB kits I was looking at were all priced at around $75-125 for 32GB
Are you okay?
Edit: Mean comment. Don't let assholes like me stop you from enjoying your life. I've definitely spent sums of money on my hobbies and enjoyed every minute of it
Are you legitimately insane?
Yikes you're literally financing your hobby! Better financial move is to get a used system to start with (usually a used gaming PC can be had for like $500ish, and I'm sure there's plenty of people online you can ask for help speccing something out), squirrel away money for a couple of years (I like to keep a dedicated savings account just for big purchases like tech upgrades. $40 biweekly dissearing into another account you don't touch is $2k every 2 years, so a 4 year complete refresh cycle for 2 people) and buy when you feel like it. Good news is it's a small enough amount of cash to easily right the financial ship but still yikes!
Hey it's never too late to get things better under control! My parents only just started that journey and they're old enough to be grandparents
Love Keepa!
Isn't this the new first party price chart Amazon is testing out?
That's crap. They've loaded their stock on a certain price and they want to surf the high wave while they can.
Almost all retailers inventory on consignment. So, no.
No they don't. They purchase at a fixed rate.
They also need to be able to replenish that stock at current prices. I've worked retail many times in my life and arguably kinda-sorta do so now (albeit largely over the Internet) and I've never run any store where we did not set our pricing by replacement cost rather than original invoice cost. In my current operation there are some rare exceptions for clearance items and the like, but for the vast majority of products we sell for what it's going to cost me to get the next one to put back on that shelf, not what it cost me for the one I'm selling you now.
I don't have any insider insight into other companies' operations, but I imagine a lot of other retailers work things the same way. Especially these days.
I think what we're seeing is the result of their stock depleting actually. AI has been buying up supply for a while, and I don't think the consumer markets are able to compete.
That's Free Markets, baby!
Someone should tell them about those e-paper price tags...
How else they gonna bait you to buy?
Huh?
For not using e-paper.
Im still running off DDR3
and feelin fine
This bubble cannot burst soon enough
It can't pop if the US Treasury just keeps dumping tens of billions of dollars into it as a backstop.
The Infrastructure Reinvestment Act kicked this mess off, but it didn't pad the wallets of the right people to the right degree. So now Trump is just cutting idiots and assholes across the VC Tech Sector ten-digit checks to keep doing what they're doing.
We're increasingly operated as a Planned Economy that exists to turn natural resources into AI slop, because this is what the federal government's leadership believes they need to maintain the illusion of control over the public.
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.
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
https://www.allaboutai.com/resources/ai-statistics/ai-bias/
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/ai-factual-errors-chatgpt-gemini-copilot-b2867620.html
AI is an technology, and like any technology, it improves. The AI we had two years ago was something akin to the Orville flier, the ones we have now are equivalent of a biplane. Those examples of technology weren't very useful, but the planes that followed were far more capable and economical.
Your assertions that AI is useless, is merely burying your head in the sand and hoping things will go alright. The outright refusal of AI by people like you, only ensures the most evil people can use it. This is like only allowing Nazis to own guns, peasants not being allowed to own land, or newspapers to only be owned by the wealthiest.
It is power that you are giving up, and power doesn't care about who has it.
Hallucinations are an intrinsic part of how LLMs work. OpenAI, literally the people with the most to lose if LLMs aren't useful, has admitted that hallucinations are a mathematical inevitability, not something that can be engineered around. On top of that, its been shown that for things like mathematical proof finding switching to more sophisticated models doesn't make them more accurate, it just makes their arguments more convincing.
Now, you might say "oh but you can have a human in the loop to check the AIs work", but for programming tasks its already been found that using LLMs makes programmers less productive. If a human needs to go over everything an AI generates, and reason about it anyway, that's not really saving time or effort. Now consider that as you make the LLM more complex, having it generate longer and more complicated blocks of text, its errors also become harder to detect. Is that not just shuffling around the necessary human brainpower for a task instead of reducing it?
So, in what field is this sort of thing useful? At one point I was hopeful that LLMs could be used in text summarization, but if I have to read the original text anyway to make sure that I haven't been fed some highly convincing falsehood then what is the point?
Currently I'm of the opinion that we might be able to use specialized LLMs as a heuristic to narrow the search tree for things like SAT solvers and answer set generators, but I don't have much optimism for other use cases.
This assumes machine learning models are able to get better than they currently are. Newer models have been plateauing in quality of outputs (improvements have been noticable in video and image generation, but even that is slowing down)
I don't think we're going to see machine learning models that perform well enough to create printing press level change to the world
I have a similar perspective. I built my own in-home AI server because I assumed if the technology had any staying power, I better learn how it works to some degree and see if I can run it myself.
It’s not a fucking lobster. Base pricing per unit based on whatever profit margin you need on that item.
Nope, let’s get as much as we can at all times, like it’s silver bullion.
No, they have to base the price on what it costs to order the next shipment, unless they want to just stop carrying ram or you expect them to take on a loan for that. The wholesale market for ram must be fucking wild for a retail store to think they have to post something like that.
Well if you know of a better way to generate pictures of comically obese bearded men gayly dancing, I'd love to hear it.
DMing you my patron
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.
Even in 2025, emerging industries are like "what's an environment?"
Can't blame this on not knowing. It's all just negligence and evil now.
You don't hate AI slop enough...
I was told I was probably overdoing it putting 96GB in my PC a year or two ago. Be that true, but if this pricing doesn't ease up by the time it becomes a server, my ZFS cache will love it!
The 64GB kit I purchased Aug 2024 for $195 is now listing for $540
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.
They said "market price".... What market are you shopping at?!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5KXrQYWbbIs
https://youtube.com/shorts/UC3gEXZJKMM
Bitch, are you surge pricing ram? Cuz it looks like you're surge pricing ram....
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)
I paid $160 US for 2x32GB DDR4 3200 ECC almost exactly a year ago, when I built my TrueNAS server. I told myself I'd grab another pair down the road to fill out the last two slots in my board. Now I can't find the same pack anywhere for less than $350. Upgrades are indefinitely postponed, to say the least.
Speaking as someone with 128gb DDR4 3600 RAM and uses mid-size AI like GLM Air, it is too slow to have much fun with. I suspect that a lot of hobbyists will adopt and discard DDR4 in short order, so you can probably get a good deal if you buy used.
Sadly I am not in a location where people just discard useful parts.
If I were to try buying 2nd hand here, I would most probably end up with stuff that has some or the other kind of of damage.
For instance, in one of the companies I worked at, their policy for getting rid of stuff was:
And the auctions occurred years later after much red tape...
Mostly bought by other companies, who get to do more red-tape stuff to buy it.
While on one hand, this is a good thing, reducing wastage, it also means that I have no way to get 2nd hand stuff for hobbyist usage.
In case we do get 2nd hand stuff, it is usually through a 2nd hand dealer, who then ends up with a higher asking price than what it's worth.
Also, I am not expecting there to be any AI enthusiast nearby me.
I wonder how long ill be staying on my AM4 motherboard... those updated CPUs for gaming that AMD came out with might be my only option for a long time.
Nothing will meaningfully improve until the rich fear for their lives
I swear I bought some RAM just at the start of October for reasonable prices. Did it change so quickly?
Short answer: yes.
Long answer: yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeesssssssssssssss.
hmm I got 2 8bg ddr4 sticks, anyone wanna make an offer?
$3.50
Dammit monster! Get off my lawn! I ain't giving you no tree-fitty!
I gave him a dollar so he'd go away.
Huh, you got 2 sticks of RAM? That's some next level gaming rig you got there. What do they cost ya?
What market are you shopping at?!
(I know it's not the point, but a reminder that data center climate impact, including heat, is nowhere near flight, agricultural waste, or construction. Hate it for its own reasons, not for fake ones.)
Hi I can explain the difference. The three other things you listed are necessary for a multitude of reasons. The current boom in data centers is for a solution in search of a problem wasting shit for no gain to humanity as a whole.
Hope that helps :3
Also the scariest part of this datacenter inflation is how much of these new data centers are going to be abandoned within the next 5 years when the AI bubble pops and suddenly the companies spending like crazy on datacenter growth need to cut back. There'll be lots of big empty buildings outside of small towns costing taxpayers a ton of money, much like when any big box store closes up shop. You can either spend a ton of money tearing it down, a ton of money rebuilding it into something useful, a ton of money attracting another business which may or may not front the cost for remodeling the space or a ton of money maintaining the empty property so it doesn't fall over and become even more of a blight. There's no winning for these small municipalities that just get used and abused by large businesses
? Massive GPU server racks are relatively easy to repurpose for several things. The most likely (if sad) is crypto mining, but there's also expensive weather simulations, cloud gaming, video hosting, etc.
Requesting a source that these centers are hard to repurpose. I find myself pretty skeptical. Computers are generally multipurpose and easy to swap tasks on.
Is there enough demand for thousands of servers with purpose built ARM processors (which may or may not have any publicly available kernel support) driving 4-8 600w a pop Nvidia datacenter chips though? Yes some will be repurposed but there simply won't be the demand to fill immediately. Realistically what will happen is companies operating these datacenters will liquidate the racks, probably liquidate some of the datacenters entirely and thousands of servers will hit the secondhand market for next to nothing. While some datacenter structure city empty and unmaintained until they're either bought up to be repurposed, bought up to be refurbished and brought back into datacenter use of torn down, just like an empty Super Walmart location
Some of the datacenters will be reworked for general compute, maybe a couple will maintain some AI capacity, but given the sheer quantity of compute being stood up for the AI bubble and the sheer scale of the bubble, basically every major tech company is likely to shrink significantly when the bubble pops, since we're talking companies that currently have market caps measured in trillions, and literally a make up full quarter of the entire value of the New York Stock Exchange, it's going to be a bloodbath.
Remember how small the AI field was 6 years ago? It was purely the domain of academic research, fighting for scraps outside of a handful of companies big enough to invest in am AI engineer or two on the off chance they could make something useful for them. We're probably looking at a correction back down to nearly that scale. People who have drank the coolaid will wake up one day and realize how shit the output of generative AI is compared to the average professional's human work
Thank you for fleshing out your world model and theory. I think that this model falls short of a source (and contradict some other AI-pessimistic economics predictions; namely a crash in computing cost and in crypto), but could be developed into something I'd find compelling.
Let me brainstorm aloud about what I think this world model predicts that we might have data on...
Did we see a crash in ISP prices, home and industry internet use, domain hosting, or other computing services in the dotcom bubble? That situation seems extremely analagous; but my vibe was that several of these did not drop (ISP price I suspect was stable), and some of these saw a dip but stayed well above early-internet rates (domain hosting)? I feel like there'd be a good analogy here, but I'm struggling with a way to operationalize.
I mentioned a use for compute that your reply didn't cover: crypto mining. Do we have evidence that the floor on crypto is well below datacenter operating costs (across exploitative coins as well)? I vaguely remember a headline in this direction. Another use case I don't see drying up: cheating on essay assignments.
More broadly, this model predicts that all compute avenues are much lower payoff than datacenter operating costs. I think I'd need to see this checked against an exhaustive HPC application list. I know that weather forecasting uses up about as much compute as AI for some supercomputing clusters.
Governments have already issued rather large grants to AI-driven academic projects. I suspect many of these are orders of magnitude larger than the size of academic AI 6 years ago. (I'll also quickly note that libraries are better than google search has ever been for finding true facts; yet google search has remained above library use throughout its existence.)
Honestly the questions you're posing require a level of market analysis that could fill an entire white paper and be sold for way more money than I want to think about. Its a level of market analysis I don't want to dive into. My gut instinct from having worked in the tech industry, working with datacenters and datacenter hardware at large companies is that the AI industry will contract significantly when the bubble pops. I'm sure I could find real data to support this prediction but the level of analysis that would require and the hours of work are simply more than it's worth for an internet comment.
You have factors including what hardware is being deployed to meet AI bubble demand, how the networking might be setup differently for AI compared to general GPU compute, who is deploying what hardware, what the baseline demand for GPU compute is if you simulate no present AI bubble, etc. etc. it's super neat data analysis but I ain't got the time nor appetite for that right now
@Trainguyrom @scintilla I realy dont understund the AI doom theory.. Theres alot of shitty projects going nowhere? Sure. Theres a buble? Likely. But AI have value and is not going anywhere
Oh yeah machine learning as a technology will survive, and eventually it will be implemented where it can do what it's really good at, but right now it's being shoved into everything to do things it isn't good at, so you end up with a super expensive to run, energy inefficient tool that runs worse than with traditional algorithms that can be run client side or on a single much cheaper server (I'm oversimplifying the server architecture for brevity)
Think customer service chatbots on ever car dealership's website. Traditionally these were extremely simplistic and usually just had canned responses based on keywords in the customer's written message and would quickly cascade the customer to a real customer service rep as soon as things got out of scope. Now with LLMs companies are running those as the customer service chatbots and the LLM can do anything from agreeing to sell a new car for a dollar to providing scam or invalid contact info to referring the customer to a competitor. There's no knowing what the AI will do because it's non-deterministic and you don't want that in customer service!
Right now we're in the bubble phase where every single company is finding some way to shoehorn AI into its business model so they can brag about it. Fucking Logitech added a remappable AI button that brings up a ChatGPT interface and just spends Logitech's money on tokens with ChatGPT. That's pure bubble behavior. Once the bubble pops we won't have literally every single time you open a car dealership page spending an LLM token or 5, you won't have Amazon running AI chatbots on every product page just for asking about that product, you won't have every website just giving away free unrestricted access to LLMs. That's what I'm talking about.
AI demand will drop when the bubble pops, and while it will be higher than it was 8 years ago, everyone is going to be very skeptical of anything AI, just like folks are still skeptical of mortgage backed securities over 15 years later, or just like people are skeptical of commerical websites without a clear method of financing 25 years after the dotcom bubble. People remember these things and will take a while to warm up to the idea again
Growing inefficient cattle crops in a desert to preserve water rights: not necessary.
Flying Coast to coast for a business meeting that could be an email: not necessary.
Manufacturing those cheap scissors that break after 2 uses: should be a crime (not necessary).
All of these subcases have comparable emissions and externalities to the data centers (at least by my fermi estimates).
It's easier to bitch about the woes of a thing I already don't like than to have to make any effort in changing my habits, mmkay?
Yeah, the main problems right now, seem to be electricity consumption, causing price hikes in surrounding areas.
Its not just electricity but also water consumption, and noise pollution if not particulate pollution too.
They provide little benefit to the surrounding communities with very few jobs by design and just consume local resources at usually discounted bulk rates to sell a service that possibly nobody locally would be in the market for
I have said this before somewhere, but this feels like something that would be very well suited for places where electricity prices have gone extremely low due to "too many solar panels".
Also, in places with excess geothermal output etc.
What are these companies really basing their installation locations upon?
I know at least a few HPC folks talking about building their datacenters far north, where cooling can be done by opening a window.
Which feels to me like terrible policies still. Make big projects pay their costs please!
It's a bit different in this case.
The responsibility of providing electricity falls onto the nearby power plant, which then also has to increase their production.
But the maker of the new electricity consumer does not need to pay for the capital or anything else really, apart from the electrical rates (and some minimal fixed rates) that they are using.
Some governments are coming up with interesting, seemingly effective regulations, though.
What type of regulations are we talking, or at least which country's?
I tried to look for the post but somehow wasn't able to find it (I thought I commented on it).
I don't remember the place, but a part of the policy was that data centers must pay 85% of their projected energy usage.
Here, found an article: https://www.ehn.org/ohio-regulators-make-tech-companies-pay-more-for-energy-hungry-data-centers
Yeah, but the average Lemme/Redditor is not going to waste an opportunity to pretend caring, pointing his/her finger and accumulate fake internet points.
I do feel obligated to at least expose folks to numeracy, even if they won't listen. Hope it's not giving them a repeated trauma somehow.
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If I hit Google Shopping, which indexes a ton of retailer sites, I can find 2x16GB DDR5 DIMMs for far less than that at various retailers that haven't jacked up prices yet.
https://www.google.com/shopping?udm=28
My first hit for "2x16gb 32gb ddr5" sorted by price is this:
https://pcpartshawaii.com/products/kingston-fury-ddr5-32gb-2x16gb-5200mhz-cl40-ram
They say that they have two in stock.
These guys are next lowest:
https://www.barcodediscount.com/catalog/kingston/part-kcp548us8k2-32.htm
Who goes to best buy for ram? Like the physical store... Everything small is marked up anyways.
And what's not marked up is sold out. Fuck that place.
Can't wait for the AI bubble to burst and we can all buy RAM at auction for $2 plus a 28% buyers premium.
So? Don't fucking buy it! Has that never occurred to some y'all? If the rest of the world had my purchasing habits we'd already be looking at Depression 2.0.
Some peopne may need RAM, however.
Just pirate it then
I usually download my warez RAM modules from ramgirl repacks
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zram
Open-source RAM is better.
Using a RAM drive for swap?
Am I misunderstanding the point of swap?
It's a compressed RAM drive being used as swap backing. The kernel's already got the functionality to have multiple tiers of priority for storage; this just leverages that. Like, you have uncompressed memory, it gets exhausted and you push some out to compressed memory, that gets exhausted and you push it out to swap on NVMe or something, etc.
Kinda like RAM Doubler of yesteryear, same sort of thing.
Zram on Linux is awesome! I've used it heavily in both memory constrained systems and systems with 16+GB of memory running very poorly optimized code
Running for example, Cities Skylines with 40GB of mods can easily lead to running memory usage being 20-30GB uncompressed. With zram I can load that same mod load out on a 16GB laptop with no swap and it won't crash where it would crash for being out of memory before.
Another example is Proxmox with over-provisioned lxc containers. Since it's still the kernel scheduler running all of the processes in those containers zram can keep them all running nicely even when a heavily modded Minecraft server gets a few players online and starts pushing past memory limits, where before I set it up I'd have some of the Minecraft server processes get killed to free up memory resources without warning or proper logging by Minecraft
Edit to add: my daughter's first laptop has only 4GB of memory and runs a decade old Celeron booting from a spinning hard drive, the definition of budget ewaste. Zram makes it so it's CPU limited running Minecraft rather than memory limited!
I mostly get mine from https://downloadmoreram.com/
You can get 32gb of ram in the UK for the equivalent of $130....
You guys are being ripped off
I can see ddr4 at that price not ddr5
Just coz a few stores have not updated their prices doesn't mean the demand will stop. It will be gone unless the ai bubble pops
Or its affecting America more because of a combination of tariffs and profiteering.
There should be laws capping how much of something you can sell to a single greedy person/purpose. It's common fucking sense.
Sure. Not for RAM, though. It ain't water, friend.
RAM is not really expensive. You get enough RAM for most tasks the use of which you can understand, as a fraction of the normal amount for any machine.
You can load a can't stress how good planetary map into RAM wholly, without paging it.
Many text editors today just load the whole file into RAM.
That there's much demand from some other side - oh yes.
BTW, I just got a thought that this might be aimed at hurting China and East Asia in general, when the bubble pops, in the west it'll be just investors losing what they deserve to lose, but in East Asia it'll be actual production rebuilt for the bubble dying in pains.
What? You might want to proof read that. The only thing I got from your text is that text editors load an entire file into memory, which has been the case for decades unless you go with a special purpose editor.
One data point: emacs normally loads the whole file, unless you're using the vlf package or similar.
TECO and
edmight not. Dunno.Ed and sed don't load the entire file in, but vim does. Not heard of TECO before 😄
TECO's kinda-sorta emacs's parent in sorta the same way that
edkinda-sorta is vi's parent.I compiled and tried out a Linux port the other day due to a discussion on editors we were having on the Threadiverse, so was ready to mind. Similar interface to
ed, also designed to run on teletypes.Holy crap, and these people think they have right to talk about computers.
You can have a 12G text file, logs, suppose, you are going to load the entire file into memory? And you think it's normal?
I think you might want to put more effort into reading. This seems to be your weak side.
You really should put more effort into proofreading.
I'm altering the rules
I can't load a stress how bad your proofreading is. Don't blame that on others.
So in how many languages do you write, and in which of them do you write better than I sometimes do in English? Other than your first one.
So you bring out "this is my second language" after telling someone else "you might want to put more effort into reading". No, that does not fly. You put "sorry, English is my second language" first. Lashing out like that is not a good look.
But it's funny
No, buddy. English is also not my first language and you write like shit. You're also an asshole about it, have a victim complex and are a hypocrite. You're just an all around shitty human being.
Says some anonymous moron.
No, and you are not an authority on my own logic.
No it's not, it's just you talking outta your ass ascribing your wishful interpretations to others. Your interpretation doesn't obligate anyone other than yourself and your butt buddies.
Are you regularly opening up 12 gig log files in a text editor? Personally I'd use something like elasticsearch or less/grep for a local file.
It's convenient to keep positions of many things, have marks, make comparisons. Ideally have multiple windows looking at the same file.
That's actually done via
journalctltoday, most of the time. Which extracts the logs out from a database instead of a text file. It has some useful features, such as slicing a specific time interval from the logs.Yes, that's very nice when you are already storing that something in a database. I said "suppose".
This is the part people are struggling with, because it's probably 3 difference sentences mashed together, whether in your head, by your fingers or by an autocarrot, but regardless its completely incomprehensible as a result
Ah. OK. So I speak a language, where such constructions are a bit more normal, except commas and dashes are used more generously, and synthetic grammar helps.
"You can fit a (can't stress how good) planetary map into RAM wholly" might be a bit better? Anyway. OK, they're struggling. They are choosing a weird way to inform me of what.
Side thoughts in the middle of sentences are definitely weird in written form. Heck they get messy in spoken form too! Some punctuation to help the reader understand what's being communicated can go a long way, and in the format of a forum discussion where folks will quickly tap out a brain fart from a 5" slab of plastic and glass, when I see what appear to be multiple sentences mashed together into one incoherent one, I'll generally assume it's a writing error, because folks don't proof read, they aren't writing literature with multiple drafts. They're just quickly jotting down a thought or two and somethimes errors compound with that level of quick communication
That depends on the language. Similarly to how different prosody doesn't indicate different national character or whatever.
In Russian that's normal enough, in German much more. Considering some weak sides of the English language, might not work.
That's super interesting! I didn't know other languages handled side thoughts better!