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The alternative is they could charge more. They could. And people would pay it.

HBM requires stacking the chips. So they need to shave the layers, glue, stack more, shave again. They also require a substrate what is even more wafers. The issue is that a error in the stack means a lot of losses.

In order to get high bandwidth, you want memory as close as possible to the GPU. The more trace lane length = signal loss, bandwidth loss.. HBM is compact, and so you can stack 24GB modules, 8 around a GPU die.

If you tried to do that with normal memory, you need like 64 modules. So a a TON of traces more that all need to be equal length, and because so many = far away from the GPU = less bandwidth.

The issue is like stated above, its a process that waste a ton of wafers. Wafers that can make easily 3x more normal memory.

Intel with "Crescent Island" is trying to make a 160GB card using LPDDR5x memory but the bandwidth is only ~700GB/s.

Motherboard. New motherboard…so new cpu socket (mine was Broadwell)…and new ram needed.

GPU is mostly fine and can probably reuse that but it’s Vega so not the greatest I was due for an upgrade but the prices of everything is ridiculous.

The thought of pc-of-Theseus’ing my busted ass PC is just sad.

Thank god I bought a PS5 Pro before Sony started jacking up the prices.

I remember when buying a $300 GPU was extravagant and gave you state of the art graphics.

Building your own is cheaper, although not by a ton. Valve isn't taking a loss on them.

> IMO, Migrating to small-scale local LLMs would be a significant improvement over using data centers.

LLM serving is most efficient when you batch a lot of parallel requests together. Data center solutions also have the advantage of collecting queries from around the globe, so the hardware can be utilized around the clock.

Having everyone serve their own local LLMs would produce a lot more memory demand. Not less. The same memory would be idle most of the time, and when it was used it would be used for 1 person instead of a batch of requests.

There are other reasons to run local LLMs, but solving hardware demand problems is not one of them.

> Migrating to small-scale local LLMs would be a significant improvement over using data centers.

This shift is probably inevitable, but it will vary significantly by region depending on prices for electricity. Look at, for example, the difference in fundamental homelab build recommendations between Germans and just about anyone else. Electricity prices in Germany are so high that even a now expensive Raspberry Pi or other ARM board is often preferred over Intel/AMD builds due to low power draw (especially low idle power draw), an effect that adds up for a machine running all the time over years.

With local LLMs and the GPUs to run it, especially if you want a model available to you all the time and can remote into your local network to use it whenever you want, there's no escaping much higher power draws, even at idle. Wherever electricity is expensive, the electric bill can be a prohibitive barrier.

> Unfortunately, I can't not use AI because it provides the best speech recognition I've ever used and, going along with hand problems, it now allows me to write code after a three-year absence from that skill.

I'll second this. The combination of Whisper + LLM makes speech recognition fantastic. I occasionally have arm pain from typing, and this is a Godsend.

I don't use it to write code - but in my experience stuff like emails + docs was the greater source of pain (one generally types slower while coding).

You don't have to directly buy RAM to be affected. It's just like oil or electricity...if RAM was part of the economic process that you participated in, then that price increase will be passed down to you. If every datacenter in the US suddenly had to pay double for electricity, how would that affect every operation that is operating in that datacenter? Ok now it's not electricity, it's the RAM.

The headline says "sold out". That doesn't mean prices will go up, that means the memory will not be available at all for many companies and the products they make will not be available to consumers.

You forgot to tack on the rise in prices of SSDs too, so that's $50 per year at least.

>Most adults I know now use their phone for everything

You mean the cloud for everything. A lot of phone tasks share their computational and storage workloads off in the invisible ether that has actual computers with real costs behind them. Amazon has no problem with bumping up their costs in order to pay for their fleet of servers. I mean, what business doesn't use the cloud these days.

Almost everything we consume is downstream of RAM pricing. I don’t buy a phone every year, but corporate workforces, streaming servers, cars, factories, etc. will all cost more next year.

Remember when car companies couldn’t get the chips they needed to make cars? And so now there’s not enough used cars. And so car companies charge way more the new ones and just stopped making cheap cars altogether?

At the low end, where the vast majority of people are, even in the US, an extra $120 will double the price.

Prices rising is inflation.

It's inflationary when the effect is big enough to have a meaningful impact on the price of the average good.

Any price increase can be considered inflationary. They usually don’t come down by all that much

It's inflationary because this demand is backed by Monopoly money. OpenAI is promising to buy half the global supply of RAM with money they don't actually have, pricing out people who would like to make purchases with real money and not $1 trillion in debt.

And once we also decided that we needed to attack Iran.

Literally put a 50% tax on everything and then said it'll only raise prices 2%

Yeah but DDR3 was faster then and still is now - I can't imagine my M4 Mac having a slightly older version RAM would meaningfully affect me, but another 24GB of it (or whatever I have) would certainly be an improvement.

CPUs have L1, L2, L3+ caches too after all.

A better SSD can get up to a passable GB/s rate, but when you're waiting tens of microseconds instead of tens of nanoseconds you can't use it the same way. And a worse SSD is 10x slower in GB/s too, compared to old super cheap RAM.

Hey, I apologize for using you as tech support, but I found tons of those M10 sticks you are talking about, but what should I be looking for in terms of an adapter? All I can find are adapters listed as M.2:

https://www.amazon.com/GLOTRENDS-Adapter-Aluminum-Heatsink-P...

Is that really competitive with just doing a pciexpress card with faster M2 SSD ?

> Pick a USB cable and buy it from ANY retailer, let's make it easier, buy a USB-C cable.

Okay, let's assume it's a USB-C cable and not just something USB-C shaped that pretends to be one.

> Does it support power delivery?

Yes.

> If so, how many watts?

Always at least 60W (3A). Up to 240W if it's e-marked.

> What is the data rate

Depends whether it's a USB 2.0-only cable (480Mbps) or a complete cable (20Gbps). Possibly more in Thunderbolt or USB4 modes - cables that handle those will be marked (both visually and with an e-mark). In any case, pretty easy to check just by plugging things in.

USBism has a lot of elements similar to the "connect your agent to your data with this 'curl | sh' script and do anything. Maybe some friction and incompatibility is useful in some cases.

It's not just currency, Amazon Canada have some jumps recently not in US version:

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

Its a way to make sure the delivery takes place. A code is sent to recipient and recipient only gives it to the delivery person once item is handed over. Delivery person cant mark item as 'done' without the code. I've seen Uber Eats do the same thing sometimes.

They are producing about a third of what Micron (smallest of big three) produces, and plan on being on par with them in ~4 years.

> Only for China, of course

HP, Acer and Asus are now using them

https://asia.nikkei.com/business/china-tech/hp-asus-and-acer...

That’s less that China needs to buy from the rest of the world, so it’s still a win.

From the "Apple II (original)" Wikipedia article:

"The original retail price of the computer with 4 KiB of RAM was US$1,298 (equivalent to $6,900 in 2025)[21] and with the maximum 48 KiB of RAM, it was US$2,638 (equivalent to $14,020 in 2025)"

> For the skeptical ones

The words after this point make you less convincing, not more, as they only serve to confirm the egregious slippery slope of your reasoning.

Yes and if it's true it's usually downvoted or flagged on HN

Price per GiB is skewed by definition. 10 Years ago, 8GiB was enough and cost between $10 and $20. For the longest time this century, a cheap build was in the $250 to $350 range. Nowadays I'm having trouble with that price range building from used parts.

According to your link, DDR5 today has the same price in real US $ as DDR3 was in 2014, during a brief spike towards high prices.

Since that peak in 2014 until today, the prices were lower than now. The peak in 2017 was more than 10% lower than today.

To reach permanently higher prices than today, we must go backwards until 2011.

So we have already regressed at least 12 years into the past, but more likely 15 years, and it is unknown how much more we will regress.

Recipe for delicious pizza:

1. Make extra greasy pizza. Nauseating-level of grease.

2. Put pizza through De-Greasinator 5000.

Sounds efficient.

Maybe they should start with Claude.

"it converted my gambling app into a three-armed bandit!"

What’s implied here is that devs were supposed to optimize for user resources, not for developer convenience.

They were supposed to optimize for the situation in which they weren't the only program running on a computer, and they failed to do it.

Time to bring back 32 bit OS, that way you only need 4GB RAM per computer!

Are there any of those left? The popular VMs for Java, Javascript and dotnet are all very mature heavily tuned designs.

You know that Moore's law is about transistor count? What worked really well for CPU in eg the 1990s was Dennard scaling. That drove the Hz higher. And Dennard scaling is what stopped working.

Moore's law is alive and well.

Moore's "Law" is not a law, it's just an observation of market forces at a particular time.

CXMT is sold out too.

https://www.guru3d.com/story/cxmt-dram-capacity-reportedly-s...

You still have to actually meet the demand. It's not good if you don't sell any products.

It’s temporary revenue, it’s not as if those businesses are suddenly fundamentally better.

To me it seems like they’re just riding the AI hype out, expecting a crash after, and not willing to risk a lot of capital on someone else’s bubble.

True - but what is happening now is very destructive to a lot of important companies.

Its not like demand will be lowered by this though, I dont see how this would be bad for ASML (besides PR-China generally not respecting IP and them reverse engineering it)

You want a bunch of 4 kilobyte DRAM chips with an interface that predates DDR1, for your Commodore 64?

Also there is a ton of debt flying around, its not just equities hurting VC funds, real banks are facing risks now.

That's the reason RAM companies aren't expanding. Worst case, they can sell their normal production to gamers.

What kind of default risk?

What we got in 2008 was central banks (eg Fed and ECB) willfully collapsing nominal GDP in their economies. Have a look at the dot-com bust or Black Monday for comparison.

> anybody who was okay with the original cameras

Who cares about those people? I would argue even they themselves hardly do. And sure, they'll be even more okay with even worse stuff, and that even worse stuff will be even more hated by even more people, whatever the people who are "okay with" (that can mean ignorance, obedience, or evil intent, but it's not justification). If they can be okay with mass surveillance they can be okay with other things, so they're basically a wash, they're just okay with stuff.

> At least one third of the country is still okay with them

Then they can be okay with the majority saying you know what, we're sick of you, you can either stop having your toys or you will be segregated from us and live under your own surveillance. "Being okay with something" isn't some magical wand or a fortress, it's just a limp shrug. It means "pass".

> In sum, we don't have as much control over these things as you seem to believe.

I don't see the connection with the sentence before that, which is a minority being "okay with" something and a majority willing to fight and out there doing it. It's not about controlling what a minority of people are okay with, it's about changing what is done. The people who are okay with stuff can go read a comic book until it's over, how does that not solve anything you raised about them? Or are you saying their being okay with stuff should be respected or even heeded? Couldn't they just make that claim themselves, if they wanted to?

Imagine a raging house fire, people stumbling over each other trying to help, and some guy steps up and goes "WAIT!" they all look at him, sure he has a major contribution for interrupting something like this, a good idea, a plan perhaps; and he goes "... I'm actually okay with this."

>upgraded to drone fleets

I wouldn't do that unless you want your airspace filled with birdshot

It doesn't matter. The perception is all datacenters do AI (not necessarily wrong nowadays either) and that's all that matters to the public when they see so many lost jobs and high computer / phone prices.

here's one

https://www.datacentermap.com/usa/michigan/ann-arbor/related...

You can hear them from quite far away since companies like X use on-site Methane Gas Turbine Generators because they don't want to wait for the grid capacity to catch up.

In the US, selling at the (new higher) market price during a declared state-of-emergency is illegal in most states and territories.

It was legal in USSR for USSR to scalp though, depends on point of view.

Then we'll have a lot of cheap RAM.

> Isn't scalping a term used for tickets?

It is also a term use in general trading anywhere traders open and close their positions quickly to make profit off an upswing which might be in part caused by traders doing this. If done with inside knowledge it is illegal, in this case more commonly referred to as “front running” (which is what many suspect happened with numerous ahemfortuitous/serendipitous position changes around announcements of changes in the state of the US vs Iran situation).

> Also, these companies supposedly intend to actually use the RAM they ordered, not reselling at some inflated price.

As well as the companies ordering for the purpose of DC roll-outs and upgrades, there will definitely be some buying purely to sell at a higher price a short time later.

> It's all fair game IMHO, except the elephant in the room which is that the AI company bubble might pop.

[and with reference to the sibling reply to this: “Then we'll have a lot of cheap RAM.”]

I don't think it will pop with a sudden bang, and even if it is it won't affect these memory sales or probably those for 2028. The first real effect will be those using the AI tools suddenly finding themselves needing to pay a lot more for them as companies offering those services deal with reduced access to “new” credit from the circling investment pool shore up their fanciful accounting that way instead. The DC builds/upgrades that are currently planned will happen but more funded by end users and less by the investment cycle. New plans might not be actioned at the same scale, but it will take a while for that to affect component prices as there is a lot of lead time involved.

I don't see the AI bubble popping any time soon (as in, not in terms of physical datacenter buildout - stock prices could fall). Even if progress hits a brick wall, we still have multiple years of just expanding out the models we have to more people in more industries.

That's it. Which is insane. We used to buy used DDR4 from obsolete servers in buckets before it was going to become e-waste. Now even that one is expensive.

Isn't DDR4 like, old and obsolete? From my knowledge, you can't just take a fab that produces DDR4 and make it produce DDR5 or higher. It's kind of a leap that requires replacing a lot of stuff.

I would expect that old DDR4 machinery to end up somewhere else, still chugging along. Maybe someone buys the old production and keeps chugging low quality DDR4 or something.

To me, it sounds like that didn't happened. Fabs that were producing legacy DDR4 are still producing it, just selling it higher and surfing on the consumer price increase of DDR5. As DDR5 became more expensive, people looked to build old AM4 PCs with the older memory, and the market just raised the price so that option would also cost more. IMHO DDR4 price increase has nothing to do with production.