Submitted 4 days ago by themachinestops@lemmy.dbzer0.com to technology@lemmy.world
“I’ve been saving for months to get the Corsair Dominator 64GB CL30 kit,” one beleagured PC builder wrote on Reddit. “It was about $280 when I looked,” said u/RaidriarT, “Fast forward today on PCPartPicker, they want $547 for the same kit? A nearly 100% increase in a couple months?”
Doesn’t Windows 11 in practice require even more memory than Windows 10 to operate with decent performance?
Meanwhile my Linux gaming PC seems to actually use less memory than back when it was a Windows machine.
My work laptop was upgraded to Windows 11 and performance has severely suffered.
As someone who usually uses 3 monitors (sometimes 4) and does GIS, it’s an issue.
Oh yeah. If you’ve got 4 GB ram, win 11 is going to absolutely skullfuck that machine.
Are you using scaling?
On my work laptop dragging a window from one monitor to the next would make them “snag” in between borders as they struggled and stuttered trying to change the scale.
It looked soooo fucking stupid I couldn’t believe my eyes
Constant surveillance will do that. Legit “telemetry” wouldn’t be using that much processing power.
I’m thinking Recall is just Microsoft trying to cut costs on their servers processing all the surveillance, and force users to pay the costs of all the extra electricity and equipment needed.
Nah it’s probably just Edge (aka Chrome) all over the new UI.
God fucking damn it… Now they want our RAM?!
I need that for all my Chrome tabs, you fucking clankers!
the worst part is I have always been stingy about upgrading my ram figuring I could always do it later so I run real lean. I only recently went to 16 and ran at 8 for a long while but im pretty sure 32 would help a lot.
tomshardware.com/…/perfect-storm-of-demand-and-su…
OpenAI’s “Stargate” project has recently signed an agreement with Samsung and SK hynix for up to 900,000 wafers of DRAM per month. That figure alone would account for close to 40% of global DRAM output.
High-density NAND products are effectively sold out months in advance. Samsung’s next-generation V9 NAND is already nearly booked before it’s even launched. Micron has presold almost all of its High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) output through 2026. Contracts that once covered a quarter now span years, with hyperscalers buying directly at the source.
If China’s going to compete on AI, it’s going to be doing so with a limited supply of memory, I expect.
They’re going to go all in on domestic chip manufacturing, and they are catching up much faster than armchair generals, and even actual generals, predicted.
Just in time for all those windows PCs that MS is trying to force people to upgrade
Waiting for upcoming patch tuesday to see if mas scripts work
Nice article but the numbers are a lot lower here in the EU.
While there is some pricing increase it’s currently more around 50% and not 100%.
The selected kit is also extremely expensive (350€ was ~300€) - similar kits are available for a lot less (270€ was ~180€) - so I doubt that anyone was buying it in the first place.
I also think it’s not completely AI related but more likely that this is another RAM price fixing scandal happening right now. Pretty much the same that we see today happend in 2017-2018.
Europe is also hit hard. The kit I was about to buy increased from 1 to 2K euro…
Bruh, my whole mid-to-high range gaming PC costs 850 to 2K euro. What is the intended use of such an expensive RAM kit? Is it LLMs again?
This seems like an appropriate place for me to bitch:
2 months ago I bought a new pre-built pc. It should’ve had 64gb of ram but had 32gb. They said the sticks they used were out of stock so they gave me a credit for $100 USD. I spent the 100 on 32gb more of what I thought was the exact same ram. I fucked up and bought a slightly higher speed so they wouldn’t work together after I tried for an afternoon. I also checked the correct listing i should’ve bought but it was more expensive, at about $125.
I gave up and decided I’d just buy the faster ram again when it came back, rather than return it and get the correct one. It went out of stock in the time it took me to get my order so I figured I’d just wait.
2 MONTHS later, it never came back in stock but an almost identical pair, with slightly different timing, is in stock right now at $216. If i had any idea this was coming in just 2 months, I could’ve just bought 64gb at once and started fresh, or corrected my mistake by returning what I bought.
So i guess I’ll continue waiting, but hey at least notepad has copilot in it.
I always thought ram of different speeds worked together, they just were run at the speed of the slowest stick.
In theory yes. In practice it depends on how finicky your motherboard is.
I thought so too, but after a few hours I gave up.
could be a bios setting that allows your ram to work at lower speed.
I’ll bet there is, but I gave it a solid few hours without really knowing what I was doing
I just don’t see the value of having 64gb of RAM. Not for the conventional user, not for gamers, not for the average power user either. Maybe there’s a need if you’re doing a lot of video editing and large file manipulation… but like… I would argue that MOST people, unless they’re trying to play AAA games while streaming and gooning don’t need more than 16gb
I have 32gb and I’ve never topped it out. And yea, Windows eats a lot (I really need to give up the ghost and migrate to Linux) but even still, 32gb, and I don’t even get close. 64gb is just going to be a lot of unused space. Bigger number doesn’t mean better. I doubt you’d even notice unless you fall into the previously mentioned category of users.
I’ve capped out 32 and still do fairly regularly. But I used to do a bunch of 3D and rendering. Now I do photo editing and just have other stuff open. 64 would help a bit for me but I can live.
At this point, I originally paid for 64 so I’m trying to get there out of principal, and I’d be there if I paid more attention.
I like to dick around with my nerd stuff and I did have the pc lock up because I used all of the 32gb ram, but I suspect 64 would’ve had the same issue in that particular instance.
In either case, my last pc buy was a decade ago, where 16GB was more than you’d need. If prices are reasonable again, getting myself to 64GB would just make sure I’m set for another decade, probably.
Just curious, what do you actually use which requires more than 32Go?
At the moment, not much. I’m trying to learn more and more and do more and more, really it’s just that I paid for 64, but then the seller and I both fucked up and I’m still at 32 now, which bugs me. Then at that same exact time frame, the prices skyrocketed.
Hey what’s the Go unit? Is that short for GiB?
I just got a 2x64GB 6000 kit before its price skyrocketed by like $130.
…Also, why does “AI” need so much CPU RAM? In actual server deployments, pretty much all the work is in VRAM, and honestly most businesses are too dumb to train anything effectively. ASICs that would use, say, LPDDR are super rare, and stuff like Hybrid/IGP inference is the realm of ‘a few guys with homelabs’… Like me.
Same memory production capacity can be allocated to ddr5 or to him and openai signed contracts with sk hynix and samsung, the two largest ram manufacturers in the world, and bought a significant percentage of next year’s production.
DDR5 prices started spiking as that deals impact propagated through the supply chain. I bought a 2x32 6800 Cl30 kit for 195 euro 12 days ago. It was 330 euro 4 days later.
…Is it that interchangeable?
TBH I know little of memory fabs, but I know (say) TSMC and their customers can’t just switch from a power-optimized process to a high frequency one at the drop of a hat.
There was a recentish model, qwen next that was advertised as smth that can be run entirely on RAM.
They can ALL be run on RAM, theoretically. I bought 128GB so I can run GLM 4.5 with the experts offloaded to CPU, with a custom trellis/K quant mix; but this is a ‘personal’ use setup tinkerer setup.
Qwen Next is good at that because its very low active parameter.
…But they aren’t actually deployed that way. They’re basically always deployed on cloud GPU boxes that serve dozens/hundreds of people at once, in parallel.
AFAIK the only major model actually developed for CPU inference is one of the esoteric Gemma releases, aimed at mobile.
I suspect RAM may become increasingly useful with the shift from pure chat LLM to connected agents, MCP, and catching results and data for scaling things like public Internet search.
When I think of database system server software, a lot of performance gains are from keeping used data in RAM. With the expanding of LLM systems and it’s concerns, backing data, connective ness, and need for optimisation, a shift to caching and keeping in RAM seems to suggest itself. It’s already wasteful/big and operates on a lot of data, so it seems plausible that would not be a small cache.
Yeah, exactly… In other words, ‘general server buildout.’
why does “AI” need so much CPU RAM
It doesn’t really, though CPU inference is possible/slow at 256+gb. The problem is that they are making HBM (AI) ram instead of ddr4/5.
First crypto miners came for my video cards, then AI came for my DIMMS…
Next tech-sector grift will probably go for our network adapters or some shit…
I’ve got a stack of old 14.4 modems I’ll sell them if they’ll grift on that for a bit.
next the tech-bros will come for you and there will be nobody left to speak up for you.
Remember that shitcoin that made HDD prices shoot up like crazy just because?
Now we just need a new nonsensical fad to drive Cases, Motherboards, CPUs and PSUs up and we’ll have come full circle
Who’s bewildered? Of course this was going to happen. Everything enjoyable about life is being ruined.
just pop already
The market can remain irrational for far longer than you can remain solvent
The thing is, the “people” propping it up, are massive tech companies with collectively trillions of dollars to burn on this thing that is making their stock prices soar.
They have no incentive as the primary investors doing the circular buying to stop. The big problem here is the stock market provides awful incentives to everyone.
neither did the housing speculators though, it will come crashing down eventually.
though i wonder if yall gonna let them get bailed out again, that still remains to be seen.
Far as RAM goes, it will become a good thing: it gives companies incentive to invest into the development of bigger RAM, more speed, and making the motherboard bandwidth big enough to handle it.
The next big generation of hardware will be much better IMO, simply because the companies will have to compete by their merits. The downside is not having enough supply right now, but once the logistics and tech is in place, even non-AI people will benefit.
No, it won’t. The DRAM market is dominated by three companies, and they’ve colluded before. They get their wrist slapped by some government body, they promise not to do it again, and then they wait a few years and do it again.
They’ll also have a flood or electrical outage the millisecond demand starts to go down, so they’ll have to sell the old stock at inflated prices first before restarting production, oopsie-woopsie
The downside is not having enough supply right now, but once the logistics and tech is in place, even non-AI people will benefit.
Have you forgotten that they agreed to reduce production to stabilize prices? Capacity is not the real bottleneck.
soon the bubble will burst and RAM will be so cheap! (I hope)
I don’t think the bubble bursting will slow AI that much, it’ll just be a round of hot potatoe over, the losers will lose their money and others will come in hoping to be profitable since they can skip a bunch of R&D costs.
AI is overhyped, but just like the internet after the dotcom bubble burst, it’s not going anywhere.
Plus I suspect that this time will be a dollar collapse rather than stock market collapse, which would mean prices would go up even more.
It always does. I remember buying my DDR4 RAM 200€, and two months later the same kit was 550€. Some month later it was back at 220€.
RAM used to cost 8x that. It’s the reason why HP cases have locks.
RAM prices fluctuate but always return to normal pretty fast, at least compared to gpus and cpus
Buy one RAM and you get two GPUs thrown in for free!
Indeed awful. AFAIU, it is stockpiling HBM memory ahead of next generation “GPUs”, rather than existing product volume. I’m especially disgusted that prices in non-tariff countries are higher than in US. If this were to last, gddr5/6 computer ram would start to make sense. NVIDIA has been behind starving memory supplies for competing platforms (usually AMD) in the past.
This pricing is both huge inflation, but also huge drop in sales, because we have to wait for it to get sensible.
The non tariff nations getting hit with higher then us prices just shows how little they think of customers. They assume we will pay, they feel entitled to our money. The products have stagnanted, the prices are made up and clearly based on nothing but good old fashion “fuck you pay me” logic. My guess is they are assuming “AI” companies will just buy whatever they make.
If people keep buying however they will keep doing this. If the market drops out from them (AI bubble bursting at the same time people cut back on buying new systems) then they will likely ask for bailouts (your money again).
Apple specifically is provably charging countries without tariffs: iphone-worldwide.com
Have the world subsidize US sales, just because they’re used to paying a little more. Not surprised that other goods would use same strategy.
Wow I just checked the laptop kit I bought a month ago it is 50% more
Laughs in ddr4…
God fucking damnit, can’t I even be poor in peace, JFC!
Although it’s ambiguous how much of this is due to AI data centres and how much is the natural ramp-down of DDR4 production.
DDR3 also increased substantially in price a few years after DDR4 became available.
Is DDR3 affected too?
Im still gaming on a 15 year old cpu and ddr3, lol. Playing a decent amount of new games. Only one that wont run is alan wake 2 and that may be because of linux .
Amd fx 8 core.
Old computer blew up, had to buy a new one. Nice 128gb ddr5. Just mobo, mem, cpu. Cpu is a rhyzen 9 9700
The memory was well over 40% of the cost, wtf?
Genuine question here, for a “normal” computer user, say somebody who :
… what does require more than say 32Go?
Dang, now i know why micron stock has gone wild.
If you have to save for months to buy RAM, you should probably save it instead. Doesnt sound like a very smart financial decision to spend every last cent on your PC.
Welp, it’s probably about time for my PC to break its RAM again.
I bought 16gb of ddr4 for 110eu back in 2018. Welcome back to the DDR wars, with NAND soon to follow.
Not sure if it’s exactly the same kit but you can get that for £300 in the UK.
tabular@lemmy.world 4 days ago
People buying RAM: oh no, what do we do?
People buying GPUs: first time?
givesomefucks@lemmy.world 4 days ago
What?
You think this is the first ram crunch?
It’s not even the first one in this decade…
tabular@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Well, I was aware RAM prices fluctuate.
I’ve never been so unfortunate when buying larger RAM, or building a new system with a new DDR version.
CosmoNova@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Those are the same people.