Last year I brought two 8G DDR3L RAM stick made by Gloway for around $8 each, now the same stick is priced around $22, a 275% increase in price.
SSD makers are also increasing their prices, but that started one or two years ago, and they did it again recently (of course).
It looked like I'll not be buying any first-hand computers/parts before the price can go normal again.
Yes but otherwise you’d get huge shortages and would be unlikely to be able to buy it at all. Also a significant proportion of the surplus currently going to manufacturers/etc. would go to various scalper and resellers
But they are all exactly the same chips. The ECC magic happens in the memory controller, not the RAM stick. Anyone buying ECC RAM for servers is buying on the same market as you building a new desktop computer.
Since DDR5 has 2 independent subchannels, 2 additional chips are needed.
Even when the sticks are completely incompatible with each other? I think servers tend to use RDIMM, desktops use UDIMM. Personally I'm not seeing as step increase in (b2b) RDIMMs compared to the same stores selling UDIMM (b2c), but I'm also looking at different stores tailored towards different types of users.
For those who aren't well versed in the construction of memory modules: take a look at your DDR4 memory module, you'll see 8 identical chips per side if it's a non-ECC module, and 9 identical chips per side if it's an ECC module. That's because, for every byte, each bit is stored in a separate chip; the address and command buses are connected in parallel to all of them, while each chip gets a separate data line on the memory bus. For non-ECC memory modules, the data line which would be used for the parity/ECC bit is simply not connected, while on ECC memory modules, it's connected to the 9th chip.
(For DDR5, things are a bit different, since each memory module is split in two halves, with each half having 4 or 5 chips per side, but the principle is the same.)
And that was caught because we had ECC. If not for that we'd be replacing drives, because metrics made it look like it is one of OSDs slowing to a crawl, which usual reason is drive dying.
Of course, chance for that is pretty damn small, bit also their scale is pretty damn big.
> China's AI Analog Chip Claimed to Be 3000X Faster Than Nvidia's A100 GPU (04.11.2023)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38144619
> Q.ANT’s photonic chips – which compute using light instead of electricity – promise to deliver a 30-fold increase in energy efficiency and a 50-fold boost in computing speed, offering transformative potential for AI-driven data centers and HPC environments. (24.02.2025)
https://qant.com/press-releases/q-ant-and-ims-chips-launch-p...
Of course OpenAI is also not buying that but B200 DGX systems, but that is still the same process at TSMC.
I would not want to rerun a whole run just because of bit flips and bit flips become a lot more relevant the more servers you need.
