> If you have a massive excess of demand ready to pay any price, and a limited supply, of course the sellers will take advantage, that's how any market work

The question is how quickly the supply adjusts. In a free market, the suppliers would respond to the price signal by quickly expanding their production to meet the elevated demand.

But a market captured by a cartel will be much slower to expand the supply.

So, the test isn't "how much is price going up" it's "how aggressively are the RAM producers expanding supply production"

"that the limited supply goes to the buyer who need it the most" - I would say that the limited supply goes to the buyer who can afford to pay higher than others. Someone may need the memory more, but may not have the deeper pockets to pay for it like NVidia and Apple might.

> I don't understand the distinction you are making.

It's pretty simple. In a correctly regulated market the sellers are in competition with each other so there is a limit to how much they can increase prices, since they'll just lose business to their competitor.

In a poorly regulated market that allows competitors to collude with each other to raise prices by the same amount, they'll inflate prices much further.

> I don't understand the distinction you are making.

20 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_industry_price_fixing

> According to the one-count charge filed in San Francisco's federal court on Thursday, Park conspired with unnamed employees from other memory makers to fix the price of DRAM sold to computer makers from April 1, 2001, to June 15, 2002. The government says the move directly affected sales to U.S. computer makers Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Compaq, IBM, Apple Computer, and Gateway.

etc

In an absolutely free market? sure. But we don't live in an absolutely free market, the memory manufacturers have refused to budge on creating new fabs until recently out of caution and to be able to create a demand excess.

They have slow rolled rollouts and everything, if there wasn't CXMT they would probably still wouldn't have budged on building new fabs for a while longer.

You can absolutely price fix/manufacture a shortage. Ever heard of merchants setting fire to crops after hoarding to sell at a higher price?

The issue is the distributer and producer are the very same people this essentially means producers have no incentive to rationalize supply, they can make much more money of the long drawn out shortage.

The distinction is that on the latter case you have a cartel that decided to fix prices and fuck everyone in the ass.

same here, even when we went to larger hardware producers, they were basically we would sell you, but we cant actually get any RAM at all either.

There are never shortages in a free market, just higher prices.

You make it sound like the crunch is caused by manufacturers, my understanding is that it is caused by the abnormal demand. I am not aware that RAM production is at a historically low level.

who is the 4th?

> There are only 3 manufacturers (about to be 4 soon) total.

...3 manufacturers with a long history of price fixing...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_industry_price_fixing

> To take advantage they'd have to do some form of price fixing which in most places is a very big footgun.

When parent commenter says "They have done this in the past after all" that's exactly what they're talking about. Micron, Samsung, Hyinx (prior to SK Group acquisition), and others all participated in RAM price fixing in the early 2000's.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_industry_price_fixing

If it's a highly profitable footgun why not?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_industry_price_fixing#202...

Just to be clear the big Memory giants are famous for their price fixing historically speaking.

I like this idea! Perhaps folks will game less on PCs and consoles. But would they shift to playing on their phones? Or play less video games overall?

Also, when OpenAI's new device comes out, would people shift to talking to these small devices?

I think it's probably for the best, the hyperconsumerism around electronics was getting out of hand. Computers are fast and have been fast for a while now. An iPhone 12 is probably more than fine to do iPhone things, if Apple didn't sabotage their old phones with poorly-written poor-performance software.

There also seems to have been a major shift in strategy from AMD / Intel / Apple / NVidia due to this, as I was used to CPU / GPU / chipset upgrades coming out more regularly with double-digit percentage improvements each year, but that seems to be basically over for the consumer space now that everyone is just trying to build as much AI hardware as fast as possible for enterprise markets.

I also used to rebuild my desktop every 1-2 years and upgrade laptops every 2-3 years, but I'm currently a bit past that and have no plans to refresh anything in the near future. I'll probably wait another CPU and GPU generation or two to even consider it, especially with prices being this ridiculous.

I'm fully anticipating AI hardware demand to dry up once Anthropic and OpenAI start tanking financially in a few years after missing earnings and investors and banks wanting their loans paid back combined with more folks realizing that LLMs cannot achieve AGI. After that, I would hope that the demand that's driving this pricing spike will fall along with it, but I also fully expect hardware companies to be as greedy as possible, so maybe a 32TB HDD will just cost $1000 going forward and the era of "a decent gaming PC made up of the tier of components one step below TOTL costs ~$2000" we've been in since the 1990s is fully over, and it's just going to be more like $5k going forward.

I'm running a 12 year old i5 3.2ghz CPU with 16 GB of memory, an SSD and an AMD RX 480 (8 GB) GPU. Currently using a 100% scaled 4k monitor and a 2nd 1440p monitor. I keep the machine on 24 / 7. It's great for software development along with video + image editing and casual gaming. Everything feels fast and snappy.

I will use this until the hardware stops. There's a 0% chance I'd buy hardware at the current prices.

I have a 2021 M1 pro and see no reason to upgrade it... ever?

I do web & general java work on it and it's plenty fast even using a memory hog like IntelliJ (which is typically disk bound anyway). Claude tells me that a new macbook would feel about 1.8x faster in my CPU-bound cases, which is not common.

If memory prices returned to normal and if local inference gets over the hump, I could see upgrading for local AI agents, but I'm fine waiting for a good long while on that.

I say all this as someone who, five years ago, was a perpetual upgrader: immediately bought new product and got excited for next product. Wonder if the future will see the end of that culture in tech and, looking back, it was a little silly and wasteful anyway.

I'm also using an iPhone mini 12 and it's fine.

There isn't much to upgrade to if all you want is a desktop for gaming, a non-workstation work box or just a decent laptop. Much like smartphones, there just hasn't been much innovation of late. A midrange gaming desktop from mid 2023, something like rtx 4070 and ryzen 7800x3d, can still play pretty much any video game on max settings and high framerate at 1440p, and has sufficient performance for most workstation-esque tasks as long as you have enough ram. Similarly, the only thing my spare macbook m2 lacks compared to m5 is hardware av1 decoding - the performance is worse, but I don't really notice it in normal usage, and macOS 27 runs perfectly well on it.

Local AI will crush any machine, of course, and if you need a 512gb ram box you'll probably need to sell both kidneys, but you're well past the average consumer territory with those.

So, fingers crossed nothing breaks down and that some of the funny money goes into R&D which will eventually trickle down to consumer devices in a few years (16TB gum stick SSDs at sane prices pretty please) instead of endless datacenter GPUs and SSDs that will be tossed into a shredder in x years.

My desktop PC turns 20 next year. I've never seen any need to upgrade it, went out of my way to build it with silent parts and it rarely if ever goes outside a single-digit CPU load (before anyone asks, software development and a bit of CAD work). I'll upgrade it when something in it physically fails, which means I'll need to replace it with new hardware with 5-10x the specs just to get the same performance.

My laptop is currently about two years into a typically 5-year lifespan, limited by when the keys start to fail rather than any need to upgrade it just because. The RAM in it is now worth more than the rest of the laptop.

I've had a RAM stick fail.

Granted, I've been building my own computer for 30 years and I've only seen it happen ONCE.

But I've seen plenty of other failures:

- Two hard drives -- One got dropped on the floor, so it was no surprise, the other was showing degraded performance and SMART showed some scary numbers and I was able to replace it before I lost data.

- One GPU, replaced under warranty.

- One AIO water cooler, replaced under warranty. Somehow, the water vanished from the loop. I'm guessing a microscopic leak that evaporated as fast as it leaked.

- Two power supplies -- One randomly exploded. Just started making popping noises and shooting sparks out the back. At autopsy, I determined that the fan failed (it was hard to spin manually) and it overheated. The other was just being overloaded. I had just gotten a new GPU and the PSU wasn't big enough for it.

- Several case fans.

Never seen a CPU or motherboard failure, even when my AIO water cooler was failing and my CPU was constantly at thermal limits. Never had an SSD/NVMe failure.

Anecdotally, RAM failures are more common than they used to be in previous decades, I assume due to increased capacities and smaller process nodes. Looser manufacturing standards may also play a part.

The component category I've never seen fail is CPU.

Most devices never test their memory and don’t have ecc, so you generally never know. Random instability can be fixed by restarting and your program not being in an area with bad bits anymore.

You may literally be the only one.

I had a 2012 mac book pro that burned out 2 different crucial memory sticks. Would have bricked the machine if it was the soldered-on type, but it was the last model apple sold that have swappable memory. Crucial had a lifetime warranty so they replaced them for free.

I used to game on it and I think the design just couldn't handle the cpu and dgpu being active for long periods, it would get extremely hot in the area close to where the memory was.

I recently had part of a 32 gig DIMM go bad on a 128 gig system. One of the larger VMs was spontaneously rebooting for no apparent reason. I was able to find the addresses with MemTest86 and map out 512 megs of the affected DIMM with the Linux kernel memmap option.

Well, you’re lucky. I had to change laptop memory sticks a few times. Though not since they are soldered directly to the motherboard

on older PC bios would perform a memory test - you may remember those - and that's where it would mark a bunch of pages dead/unusuable and it was not uncommon at all.

Same, it's either bad to begin with or it's basically immortal.

Interesting, I've had two fail already in much shorter time. One was brand new, another quite old.

This isn’t true anymore beginning with DDR4 speeds.

I've seen some fail. Might have had to do with the fact that the computers were literally flooded (river came up faster than the sandbaggers could keep up) while running.

I've had a few RAM sticks fail, but the ECC usually caught it first. Also had one case that somehow the stick slightly unseated itself; dunno how but it was out of service for months until someone opened it up and reseated the stick.

...granted though I've also seen a backpane on a server fail. I didn't think that was even possible until that point.

DRAM fabs are multi-billion dollar investments which take years to come online. That's the whole reason we're in this situation, there is no quick fix available.

This is why the companies should be aiming for a soft landing to this fad (if they know that they can't make the ROI that makes the industry worthwhile).

"I've seen gluts not followed by shortages, but I've never seen a shortage not followed by a glut." - NNTaleb

My understanding is that it's fundamentally a fab capacity limit. At a given node size/technology (think 7nm, etc) they can only output so many wafers. If AI data centers are generating enormous demand for memory, then that's what those wafers are going to be used to for, unless they can be outcompeted, hence higher prices.

I'm not actually sure if enterprise designated memory is equivalent or not to consumer designated. Could be they are the same just packaged differently and/or with better binning. Either way, it's the same supply/demand dynamic at work.

Memory fabs make a mix of DDR/LPDDR/GDDR/HBM and they continuously adjust the mix to market demand. If demand for HBM drops they will start making more consumer RAM.

Datacentre NVMe disk is still usable in a standard desktop. Sever memory less so, but essentially if there were no 'new' server market whatsoever then you could redirect 100% of memory production to consumer chips without enormous upheaval.

By the way I personally think this scenario is very unlikely to happen.

Except staying on the edge costs exactly the same as not, when you take the resell value of the components on the second hand market into account. The problem is that some can afford to lock their capital in the hardware (via one-time investment) and some do not.

R9700 will lose less than 30% of value in the upcoming 3 years. Give or take. Yet people buy ancient cards for way more than 30% of R9700's cost.

And watch … $5 says they have nothing to do with the ram because even if there was enough power there’s no use case for this much spend

If I had to guess they’re just buying up ram to keep others from having it same way meta, Google, etc hired up engineers to keep others from having them

next they will become successful business by reselling RAM

And that's the really fun part of all this, that weak substitutes will also become more expensive. But on the bright side, I've got dozens of sticks of DDR3 RAM that I'm hoarding like Pokémon cards. Any day now, we'll get desperate enough to start using them again!

Some people really so need the /s huh

I'm quite sure he's being sarcastic.

"The best good ever is to maximise shareholder profits" is a tired and cliched caricature that some people unfortunately take seriously. But this is too on the nose.