The dominoes are falling: motherboard sales down 50% as PC enthusiasts are put off by stinking memory prices
https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/motherboards/the-dominoes-are-falling-motherboard-sales-down-50-percent-as-pc-enthusiasts-are-put-off-by-stinking-memory-prices/Open linkView original on lemmy.dbzer0.com1266
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what if we cannibalize our long-term viability for a short-term gain says every dipshit in charge of tech hardware manufacturing.
you know when the bubble pops and they no longer have AI companies buying RAM they will switch back to consumers and keep the high prices.
if they're still around when the financial shell game they're playing finally comes to a stop. who am i kidding the government will bail them out.
Using your money.
if the US government were actually funded by taxes, then everything the government does would be with "my money"
Well, if you're a citizen, the country is yours, and the government is there to manage it, but some assholes in power managed to convince people that it's the other way around
Even if the government is funded by money printed by the central bank, it would still be funded with "your money". Every dollar printed dilutes your money by that same amount, ie it's like a much more subtle tax that doesn't follow any of the principles of proportionality, everyone pays the same (except those with little to no liquidity and everything invested, so it's really a tax on the poor through inflation)
Profits for me, losses for thee
That only works if we (the collective we) have more money. If a rich person has more $$ than a small country that means the effect we have is equivalent.
That's why micron is doing what its doing. We are no longer the customer. They voted for us.
Of course, not all the companies survive and now there’s decreased competition, so we can shove prices up a little bit further
Absolutely
Keeping prices above what people are willing to buy for, while the majority of their business goes bust, is not a recipe to stay in business.
But consumers are stupid. when they start selling ram again at a high price we should all boycot buying computers. instead a lot of people will just accept the new price. we saw it after the pandemic, people just accepting prices instead of holding fast and forcing prices down.
You're saying this as a comment on an article about how drastically sales have already dropped due to the price increases... people are already doing that.
I am talking about when the price is no longer based supply. When we see their market bottom out on AI one would expect to see the price drop. But looking at recent history these massive companies keep the price high because consumers see it as the new normal.
Consumers will find a way to eventually afford this price bump when its not food, shelter or medical care. It just takes a little longer when it is not a necessity.
Every business is doing this for everything. To different degrees but they are all chasing their “get our fortune now and get the fuck out because the sky is falling” mentality. Have been since Trump 1.0 and now it’s accelerating rapidly.
You have to remember that "get that bag" is practically inherit to business. We spend a lot of time and effort making it illegal to fuck people over and do bad business stuff, but kinda-sorta since Regan the businesses have slowly been winning that battle.
That's every company, most upper management don't stay in one position for more than 2 years. So the system is setup for short term gains because investors aren't interested in long term investments and the blowback is the next guys problem. Who then is looking for the next big win to cover up the last guy issues without fixing anything. Then they bring in someone to clean up the mess and the cycle starts again.
Plus most consumers have short memories or don't have an alternative so their stuck. There are small groups holding on but for 75% of the world's population right now it's Android or iOS, AMD or Intel, AMD or NVIDIA, Samsung or WD or Seagate or SanDisk, Att or Verizon, Apple or Microsoft, and so on.
Not every company, just most. Privately owned corporations aren't legally obligated to kill long-term viability for short-term gaing like publicly traded companies are.
Many owners of privately owned corps are that dumb, but not all of them
Public companies are not obligated to do this. This is caused by the stock options that CEOs/other upper management gets. They want to maximize their gains on their could of years they serve before jumping ship to the next company.
False. There's a thing called fiduciary duty where companies are obligated to make profitable decisions for their shareholders. If they don't prioritize short term gains they're opened up to lawsuits from investors
Fiduciary duty does not require they tank long term profitability for short term gains. That's an idiotic belief you have.
Also your reputation. I had a Crucial SSD and was days from getting an identical one as a backup but then they said they were stopping consumer RAM sales so they're now on my blacklist.
Question is, though, who now isn't on your blacklist?
Samsung and SK Hynix never sold to consumers directly, yet seem to be avoiding flak. Micron is now joining them in that.
Who do you get that isn't that three? Almost all RAM on the market is Samsung, SK Hynix, or Micron.
On top of that, Samsung and SK Hynix were the ones that signed the OpenAI deal (OpenAI bought 40% of the world's DRAM supply and kicked off panic buying), so tbh Micron is the least responsible for the current DRAM market issues.
how are they in control? market demand is an outside force
Makes sense. CPU/Mobo/RAM typically go together in a rebuild. Storage, case, PSU, perepherals, GPU can often carry over between builds as they're all pretty backwards compatible.
Yeah. This makes pretty good sense. Make some ram and SSDs - lowee the price - and I'm sure Motherboard sales will go up.
It's funny how people don't want to buy motherboards without anything else
I only change motherboards when moving up to the next RAM format or CPU chipset. I stick with AMD due to cost and low thermals, and while their CPU generations shared the same interface I had one mobo for DDR3, one for DDR4, etc.
Can't wrap my head around constantly upgrading the mobo to be honest. Sure, they have lots of features but I haven't seen a situation where a mobo would be an upgrade worth doing without also upgrading everything else.
Just use Intel CPUs and you'll understand, as they seem to invent a new incompatible socket every five minutes requiring a new mobo.
That is part of why I have avoided them, far easier to mix and match AMD stuff to meet my price points since their sockets stick around so long!
Each PC lasts me at least 5 years. I am three or so years on my 5800x3d with a 7090XT I picked up last year and the whole setup will probably still be rocking games past 2030.
Hah I just upgraded to that setup at the beginning of the year from a 2017 ryzen 1700 and GTX 1080 build.
It increased the longevity of this system by so much
The only time I've ever done that is during an upgrade chain that results in a motherboard not fitting into the case I need it to. Even then, the last one I bought was from a local used parts shop since I had an Intel 4670k I wanted to slap into a server.
I still got a 4670k in my server. Thought of upgrading in Q1. I can forget all about that now... Unfortunately my mobo is slowly dying, so there's a limit on how long I can push it.
How often do you upgrade your computer? I do the same but without really trying, it's literally the case that by the time I start to feel I need a new pc there is already a new CPU socket, often several, and new ram format. I've almost never been able to actually reuse stuff. I imagine the only scenario where I could do that would be if some component straight up broke
Maybe every 5 or so years, and generally there has been something worth upgrading the mobo for like new connections for storage. So far it has been when it struggled with 75+ FPS in games that I care about at the settings I want.
Since it is so spread out I can't say it is a solid pattern, but so far each CPU and mobo upgrade have been together with a new set of RAM and occasionally I get extra RAM in between. Hard drives/SSDs and GPUs are whenever but generally they are years apart too.
Yeah but it's like the gearbox. While everything's pulled apart, you may as well swap out the clutch, bearing, and flywheel too because they'll need replacing again first. Especially if better versions of them are now supported.
because youd only swap mobos for either aesthetics(expensive, not often done) at best because you choose to downsize, or because you need more pci-e I/O.
the average user doesn't use all their pci-e i/o, and the ones that do, are looking towards workstation motherboards, which is almost a completely different market from the consumer level stuff. It's a game of, you know when you need more i/o, and if you needed it, you probably would have never bought the consumer level board in the first place.
I don't understand what their long-term plan is here. Even if AI isn't a bubble eventually all of the AI companies are going to get to a point where they don't need more compute because they're working on algorithmic optimisations because they decide that that's cheaper.
Then they're going to have to pivot back to the consumer market. Except by that point it won't even be a consumer market because China will have eaten their lunch.
The plan is to continue making bank until the companies are done with them, then sell to consumers again without missing a beat.
Source: the GPU shortage we just went through.
Future source: the CPU shortage scheduled for 2026.
That's my point though they can't do that.
The market isn't just going to wait around for them to get around to selling to consumers again. China is going to see an opening and they're going to manufacture their own chips and make bank. Then when the traditional manufacturer is getting their head out of their arses then realise there market share has vanished. All 100% their fault.
They have decided to shoot themselves in the foot because someone's convinced them they won't ever need legs ever again.
Eh, Chinese manufacturers are also desperately trying to catch up with AI hype. In any case, we'll see some new brands on the market, and it's not a bad thing, and I would not spend my time worrying about giant rich corporations.
My actual worry is that once RAM prices go up, they won't go down for quite some time. If we get another bubble after AI bubble pops, the prices may not decrease at all.
I read a great article recently that tries to analyze what exactly went down and for what reasons. And most importantly, the effects it's going to have on different hardware prices: https://www.mooreslawisdead.com/post/sam-altman-s-dirty-dram-deal
Yeah that's widely considered to be the article about it tbh
These companies are controlled almost entirely by people who only really care about what the stock price will be sometime in the next few years or so.
*quarters, or even months
They most likely don't have one. Keep in mind that tech bros and C-suite execs are sociopathic dumbasses. We saw this with AAA gaming studios and private equity where they just assume line will continually go up
Cloud computing. Stallman was right.
We would need a better general network for that. Remember stadia? Nothing has changed since then, hell some areas have even lost some capacity.
I'd you're talking about cloud computing for gaming specifically (as you can of course use cloud computing for, well, everything), then maybe it's not good enough in the US, I don't know enough about that area to say, but networking is definitively more than sufficient in Europe.
Not american, But most of the world does not have the network. And Europe might have a good enough network, but not everywhere, and who knows if the current network will handle the sort of extra load that moving everything off local hardware would create.
Noooooo don't say that ;a;
How dare you suggest that there is a future beyond next quarter!
The companies making the ram chips are not the ones making motherboards. They just want to sell their product for as much as they can.
Shutting down your entire consumer business does seem a bit short sighted though - keep the doors open for the future.
Speculative
On the plus side, indie games that don’t require a rocket ship for a PC have never been better. So, can still play some good stuff on my old clunker. Thanks to Steam/Proton, they run even better on my old computer.
Would be nice to see the gaming industry pivot back to making innovative games within the constraints of hardware, instead of just expecting customers to throw ever more powerful (and power consuming) hardware at it.
As much (well deserved) hate that Nintendo gets, they are fantastic at this. They seem to be able to make games look good on low powered systems with stylistic decisions and smart optimization/coding. They learned some pretty important things in the NES/SNES era about using tricks to squeeze performance out of the few KB/MB they had to work with.
Shame nobody told Pokemon, really.
For context:
https://youtube.com/shorts/OkPRdIbxBZM
Yeah that crossed my mind, but if I'm not mistaken Pokemon was developed by Game Freak, only licensed by Nintendo.
DLSS has made devs lazy. Why bother optimizing when you can have some whiz bang AI algorithm turn a low res input into a greasy looking high res output.
Some Indy games using unreal engine can still bog down a fast PC...
Somebody pop the zit that is AI.
AI isnt a zit, its a giant infected boil and blister now.
I don't disagree lance that green puss filled cavity.
A giant cyst that got infected and is now life threatening.
It's such a shame to see high-performance computing and gaming more broadly become largely unaffordable. Hell, prior to the DRAM shortage, the current-generation game consoles were already MORE EXPENSIVE than they were at launch. And it's just going to get worse.
Like it was before. In the, not so long ago, past a high end pc was too expensive for the average user.
This statement sounds defeatist.
None of this is "high performance computing". Are you simulating nuclear explosions? Airflow around supersonic aircraft? Sequencing DNA?
This is all entertainment, it's useless, it turns people into potatoes. Digital garbage to make AI fat people fart videos.
Good riddance I say.
You posting on the Internet is also useless digital garbage, so put your money where your mouth is and go do something productive.
"Dear Mr. President, there are too many states nowadays, please eliminate three. I am not a crackpot."
Lil bro thinks this is only about gaming
Probably never used his pc for anything other than
Go use a type writer.
I simulated a nuclear accident in a i5 2540M
I just did on an esp32
On my steam deck. It was devastating 🤣
At least people aren't buying at these high prices, wouldn't want them to stay there after all.
This is a good point, we don't need PCs to be this expensive.
I just hope we don't fuck up the whole thing and end up with cloud computers or end up not making new PCs..
I'm pretty convinced this is the play. Drive up DIY PC parts then promote thin cloud clients as a way to have a PC without paying the crazy prices that they set. It's a lot easier to tell you "it's safer for the children" and pillage every file, action, and keystroke for AI training and data brokerage. Your owned PC is a black box for them and it's their wet dream to own it for you... As a subscription of course.
While it might actually end up going that way, I don't think that's a deliberate play. The tech bros and C-suite execs tend to be sociopathic dumbasses. I think they're legitimately just loading themselves up with tons of debt just to buy hardware to capture market share thinking that things could never collapsed on them.
thin client machines that you have to lease with a cloud subscription and which are locked down to the intended purpose only. basically the death of generic computing. delevoper machines will be tied down devel kits.
Isn't that what windows is anyway?
not yet. you can develop on windows without paying microsoft. windows is not subscription software.
The way things are going, pretty sure it's as you say, not yet. The current technology environment is frustrating, to say the least.
Like a Chromebook.
5 years ago I would’ve called you insane, but with everything happening right now… it’s a distinct possibility.
RAM’s unaffordable, GPU’s will likely be harder to come by and more expensive. Microsoft is actively driving people away from Windows, Steam is launching their Steam Machine…
Here’s hoping many gamers will jump to Linux and grow that platform instead. But even then, too expensive hardware will be an issue.
We’re living in interesting times.
That in itself might act to make linux attractive as it can be a much lighter weight alternative to windows to stretch the useful life of hardware they own.
That's actually the main reason I switched my PC from Windows 10 to Linux. I couldn't upgrade to Win 11. Now I'm happy I couldn't!
I would have called myself insane five years ago too!
Yeah, jumping to Linux could help a bit. I did that a couple of years ago, but that was more because I couldn't upgrade to Win 11 on my almost a decade old PC. Now I'm glad I couldn't upgrade to Win 11 haha.
I had a laptop with Win 11 tho but I never got used to it and don't want AI and shit in any of my computers so I jumped over to Linux on that to.
Maybe Steam will save the day with the Steam Cube? Isn't that pretty much a normal gaming PC?
That is an increasingly high risk I can see, PCs just no longer exist.
Just keep old computers is all. Eventually your spec will be considered 'retro computing' and you can still enjoy the thousands of games that are playable on real hardware.
Computer with cloud-based subscription sounds like a great example of enshittification.
I might prefer no PC over that. Ew. I mean, the libraries have PCs you can borrow if I'd really need to use one.
I went from thinking about a full rig upgrade, to just buying the best used processor and GPU my am4 board could handle with my current PSU and ddr4 ram.
Went from a ryzen 1600x and a Nvidia 1060 to a ryzen 5 5600x and a Radeon rx 6600 xt. I'll be able to ride that out for a few years no problem.
I went from thinking of upgrades to enjoying my backlog of old games. My wallet and library are both happy and I'm enjoying the games I'm playing.
same. I have over 300 games in my steam library that i've bought over the years and the vast majority of which I never launched. So now i'm going through them. combine that with finally getting retroarch/libretro all PROPERLY set up I've also got a shit ton of roms from various consoles to play also, games I couldn't afford as a kid.
Like right now I'm FINALLY playing Ocarina of Time for the first time ever and it's a blast, now I understand why people love it so much. Also started playing New Vegas and System Shock on the PC which I've owned for years and never played and both those are great too. New Vegas is REALLY fun.
and then there's GOG which has thousands of older games, drm free.
Likewise. I haven't bought a game that wasn't at least a year old in a decade. Heck, right now I'm playing Psychonauts.
Same here, the Steam Deck changed my life 😆. Less AAA, more AA and indie games, especially at work.
The artificial price hikes actually saved you money. Noice!
funny i bought exactly the same CPU and GPU half a year ago. Someone in my city sold these for 200€.
I was going to go for an AM5 board and everything, but couldn't afford it. My older parts were from 2016 and not even terrible. Its funny how little the hardware requirements have changed in the games and OS area. I am still using the same 16g RAM and PSU from 2016.
AM4 unite! Have had 3600X and 2070 super since 2019 and still works well. Although some USB-ports on the mobo are starting to degrade.
That's alright. USB rails for a PCI slot are dirt cheap.
Nnnoooo, you won't get enough fps to enjoy your games!!!
/s in case some of you don't get it
My eyes aren't good enough for 4k. Lol
Ryzen 5600x here, was rocking a 6700 XT but found a good deal on a RX 9070 for $540 right around when the RAM prices increased. Already have 32 GB RAM, so I'm set for a while.
Yeah, I had the ram, but the 6600xt was the most I could buy without having to also upgrade my PSU.
I also decided to do a mild upgrade in my AM4 board rather than shell out for marginal upgrades. I'm rocking the 5700x3d 5700xt build.
Nice, had a nitro 6650xt, can't recommend enough if it makes sense financially
Paid under $200 for it and it punches well above the 1060 I've been using. Wanted a Radeon because they play nicer with Linux and this card is the beefiest AMD I could go without having to also buy a new PSU. Also couldn't go much nicer anyhow or I'd be creeping up on games cpu limited, so it pairs nicely with the r 5 5600x. So for me and my particular set up it made for a nicely balanced hardware and cost choice. After this it will just be time for all new hardware in a few more years.
Burst the fucking bubble already. I'm edging so hard right now.
It's a play to make at home compute unachievable, forcing people to pay for subscription cloud services and cloud compute in walled gardens.
I don't agree. The prices will rise across the board no matter where you site the memory or if it's in a gaming computer or otherwise. Renting will always be more expensive than owning because competitors must recoup the capital cost of buying and make margin at the same time.
This is hilarious. Intel after many years finally fixed their manufacturing process, but won't be able to sell chips because of memory crunch
If only they had a solid state technology that expanded system memory... Shutting down optane comes to bite them, again.
Next up: MSI, ASUS, ... are pulling out of the consumer market due to falling revenue causing major price hikes.
Here's to hoping that it increases pressure to break the cartels and start getting the ball rolling on more independent foundries.
Problem I see with new foundries is that the profit is still going to be selling to data centers. It would take a philanthrope like Marc Cuban selling meds at cost, selling at a loss to enthusiasts.
Calling Marc Cuban a philanthrope feels icky, but he is doing a thing that I think is genuine.
It doesn't matter as long a the supply continues to grow. It also helps make the rest of the world less dependent on a US hegemony that's now going sour. When investment firms are buying up so much inventory for data centers that aren't even operational, a big part of that exists as an excuse for market manipulation by the really big hitters that have their presence in those cartels anyway. Once they start feeding their own demise and market competition, they will back off pretty quickly and will likely saturate the market from the surplus inventory they are clearly hoarding under bullshit excuses to try to eliminate and buy up the nascent competition.
Do MSI and ASUS have enough corporate/enterprise sales to offset the loss of consumer demand? With the RAM companies the consumer crunch is caused by AI companies bidding up the price of raw memory silicon well beyond what makes financial sense to package and solder onto DIMMs (or even directly solder the packages onto boards for ultra thin laptops).
Asus is a significant ODM, supplying boards for brands like HP. I'm not sure what lines/models they make today, but they are a lot bigger than just their consumer lines.
Or gpu prices or hdd/ssd prices that never recovered from the tsunami. Consumers just keep getting fucked.
A rising tide drowns those who can't swim.
Prices don't generally recover; any reason for a price rise is a reason to make it the new norm.
Used to be, competition would spring up and keep them in check, but now that the entire market is 6 companies in a trench coat, any new competitor would just be acquired or forced out of business with legal demands or supplier tampering.
These companies have been found guilty of collusion in other markets (lcd panels anyone?) so what you are saying while factually correct, is in fact because of the failure to address the post collusion market. A fine is paid and then business as usual. It's like a chicken vs egg argument except instead of just recognizing it doesn't matter and regulate a market properly we use it as perfect justification for doing nothing.
I fear they will pull a GPU and the storage prices will be permanently 50% higher after.
I mean, that's capitalism, right? The manufacturers see that their product is still selling at a 300% markup, why would they bring the price back down when they can just make more profit if/when costs for them come back down? Sure they might drop it a little to make it "look" like a good deal. Just like GPUs. They went from being $600 for high end, to being $2000. Then when they announced that the next Gen was "only" going to be $1200 everybody was like "Wow! What a great deal!"
I hate this timeline. They just keep figuring out new ways to squeeze money out of me and ruining my hobbies.
But this only works long-term with collusion. Which i don't see the current administration persecute much.
This does seem likely, especially if it’s as the article claims and this continues into 2028. After 2 and a 1/2 years of triple digit profits nobody is going to be satisfied with a measly 14% or whatever markup they were getting before.
Our economy increasingly is consumed to serve the rich. They are eating the world. Grocery stores increasingly cater to the wealthy. So do the automakers. Billionaires are buying up whole city blocks for themselves. And now we won't be able to buy electronics because they've taken the resources for their speculative investments, and if they crash the economy our tax dollars will be appropriated to bail them out. It's almost like we're barreling towards a violent confrontation between the classes...
I for one am in favor of throwing the rich into wood chippers.
The rich and their bought and paid for politicians.
Feet first.
We won't. Them sowing discontent among ourselves works to well and has worked longer then most realize.
I'm on ryzen 9 5900x, rtx 3080, 32 GB DDR4, with mobo and psu that's ~€850 today and it will play most modern games on high settings 1080p at +100 fps. Computer hardware these days is a lot more like car hardware than it used to be. Generational improvements aren't as big and the price for a used 5 year old unit is a ⅓ of a new one. Unless you absolutely need the latest and greatest go with a used last gen.
Same specs as you except 5800x3D. Same sentiments at 1440p.
Same here, except 64GB of RAM, I can't even remember how much that cost 4 years ago but I'm afraid to check the receipt at this point.
https://pcpartpicker.com/list/XpFtXR
That setup would currently run for around $1730? Without investing into a monitor, or any peripherals like keyboard, mouse, etc and picking a relatively cheap psu/case/cooler combo.
Maybe I misunderstood but seems a far cry from €850.
Your prices are msrp for unused components.
On my local equivalent of ebay/amazon I can get a used 3080 10 GB for $390, ryzen 9 5900x $265, 32 GB DDR4 3200 mHz $170, new b550 mobo $80, 750w psu 80+ gold $70. $975 total. I didn't count anything else coz a lot of people already have those things from their old PCs and they're super cheep. For a full ~$1000 build add a $60 512 GB sata ssd. Cooler will set you back $15, same as a 1080p screen, case and m+k combo and a lot of the time you can get those things for free and they will last you a lifetime.
This is my first ever keyboard that I got for free from an office that was closing down and I use it to this day. Eventually I had to buy a PS/2 to USB dongle but that's like $5. I have a 2nd spare one in case the 1st one breaks. I plan on using it till I die.
I see the misunderstanding, didn’t consciously see the ‘used’ hardware in your post above. That makes a lot more sense!
I haven't made any purchases since tariffs drove up prices.
I was prepping to build a new NAS in 2026.
Not anymore sellouts.
Time to buy an AM5 MOBO to upgrade in 2028 then.
Just in time for AM6.
I'm sure it doesn't help that motherboard manufacturers have increasingly been targeting "whale" consumers over the last 10-15 years. I remember when a top of the line motherboard would cost you $300; and an average board was around $100-150.
Have not built a PC since Windows7, what is the difference between a 150 and a top of the line motherboard?
I'm talking more like the Windows ME/XP days to be honest. But too many to count. It's more that actually useful features that used to be fairly standard (like 7-segment status displays and speakers) are effectively being gated behind $500+ motherboards to make them more attractive. A board that would have come with alphanumeric status codes now is lucky to ship with a couple LEDs that just indicate where a problem is at, not what the specific problem is.
Nothing lasts forever. Even this.
Yep. Being able to own a PC was nice while it lasted.
I mean... We will learn to make our rigs last, do more with less, and carry on optimizing Linux builds. Anything you can run today, you'll be able to run tomorrow. And there is enough backlog to keep us all busy until at least 2028... Be honest with yourself lol
I mean, a PC from year 1999 is in the realm of possible for plenty of more localized production chains than needed to have that monster with Ryzen in the name.
And it's not unreasonable to expect such a scattering of production. It happened with plenty of technologies. Also it's not unreasonable to expect a return from more sophisticated and powerful material culture to one less so at both, but more accessible.
That's what happened with automobiles a few times in history, that's what happened with construction technologies and money many times in history, with food, with warfare.
That semiconductors are something challenging in complexity to produce - that actually makes such scattering more probable.
It's not much different from chinaware or late medieval metallurgy needed for firearms. Strategic technologies are hard to achieve and it's simpler to purchase their output, but eventually everyone realizes they need their own.
So I really hope that instead of the same not really diverse ecosystem of Intel, AMD and ARM powerful hardware we'll have a thousand different local manufacturers of partially compatible hardware far weaker, like Amiga 1200, but more interesting.
Perhaps this will also be similar to the transition from late Rome to early Middle Ages.
It just makes sense historically. More distributed production environment can support smaller efficiency, - can't make and sell on the same scale, - but there will be constant pressure to have it.
Of course, in reality this is all alarmism for no reason. There will be a bubble burst, suppose, - well, then there'll be plenty of cheap hardware thrown out. The RAM manufacturers will have hard times, but it'll balance out eventually. Just how it did after the dotcom bubble, not in the best way, perhaps with only a few manufacturers remaining, but it will. Or if there will be no bubble burst, suppose all that computing power founds an application with non-speculative value, - well, there's still long way to go before your typical PC usage starts requiring really expensive amounts of RAM. If we drop the Web, even with modern Linux or FreeBSD one could survive on 2GB RAM and Intel C2D in year 2019. Then on 4GB, almost comfortable, even playing some games.
One good thing I'm seeing - those RAM prices can eventually kill the Web. It's the most RAM-hungry part of our needs for no good reason. Perhaps Gemini is not what can replace it, it's too basic, but I can see it becoming in corporate interest to support a leaner non-compatible replacement for the same niche. And corporate interest kills.
Or perhaps they'll like some sort of semantic web gone wrong way - with some kind of "web" intended for AI agents, not humans, with humans having a chat prompt.
ELKS linux runs on 128 Kb RAM on ROM-based systems.
Or the PC market existing.
It's only going to get worse.
Wow, I can't believe my plan for a cheap motherboard worked.
If sales are going down, prices of the motherboards are going up.
Going to gouge all the midstream businesses in the long run. Hardware retailers, PC assemblers, all those little companies selling custom cases and overclock kits and fancy cooling appliances.
The lack of cheap but crucial components will have some ugly coat tails for the rest of the industry.
Welp, sucks to be a motherboard manufacturer. Always getting dragged along by other component manufacturers.
They had a little bit of reprise with the surge of SFF PCs but not much.
What’s an SFF PCS?
Small form factor, or something like that . Little motherboard possibly fanless, space for one or maybe 2 2.5 hd. The little thing you can use for a nice video player at home or the cash register at work
Been thinking of getting an N150 mini PC sometime. Stick proxmox on it and pihole. Probably a web server and host media on it too.
Not sure how well it would run dwarf fortress in a VM, play over SSH. Otherwise there is still CDDA.
Small computers are more powerful than you think, if used properly. I stick with a bunch of containers instead of VMs and it all just hums along nicely on a Raspberry Pi 5.
Pi-Hole running all the time barely registers as a workload.
Yeah, I suspect I have a fair few games that could run in it but ARM doesn't help for anything closed source stuff.
An N150 mini PC don't cost that much more once you consider that it comes with storage as well, not looked since RAM went silly though.
I don't think it would be much use other than emulated computers/consoles/arcades.
I heard about Fex for x86 emulation, but never tried it myself.
Does China not have any companies that can make RAM? Seems like an opportunity to grab some market share. But maybe they don't, or maybe they'd prefer to sell it to AI companies too.
CXMT has ddr5 manufacturing capabilities but it will be years before they scale it, and they're embargoed by the US, so nobody on good terms with the US can get it.
And yes, they would also sell to the enterprise customers, but it would lower prices overall.
So no one.
They do, but perhaps they haven't expanded yet into your market. I see some here sometimes.
Why would a Chinese for-profit corporation differ from any other? Except for the Chinese ones having backing from a garbage authoritarian empire. Maybe they can get free slaves from the state?
As opposed to the US, where they get free slaves from China AND the state.
Because the Chinese government controls Chinese companies whereas the American government just lets companies do whatever the hell they want.
Chinese government controls Chinese companies. American companies control American government.
The only rich country with actual legal slavery is the US.
We need global laws against gouging
This isn't typical price gouging. It's an industry moving away from consumers because our buying power is nothing compared to large corporations running on AI circlejerk VCs.
I mean, it is also that OpenAI cornered the RAM market, which is a typical price gouging scenario; it's just weird that OpenAI wasn't trying to make money directly through the maneuver. It does seem like they wanted prices to rise, though, to increase the barrier to competition.
It's almost like unregulated capitalism is a certain highway to oligarchy and authoritarianism.
It's also desirable for them because it decreases people building their own computers and pushing more people to buying premade ones they sell.
No, the endgame is for all the compute power to be in the cloud, and you rent time on their servers.
Everyone will just be running thin clients at home, with subscriptions if they need to do anything more than send an email
Yeah, they can be enforced by the power rangers across borders.
It's a pipe dream, sadly.
I was thinking of upgrading my RAM this year, but I know I don't have to. It's their loss, not mine.
I bet it's this for so many people. Our libraries are full of games that work fine with older hardware.
The backlog is immense
memory is way up
GPU's will need memory, production cuts
followed by production cuts for cpu's monitors and powersupplies
welcome to the $10k mid range gaming PC in 2027
And all that just for some shitty AI that's getting all its questions wrong
And my monthly power bill has tripled to subsidize them. I'm paying for several new PCs for someone whether I like it or not.
I wonder if developers will finally start taking middle end GPUs and the existing handhelds seriously.
There are "Deck optimized" games that run horrendously. But what if people can't afford new hardware for the next four years? It's either fix the performance or lose sales. The Switch 2 is likely going to become the most common performance target, and having only 12GBs of shared memory, it actually helps PCs in this situation.
They'll have to, soon enough, if they wanna continue selling games
One could hope, but the cost will carry through to consoles as well :(
And after 26+ years of friendship, my buddy chose this month to be the month where he finally hunkered down and built his first PC. Of all the times to build a budget parts list for a friend...
If they lower their prices of MOBOs to try and generate more sales, that might actually be worth it long term. For RAM, I saw the other day a Laptop RAM conversion to desktop. Which apartment Laptop RAM is still lower priced. There might some interesting Frankenstein builds in the coming months
Yeah but laptop ram hacks aren't really a sustainable long term solution because we live in hell and scalpers will buy it all up if it becomes mainstream. And newly manufactured laptop ram will have all the same price issues because they need chips from the same fabs.
Laptop RAM is always going to be slower than it's equivalent too. Hopefully that keeps the prices just lower if people want to go this route.
Oh, was this the Salem Techsperts video?
Perhaps, I don't recall I didn't pay enough attention.
It's the obsession with replacing PCIe slots with M.2 sockets that gets me.
Why not? I think its quite convenient. Also saves some required wiring and its very compact
I’m more concerned with PCI slots blocked by massive GPUs, especially on smaller form factor boards. You’ll need PCI/e extension cables to install an additional card.
There are not many cards you need these days, especially not that doesn't have an USB equivalent. USB capture cards are now decent, same for Wi-Fi+Bluetooth ones (provided you buy one with deported antennas). Other than storage related ones (for moar m.2!, or for sff SAS ports), I don't see that much uses these days.
Even my NAS, which uses a micro-ATX MB, only uses one slot on the 3 available. And all its 4 m.2 ports are used (2 for redundant system discs, one for an AI accelerators (for Frigate object detection), the last one being an old SSD used as ZFS cache for my main disk array (will probably be replaced by another AI accelerator once I find another use which would need one).
Motherboards seem to have a normal amount of slots though?
Not like you can populate them all anyway, though. Use one modern (i.e. oversized) graphics card and it seems to block three slots.
You'll be happy with the government supplied computers whether you like it or not.
It won't be government supplied. You'll buy a basic terminal from some big tech company, and then subscribe to a plan that will grant you access to remote processing, memory, and cloud storage. Think Google Stadia but for everything. Using a computer will be more like using, say, the PlayStation store. You won't be able to install whatever you like - only what is made available. Piracy or adblocking will be impossible. Privacy and anonymity will become things of the past. Even news and information will be curated. And you'll have to keep paying for it all in perpetuity, while being tracked and forced to consume manipulative, targeted advertising.
So... A Chromebook?
Or you can install linux.
Alternately, perhaps we can look forward to
Still to optimistic.
Thanks. I hate it.
It’s just nonsense. Absolutely nonsense.
who would've thought that it would happen... (checks stats) yeah, it was EVERYONE. Gee, maybe someone needs to learn some supply and demand basics by this point. The tenacity!
i really wish I could have eeked out one more GPU upgrade before the shit hit the fan..but GPUs are at the point now where you gotta upgrade the PSU to upgrade the GPU since power draw demands are getting absolutely donk.
Weird aside, but I have a 14900k which just eats power. About 400ish watts draw during CPU benchmarks for total ststem draw. I had a 1000w psu and finally got a 5090. Now a 400w cpu + 600w gpu should not work- but it did. I did stress test both at the same time and hit 1100w, but it lived. Thing is, most games do not stress borh CPU and GPU at max at the same time, so real world usage I was always under.
Still, I want headroom, so I got a deal on a 1500w psu. New PSU is more efficient, and running the same simultaneous cpu/gpu benchmark I hit about 960w, so the efficiency bump kept me under my old psu limit. It did lead me to get a new PSU, but technically it would have been mostly okay.
GPUs at least are actually not that expensive right now. Aside from the 5090, they're mostly close to MSRP, which is a pretty novel situation. I was waiting to upgrade my whole system for that, though, because my CPU would be a bottleneck at this point, and that's not really an option now because of the crazy RAM prices. The past few years have been super frustrating for PC builders.
for now
by the time i can afford it, and a new PSU, the ram issue will probably see GPUs skyrocket as well. Especially with companies cutting consumer production for AI production.
Yeah. At least I managed to pick up a used 3070 a couple years ago. I'll just jolly along my old i7-7700k system for a few more years...
Wonder if we'll be getting consumer grade SoCs that are CPUs with integrated RAM.
We'll be getting the opportunity to rent low-powered cloud computers at premium prices, and if you want to keep your data that costs extra.
"You'll own nothing and like it."
If things get that bad, I'll just have to change my hobbies up and ditch tech as much as I can. I'll buy used and try to wait this out first.
Strix Halo (AI Max CPUs) are basically that.
But they’re still DDR5 hanging off a bus, manufactured in the same place as sticks, so that wouldn’t really affect the price.
I dont know enough about the hardware details of DDR5 admittedly. But it doesn't seem improbable to architect x86_64 cpus to include a set amount.
Yeah, you lose the ability to upgrade it, but you gain guaranteed compatibility, one less component to damage and troubleshoot. People don't seem to complain about the integrated RAM in ARM processors .
CPU makers can’t really make system memory affordably, unfortunately. That’s why it’s separate in the first place :(
Intel has actually done this in the past, with a little eDRAM cache for their integrated graphics on some older 5000 series CPUs, like the 5775C. It topped out at 128MB.
AMD already does something similar with their X3D CPUs, albeit with SRAM… it tops out at 64MB.
They will sell you a bigger version, with IIRC 768MB of L3 memory, for many thousands of dollars.
Another issue is that CPU designs take many, many years to go from initial idea to manufacturing, along with truckloads of cash. So they couldn’t even respond to this shortage in 2026 if they wanted to.
Another is that AMD outsources their manufacturing anyway, though not Intel.
In the case of Strix Halo, it was a signal integrity issue that prompted AMD to forego user replaceable RAM like LPCAMM. Soldered memory offers a more reliable channel to feed the iGPU at expected performance levels.
Honestly, probably a buy opportunity for good ddr5 motherboards. When the bubble bursts then you can buy the ram for pennies.
Yeah in 2035 when we've moved to DDR7
Oh I didn't even think of this. There are so many companies that could get into trouble because of this, and they will all get mad at the AI bullshitters.
Dominoes falling
Riot in the streets...
Streets? PC enthusiasts? Riot in the forums.
Oww, people didn't get my reference :(
https://youtu.be/ZTidn2dBYbY
:)
Baby this time
There's no retreat
There's no surrender
abolish money, in favor of labor vouchers. seriously!
...and let your employer govern your livelihood? What?
Seriously.
They are already doing this through regulatory capture and corruption. Let's not give them more power
Your employer already governs your livelihood through your paycheck.
That's why employers should be elected, not just be rich people that can afford to hire workers.
in some forms of marxism, money as a source of exchanging goods is abolished in favor of labor vouchers. seriously!