Slight tangent, I found this chart for the prices of RAM:

https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/

It's not looking good, I don't think supply is catching with demand yet.

Though the other day I learned there are many technologies for "RAM", and most of them are garbage for LLMs but still useful for other things, like microcontrollers. So I'm thinking my next "build" is going to be a guitar.

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undersuit 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Though the other day I learned there are many technologies for "RAM"

I'm an advocate of sticking a $5 16Gb Optane stick from eBay on a $10 M.2 to PCIe 1x adapter from eBay. Set it up as swap in Windows or Linux. Or pay $200 for a 16GB stick of DDR5.

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dom96 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Super interesting charts there. What's really interesting to me is that the GPU prices (which also includes RAM) didn't see such a massive increase in price as the RAM itself. Anyone know why that is?

	▲	SloopJon 5 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I held my nose and bought an RTX 5070 Ti for $100 over MSRP in January. The very next week the same model was up $200. It turns out that NVIDIA had been subsidizing retail graphics cards with its Open Pricing Program. Not the whole story, but it may help explain the relative flatness of the graph until the end of January. The other part of it is that the MSRP already baked in a substantial increase from the previous generation. While RAM was near rock-bottom pricing when this hit, current-gen GPUs definitely were not.
	▲	recursivecaveat 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		A $1500 5800 only has 16GB which would be $250 if you compare it against the DDR6 graph on that page. Given that there's only 2 top tier GPU manufacturers at most, they were probably already not very BOM cost sensitive.
	▲	MengerSponge 6 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		RAM is just part of the GPU bill of materials? It might also be that NVIDIA is a natural monopoly, while memory manufacturers are a cartel...

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MengerSponge 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> It's not looking good, I don't think supply is catching with demand yet.

Surely this will be helped by a helium supply shock.