High RAM prices mean record-setting profits for Samsung and other memory makers
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The worst part is knowing that the bubble-blowers are somehow going to make out handsomely no matter how badly it pops.
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I pray every day that Sam Altman will be forced someday to sit and literally eat all the uncut, unused, RAM wafers he decided to take away from everyone else so he can have some kind of nebulous competitive advantage in his quest to "Win AI". May his bloody colon be the salvation for all the rest of us.
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If I can't afford to build or buy a new PC to run AI, learn AI, build with AI, then the AI companies won't be making any money on me.
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For kicks, I built a PC on Newegg a few days ago. $830 for 64GB RAM. A year ago, I bought 16GB for $63. I was hoping to replace a PC this year, but not holding my breath. Guess I'll stick with this Intel i7-9700k for another year or two.
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Of course. Because they're better than us. You can tell by how much money they have. I have 105, they have 1010. They are 100,000 times as good as me. QED.
(/s, if that wasn't clear)
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All I know for sure is that Micron will not be getting my business when they decide to reenter the consumer market.
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I've been tempted to build a PC just because I have a few spare 32 GB sticks of DDR4 and an idle 3080. I don't need another computer. I don't even know what I would begin to do with it.
But with prices where they are, it feels wasteful to just have the hardware sitting there.
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With my grocery bills at unheard of highs, with my power bills ever increasing, my existing systems old enough to be interested in dating and a few old enough to vote, it warms my heart to see that companies are making record profits and their execs millions of dollars.
Thank goodness. They deserve it, they truly do. I can just hope as I start going into debt just to keep my family fed and housed that they can make even more every quarter.
Thank goodness. They deserve it, they truly do. I can just hope as I start going into debt just to keep my family fed and housed that they can make even more every quarter.
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“Micron is taking money from the American people under bipartisan support, and it is then fucking those people over by killing its consumer-facing line of memory with its mega corporate buyers getting priority over the forlorn consumers who themselves footed the bill to pay for their own economic destruction. What they can also do is continue processing your daily computing needs in those data centers while making the hardware impossible for you to buy because you can't fucking afford it because they bought it all…. So while normal people are feeling the walls closing in around them, software-as-a-service looms from data centers hoovering up all the affordable hardware, signaling the end of an era for affordable home computing.”
--Steve Burke, Gamers Nexus, "WTF Just Happened? | The Corrupt Memory Industry & Micron."
--Steve Burke, Gamers Nexus, "WTF Just Happened? | The Corrupt Memory Industry & Micron."
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I'm just hunkering down on AM4.
Upgraded by motherboard for the sake of PCIe 4.0 and bought a RX 9070XT at Christmas, kept my Ye Olde Ryzen 5 5600X and 32GB of memory.
You can still buy DDR4 locally for not insane prices.
Upgraded by motherboard for the sake of PCIe 4.0 and bought a RX 9070XT at Christmas, kept my Ye Olde Ryzen 5 5600X and 32GB of memory.
You can still buy DDR4 locally for not insane prices.
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Me too. But folks like us are being attritioned out. Younger people are accustomed to subscriptions for computational services. Local computing is going away.
I guess I'll take up crocheting as my next hobby. Who knows, it might be as fun as getting the highest possible visuals on a PC in Cyberpunk 2077.
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This is why we need a marginal tax of 95% on any income over $10 million annually. If the amount of money you can earn is tied to your company's share price, and gouging consumers during scarcity increases your profits and share price, that's what CEOs are going to do.
To be clear, a tax rate of 95% on $10m isn't going to solve all the world's problems, it just removes the incentive to behave like this. If 95% of your planned bonus is going to go to the IRS, then it makes more sense not take the bonus, and instead invest more in your workers, the company, and the economy as a whole.
People don't like to admit it, but taxes on sugary drinks and cigarettes cause people to consume less. When you make something incredibly expensive, most people do less of it. Not all, but most. The same logic would apply to CEOs and obscene paychecks.
To be clear, a tax rate of 95% on $10m isn't going to solve all the world's problems, it just removes the incentive to behave like this. If 95% of your planned bonus is going to go to the IRS, then it makes more sense not take the bonus, and instead invest more in your workers, the company, and the economy as a whole.
People don't like to admit it, but taxes on sugary drinks and cigarettes cause people to consume less. When you make something incredibly expensive, most people do less of it. Not all, but most. The same logic would apply to CEOs and obscene paychecks.
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When the bubble bursts, In a just world, Altman, Musk and the like would end up penniless on a street corner begging for the pocket change I just used to buy 1TB of DDR5.
We don't live in a just world though.
We don't live in a just world though.
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That ship sailed in the 80's. These people don't make any income, they are given stock options at rock-bottom prices that they exercise once a decade for funding purposes. Usually tax-free.
Really, we can leave a lot of stock-casino problems at the feet of (failed) attempts to limit CEO pay long ago.
I expect limiting stock options is near. It won't help. They'll get their compensation, just in a different and worse way than before.
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You're making the mistake of thinking that you are their customer. You are far too small to be their customer. They were never planning on making any money off of you.
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Micron probably won't get back into the consumer market. They'll resell their chips to packagers like GSkill instead.
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If this is what it takes to kill Electron apps and Chrome's insatiable demand for RAM, I'm going to be very upset because then I'll have some nice things to say about the AI bubble.
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Our consultant wanted me to upgrade our 1 year old server from 128GB to 1TB of memory. DDR5 ECC RDRAM. When I saw the price tag… Yeah, no way Jose. We'll have to live with the performance that far less would give. Even 256GB is also 2-3 grand.
My hardware integrator told me "I don't want you to buy the extra RAM from me, my cost is stupid high, get it direct. But if you need to swap all the DIMMs, I'll gladly cut you a check for the [year-old] ones."
My hardware integrator told me "I don't want you to buy the extra RAM from me, my cost is stupid high, get it direct. But if you need to swap all the DIMMs, I'll gladly cut you a check for the [year-old] ones."
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I actually did use one in a PC I just finished building for a friend, which is why I don't have a spare AM4 motherboard or Ryzen 7 CPU on hand.
The thought of selling them has, of course, occurred to me...but it feels kind of profiteer-ish to price them according to the market, and pricing them where they should be just means they get picked up by a scalper to resell.
I don't mean to make this sound like it's some huge challenge; it plainly isn't. It's just that doing something better than having them sit in a box takes effort. And possibly human interaction.
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I'm always amazed at just how far computers have come in the last 40-50 years. In the early 1980's my family had an Apple II+, which came with 48KB of RAM. My father spent $200 (roughly $800 in today dollars) on a 16KB expansion card. Six orders of magnitude increase in memory capacity in a much smaller form factor for (effectively) half the price, inflation adjusted. Even at the new ridiculous prices, the progress is astounding. That said, screw AI. 
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There are quite a few orgs that take spare computer parts for charity, if you want to avoid the profiteering feelings. It would probably still require human interaction however.
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You aren't understanding their end goal. It's not about YOU having a PC. Its about you renting cloud services from someone else as you are just some plebeian peasant who can't spend 4-7 grand on a BYO computer. Subscriptions, That is the end goal. Get everyone to constantly funnel money into a company until the day you die and probably after you die as it will probably auto renew the subscription.
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Oh, that's a great call; thanks!
(In my defense, my wife handles our charitable giving, and we generally have a "the most effective donation is money" policy. Obviously, it's not just that I'm too thick to have thought of it on my own.)
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That will be 0 wafers the guy has to eat. OpenAI only signed letters of intent. There is no 40% of the market they are buying (OpenAI doesn't have the billions for that). The rest of the market went into panic mode just because OpenAI declared their intent to corner the market.
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Your username suggest that you might be an enthusiastic buyer.
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I just built a new computer for my roommate. I warned them to buy the RAM soon, but they didn't. It was literally the last thing they went to get. So I ended up pulling the old ram (32 gb) out of the old computer (about 8 years old) and putting it in the new one. The RAM was fine as is, but slower than the stuff that came out years later. The CPU made up for some speed issues, and the Linux OS boots up about ten times faster than Win10 did, so they're happy.
When I priced the RAM, it would have been about $300 for 64 gb. When I went to build the computer, that number was more than double (~$700 at the time, and it's only gone up since then).
When I built MY computer with 64 gb in 2023, it was about $180.
Fucking nuts on pricing.
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Yep. Feels like we are the proverbial 'Herd of Cats' being slowly but surely directed back into our little computer cubicles where we will use Mainframes with TSO accounts. We will only run approved Programs with approved Data and be happy with the approved Output. The era of owing your computer and controlling what is on it is rapidly coming to an end. Oh, you will still pay for one but everything that runs on it will be dictated by Microsoft, Google, and other mega corps.
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I finally replaced my 2014 computer because of this AI stuff, and stayed on AM4 just because of the RAM prices. My paltry 16GB of DDR4 was still like 3x as expensive as it was earlier in the year.
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Disappointed in the lack of mention of Sam Altman's personal role in driving up prices for everyone other than OpenAI by making an anti-competitive and consumer-hostile deal to claim a large percentage of all wafer starts.
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Where?
I need to upgrade my laptop to 64GB. It costs nearly 4x what it did a few months ago.
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