Right now the biggest threat to their IPO's is that people realize that local models are good enough for whatever they're peddling, what's the most important factor to even running good enough models? RAM since you want the models in memory to not be total slogs.
Surely it is a more efficient use of DRAM to run inference on shared hardware with large batch sizes and more utilization.
Because what to do with power-consuming outdated hardware ? let's say 5 years from now ?
They will need new RAM.
I wonder.
Right now the biggest threat to their IPO's is that people realize that local models are good enough for whatever they're peddling...
...plus the recent price increases by AI companies, made me actually think the opposite: that there might be another additional "run" for memory and/or GPUs.
Therefore, yesterday I decided to order an additional RTX 5060 with 16 GiB VRAM for the ~500$ that I saved during the last months (to be added to the RTX 5070 12 GiB that I bought last year to play games in 4k + my old RTX 3060 12 GiB which I recycled a few months ago after noticing how nice it is to run llama.cpp locally without having to worry about subscription costs).
The original 24 GiB VRAM were actually quite enough for some of the stuff that I do (e.g. transcribe text of image scans of old magazines, coding with Aider, etc - I usually use Q5_K_M quantizations of Qwen & Gemma by Bartowski as lower ones delivered sometimes weird results and/or looped forever in "thinking"-mode), but I guess that with 40 GiB I should be bullet-proof for my pessimistic view of our future :o)
they are not. Unless you are satisfied with plausible, but mostly garbage output.
For non-coding work, they are more than good enough. A lot of the ways my non-technical family members have interacted with AI would be perfectly served by using a local model.
After all, people were more than satisfied with the results from GPT 3. That has long since been surpassed by open weight models.
It will happen, but yeah it takes time and money
This is similar situation to housing market. Prices are going up and supply is being restricted by whatever means.
It will be a bit of Catch 22.
It's gotten to the point where nvidia doesn't even bother to report their gaming revenue anymore. It's a clear sign that we're back to the bad old days of pc gaming being a 'prosumer' hobby, but don't worry I'm sure nvidia and their ilk are salivating at the idea of making pc gaming into a streaming stadia like solution that you pay for monthly
I was thinking of upgrading the video card to something better, but looking at the cost of replacing that Quadro? I might just stay put for now. Costs on those have also pretty much doubled.
I had it all priced out, but a bunch of birthdays in my family were coming up and I felt like I shouldn't buy something for myself if it's really their time.
My old laptop will have to cut it for a while. :-)
AI bros are building something fantastic, but let's not forget that value isn't necessarily brought by sheer prices
Would be nice to be able to own property.
Anyway, I just can't find a reason to build an AM4 PC even though the RAM is "free". It's just not worth it. If you need 64GB+ of RAM and the DDR4 vs DDR5 difference isn't significant to you then maybe it's worth it. Otherwise, you can still buy a 32GB DDR5 PC for similar prices to last year sometimes. It's not worth buying any AM4 CPU then the 7500X3D/7600X3D/7800X3D are so much better for the same price.
The 5800X3D re-release is kinda funny. AMD claims they had to do significant re-engineering but it is my understanding they stopped selling it in the US but were still selling it overseas. So did production really stop? Anyway, the price seems to be $349. If so, that's completely not worth it. It's the same price as the 7800X#D, which is significantly better.
As an example, here's a 7800X3D + motherboard + 32GB DDR5 bundle you can buy today for $629 if you happen to live near a Micro Center [1]. No AM4 option is going to compete with that, particularly not with a $349 CPU.
[1]: https://www.microcenter.com/product/5007391/amd-ryzen-7-7800...
The 5700X3D has been the smarter pick back then, it fits to the current latent user hostility of AMD to focus on the more expensive processor.
Spec-ing and buying servers has become quite the pain in the past year, at least at the relatively-small scale we operate at. It's "dynamic pricing" with most quotes being valid for 24 hours :(
That's about 50% higher than you'd pay for retail, small quantity, off the shelf alternatives in the US.
Many vendors have limited allocation so they're sending out extremely high quotes to see who will take it. They know everyone is seeing news about high RAM prices and getting new vendors approved can be hard, so they raise prices and see who takes it.
I would recommend getting quotes from multiple vendors. Don't be afraid to push back. They might come back immediately with a lower price in this market. Also check the retail suppliers you can access in your country.
> Quotes came back to about €200k for 48 x 96GB DDR5-5600 RDIMMs.
That's around EUR 40 per GB? That seems quite high compared to what consumer DDR5 RAM is selling for, though it being RDIMM may account for some of the difference.
Quotes are 7 days max, lead times fluctuating out months, and often now have language they can choose to not honor the quote for any reason due to price fluctuations.
When it comes to server RAM, I got quoted double a previous quote within the span of a week.
Buying servers is basically quote roulette now.
I sell used RAM in trays of 50 sticks (I physically know how much that is, I've held that many). I've had some trays sell for a few thousand dollars. Six figures for just one tray is absurd, but I've never collected enough DDR5 to make a full tray.
The only hope here is China floods the market which would be a good or bad thing however you look at it.
Like clockwork, people naturally want to have their cake and to eat it too, so there will be the incessant complaining about the externalities. Half the people lack the brainpower to see the good and bad are intrinsically linked, and the other half just like complaining.
But at least for now, both halves aren't pulling back (in fact it's increasing), and money, not complaining, steers the ship.
Can you elaborate? Leaded gasoline is estimated to have contributed to the deaths of like tens (hundreds?) of millions of people. Asbestos probably millions.
Why would high RAM prices be remembered alongside these events?
Is supply actively constrained, or is this mostly in anticipation of future shortages? How much of this is a mix of panic buying and price gouging on bad news?
I care more about the secondhand market. Prices are nuts for old used gear, but that also tracks with patterns I've been seeing since roughly the pandemic where more and more secondhand sellers on the usual platforms setting pricing patterns are small businesses, not hobbyists.
It is hard to overstate the damage that the infinite money being poured into AI is doing to the wider economy. Anything involved in datacenters is going to experience shortages/price rises. A pre-existing problem is power transformers: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-power-transformer...
The impact on domestic electricity prices in a year just after high oil prices is not going to be popular either.
I get what you're saying but medium term this is an extremely funny sentiment. This money being poured is likely to end up being a huge boon for a lot of economic sectors, including in the US. Most commodity shortages like this end in a glut, with a medium term win for consumers, even if we have 1-2 (more) years of pricing pain. Meanwhile expensive RAM has so far left stock for people that really need it. Calling this kind of demand economic damage is odd.
I know it's an unpopular opinion on Hacker News but I think most people are overstating the damage to the economy. Increased demand starts to pull more advancements forward and increase spending on production, which benefits everyone.
Transformer demand is real, but what percentage of your electricity bill do you think goes to spending on those transformers? The number is so small that it's a rounding error. Many examples like this where we see headlines about some part going up in price and forget that it's such a negligible piece of our bill that it barely matters.
The cost of fuel inputs for base generation and peak supply are a bigger factor.
Both. AI datacenters create immense demand on DRAM, NAND storage, even HDD storage.
Then Sam Altman went ahead and "bought" 40% of the world's DRAM production, by way of secretly approaching both Samsung and SK Hynix (each unaware of the other getting a similar deal), which sent the entire market into a panic and everyone rushed to buy ahead of the anticipated supply shortage.
The kicker is that it wasn't even a proper purchase agreement. Just a non-binding promise of "By 2030 I will have infinite dollars and buy your DRAM".
Steam Deck had a huge price increase (~40-50%) but it still sold out in 24 hours.
All it would take is for everyone not to pull the trigger on buying things for a little bit and prices would fall but instead enough people are buying things at a crazy markup. If anything that's a signal to sell things at higher prices. Of course AI is amplifying this problem but realistically people are still buying consumer hardware at these prices which lets businesses know people will pay this price.
I'm on a machine built from parts in 2014 and it's all very good for me to do every day development so I'm not posting this from a machine I won't have to touch for another 10 years.
I pulled the trigger on an early Ayn Thor because it was obvious this was going to happen. Something I didn't really want to fit into my budget but knew that if I didn't I would regret it later.
Implicitly, but that's blaming the consumer who has no or few equivalent choices. Purchasing RAM is not like choosing between Coke and Pepsi. A better analogy is that when a hurricane is coming or a natural disaster has already hit, it doesn't help that people will purchase food and fuel at any price.
When I bought the same ECC DDR4 16gb ram stick in 2016 (when DDR4 was rather new) it cost $85 (cant remember if it was new or used)
$86.30 for my 32gb DDR4 3200 stick Oct 2022. So glad I bought that. I have a mini-itx board and one of the ram slots died so i was forced to upgrade to a single stick. the historic trend of price deflation in computer components has always had me leaning toward not upgrading my set up.
fortunately all i play now are "premium" web browser games like narrow.one and eggball, ha! going to be hurting when GTA 6 launches with my 3050/1070 gpus...
I wanted to upgrade my SSD but prices are more than at the end of 2025. I refuse to pay 500 euro for a 4TB SSD. I rather go outside and play with my bike like when I was 5.
"Price tracking courtesy of PCPartPicker now reveals the cheapest 32GB DDR5 RAM you can buy is $375. Specifically, four XPOWER kits from Silicon Power will set you back $374.97 thanks to a promo code."
its paired to a 5950x so im sure it will be fine for a few more years
Same thing with GPUs, is kind of insane having so much processing power and yet requiring more and more. What purpose for? What's the limit? Does it really really pay off such investments?
For me as a non-AI developer (I don't use any models of any kind, nor I train LLMs at all), a system with 16Gb seems to be more than enough for a vast number of applications.
I have a 48GB development machine which is nice if you are running IDEs, backend stuff via docker, etc. And even just having a bunch of RAM there for file caching helps keep things fast.
I think people who need more than 16GB of RAM are power users with higher memory requirements, such as those using local LLMs, those who frequently use virtualization, and people doing tasks such as video editing.
The exact same sticks/model #’s of RAM cost $200 last year, now costs $950. I don’t remember existing CPU’s ever going up in price by 5x (300-400% increases).
- Altman, a.k.a. Dory from Finding Nemo and/or Dario, a.k.a. Carl from Jimmy Neutron.
And if you're wondering, who's throwing out DDR5 systems? A local healthcare company. The boxes for some units are crushed and have water stains on them, and I imagine others don't meet their exacting requirements in some minor way (though they look and work OK to me, regardless of scratches and dings on the case).
Some people need to buy at these inflated prices anyway, and are ultimately willing to spend. Maybe it differs in your area but there's no risk in listing these on Facebook Marketplace or similar platforms and see the interest.
i5-13500E, 32GB DDR5, 512 GB NVMe, scratched and dinged a bit for $500 is practically a steal! Hardly anyone's biting or clicking, I don't get it...
New open box models (not scratched and dinged), if anyone's interested: https://www.ebay.com/itm/188355326179
Edit: they're intended to be retail POS PCs, like cash registers. (The motherboard literally has a header for a cash drawer!) So unless you're a particular kind of retailer, you're not asking your distributor for them. If distributors aren't looking for them, our B2B buyers aren't buying them. If they were Elite/Prodesks, Optiplexes, or Thinkcenters, they'd probably be gone by now.
Looking at it from that frame, it seems reasonable.
I thought 128MB of SDRAM was a good deal at $100.
I also thought $479 for 32GB of DDR4 was nuts back in 2016/2017.
That makes me realize how much of society, economics and our nature is really like a current, ripples in a big ol ocean. Supply and demand baby.
weather forecast wasn't more rainy on a 2005 windows PC or an early smartphone in 2G to save battery
FHD streaming has worked for decades now
The plot of animes was still enjoyable on DVD
Progress is important, but some companies don't realise how customers don't need it when it's twice their pay
A 2x32GB DDR5 kit I paid $150 for 11 months ago costs $910 today from the same retailer. A 2x16GB DRR4 kit that was $105 last year is now $230.
The RAM alone in my newest machine would sell for over double what I paid for the entire machine one year ago.
I am annoyed that the new handhelds are all crazy so sticking with my Legion Go for now.
The one I am annoyed with is storage. I desperately need to get a couple new drives for my NAS (one to replace one that its bad sectors are growing and one to add more storage) and I am not looking forward to spending $600-$700 each for 20TB drives.
Been solid so far for 6-ish months.
https://www.amazon.com/Crucial-6000MHz-Overclocking-Desktop-...
Usually these bottlenecks lead to a price crash later. Of course that’s also part of what fuels the bottleneck. Companies are afraid of over investing in production and being left with underwater capital later.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-02/sk-hynix-...
If you're building your own PC, your best bet is to buy a bundle. If you happen to be lucky enough to live near a Micro Center (they don't deliver), then you have good options [2]. Newegg does too.
Prebuilts get a bad rep and it's not really justified. That Walmart PC is ABS. That's Newegg, basically. I'm sorry but you just can't buy that parts list for $!900. The idea that there is a $1000 premium for a prebuilt is just not true. Alos, I hear people say "it only takes an hour to build a PC". No, it doesn't. Maybe if you've built 20 PCs it does but if you don't do it regularly, it's a massive pain. Years ago I used to do this. I'm too old and the novelty has worn off. I don't want to diagnose if I've gotten my motherboard headers right or why my fans aren't spinning up or why my PC isn't POSTing or even just getting the cabling right, etc etc etc.
But yes, if you're just buying RAM by itself the situation is horrific. If you can live with a 32GB gaming PC, there are options that are relatively comparable to what you could get a year ago. If you want 64GB+ of RAM, that's going to bite.
[1]: https://www.walmart.com/ip/ABS-Eurus-Ruby-Gaming-PC-Windows-...
[2]: https://www.microcenter.com/site/content/bundle-and-save.asp...
But then again I remember spending hundreds of dollars as a high school student to upgrade my family's 8Mb desktop to 40 Mb.
It's not that bad, at least by recent standards, but the problem is that there's no such thing as "price per Gb." If you need 512 Gb you will not be buying 16 Gb DIMMs to get it. More likely you'll be buying 64 Gb ECC sticks, and those are much pricier.
The question is to buy or wait.
I have no idea why a weather forecast site needs tens of megabytes of resources, and gig+ of ram for my browser, since i get no more info from it, than i did back then. Same for chat programs (how is discord different than irc? and why does it need so much ram to do so? same for slack), mail clients, etc.
Maybe it's time to kick developers to start optimizing stuff a bit, since neither they nor the users can't afford "unlimited" ram anymore.
edit: i'm not saying we need to get back to literally 32 megs of ram, just to make developers performance test their stuff on a laptop that was on sale 3 years ago in their local supermarket, i.e. stuff their users use at home.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BJ7X9P1W
Consumers need to start playing legal warfare against the companies for openly distorting the market. The ramifications will only hurt us and there needs to be a true comeuppance.
Well... I guess William Gibson laughs last, after all!
I bought it for 82 EUR, before the whole ongoing situation.
Now the same spec costs upwards of 290 EUR, about 3.5x the original price and even on Amazon the best prices I can find are upwards of like 210 EUR (2.5x).
[1] https://tweakers.net/pricewatch/1419292/corsair-vengeance-lp...
I'm at least happy I went for DDR4 RAM when I was building this server.
I built in February 2025, and my two 48GB DIMMs were $440. Last month I checked and they were $1800 if you could even find them still in stock.
For my workloads it was like getting 2 - 2.5 more CPU cores worth of performance, so it was worth it, since the CPU was already as beefy as it could be. It was a reasonable premium then. Today? I’m not sure the math would still math.
Now some will bill Taiwan and Korea the same way they bill consumers and industries when they need RAM, should they need us.
Chinese companies were at least producing more and more to brace for restrictions from western manufacturers
There certainly is lots and lots of potential.
Now they're worth over half as much as the whole machine.
That said, getting hold of them was hard and needed a special order.
This is the stupidest freaking timeline...
Boy do I ever regret that. Every time I compile some code and the VM I use goes OOM, I die a little bit inside knowing that less than 100 bucks or so would have fixed this if I just went for it.
This is insane. We've built our apps and websites to require ungodly amounts of memory and now AI scrapes away said websites while pricing us out.
Fast apps and websites need to make a comeback.
