Comment by sbarre a day ago
I'm so mad about this, I need DDR5 for a new mini-PC I bought and prices have literally gone up by 2.5x..
128GB used to be 400$ in June, and now it's over $1,000 for the same 2x64GB set..
I have no idea if/when prices will come back down but it sucks.
I am so glad both top rated and majority of comments on HN finally understands DRAM industry instead of constant DRAM is a cartel that is why things are expensive.
Also worth mentioning DRAM and NAND's profit from Samsung is what keep the Samsung Foundry fighting TSMC. Especially for those who thinks TSMC is somehow a monopoly.
Another things to point out which is not mentioned yet, China is working on both DRAM and NAND. Both LPDDR5 and Stacked NAND are already in production and waiting for yield and scale. Higher Price will finally be perfect timing for them to join the commodity DRAM and NAND race. Good for consumer I suppose, not so good for a lot of other things which I wont go into.
DRAM manufacturers have literally been convicted of price fixing in the past why do you have to white knight for them?
Both stories can be true.
The firms can coordinate by agreeing on a strategy they deem necessary for the future of the industry, and that strategy requires significant capital expenditures, and the industry does not get (or does not want) outside investment to fund it, and if any of the firms defects and keeps prices low the others cannot execute on the strategy, so they all agree to raise prices.
Then, after the strategy succeeds, they have gotten addicted to the higher revenues, they do not allow prices to fall as fast as they should, their coordination becomes blatantly illegal, and they have to get smacked down by regulators.
I wouldn't be so sure. I've seen analyses making the case that this new phase is unlike previous cycles and DRAM makers will be far less willing to invest significantly in new capacity, especially into consumer DRAM over more enterprise DRAM or HBM (and even there there's still a significant risk of the AI bubble popping). The shortage could last a decade. Right now DRAM makers are benefiting to an extreme degree since they can basically demand any price for what they're making now, reducing the incentive even more.
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/storage/perfect-s...
The most likely direct response is not new capacity, it's older capacity running at full tilt (given the now higher margins) to produce more mature technology with lower requirements on fabrication (such as DDR3/4, older Flash storage tech, etc.) and soak up demand for these. DDR5/GDDR/HBM/etc. prices will still be quite high, but alternatives will be available.
> produce more mature technology ... DDR3/4
...except current peak in demand is mostly driven by build-out of AI capacity.
Both inference and training workloads are often bottlenecked on RAM speed, and trying to shoehorn older/slower memory tech there would require non-trivial amount of R&D to go into widening memory bus on CPU/GPU/NPUs, which is unlikely to happen - those are in very high demand already.
The pop culture perception of AI just being image and text generators is incorrect. AI is many things, they all need tons of RAM. Google is rolling out self-driving taxis in more and more cities for instance.
No, the 10% best scenario return on AI won't make it. The bubble is trying to replace all human labor, which is why it is a bubble in the first place. No one is being honest that AGI is not possible in this manner of tech. And Scale won't get them there.
Doesn't the same factory produce enterprise (i.e. ECC) and consumer (non-ECC) DRAM?
If there is high demand for the former due to AI, they can increase production to generate higher profits. This cuts the production capacity of consumer DRAM, and lead to higher prices in that segment too. Simple supply & demand at work.
Maybe we'll get default to ECC in everything with this?
The idea is someone else comes in that's happy to eat their lunch by undercutting them. Unfortunately, we're probably limited to China doing that at this point as a lot of the existing players have literally been fined for price fixing before.
It seems more likely that someone else comes in and either colludes with the people who are screwing us to get a piece of the action or gets bought out by one of the big companies who started all this. Since the rare times companies get caught they only get weak slaps on the wrist where they only pay a fraction of what they made in profits (basically just the US demanding their cut) I don't have much faith things will improve any time soon.
Even China has no reason to reduce prices much for memory sold to the US when they know we have no choice but to buy at the prices already set by the cartel. I expect that if China does start making memory they'll sell it cheap within China and export it at much higher prices. Maybe we'll get a black market for cheap DRAM smuggled out of China though.
In that case it's far simpler - even IF they wanted to met the demand, building more capacity is hideously expensive and takes years.
So, it would happen even with best intentions and no conspiracies. AI boom already hiked GPU prices, memory was next in line.
I think in part it is a system level response to the widespread just-in-time approach of those businesses' clients. A just-in-time client is very "flexible" on price when supply is squeezed. After that back and forth i think we'll see return to some degree of supply buffering(warehousing) to dampen down the supply levels/price shocks in the pipelines.
I thought that, too, but then the Nexperia shitstorm hit, and it was as if the industry had learned nothing at all from the COVID shortages.
Is this still the case in 2025, though?
In a traditional pork cycle there's a relatively large number of players and a relatively low investment cost. The DRAM market in the 1970s and 1980s operated quite similarly: you could build a fab for a few million dollars, and it could be done by a fab which also churned out regular logic - it's how Intel got started! There were dozens of DRAM-producing companies in the US alone.
But these days the market looks completely different. The market is roughly equally divided up between SK Hynix, Micron, and Samsung. Building a fab costs billions and can easily a year of 5 - if not a decade - from start to finish. Responding to current market conditions is basically impossible, you have to plan for the market you expect years from now.
Ignoring the current AI bubble, DRAM demand has become relatively stable - and so has the price. Unless there's a good reason to believe the current buying craze will last over a decade, why would the DRAM manufacturers risk significantly changing their plans and potentially creating an oversupply in the future? It's not like the high prices are hurting them...
Also, current political turbulence makes planning for the long term extremely risky.
Will the company be evicted from the country in 6 months? A year? Will there be 100% tariffs on competitions imports? Or 0%? Will there be an anti-labor gov’t in effect when the investment might mature, or a pro-labor?
The bigger the investment, the longer the investment timeframe, and the more sane the returns - the harder it is to make the investment happen.
High risk requires a correspondingly high potential return.
That everyone has to pay more for current production is a side effect of the uncertainty, because no one knows what the odds are of even future production actually happening, let along the next fancy wiz-bang technology.
But people do need the current production.
A waiver is a waiver. The cost is per square mm. It’s pure supply and demand
No, a wafer is very much not a wafer. DRAM processes are very different from making logic*. You don't just make memory in your fab today and logic tomorrow. But even when you stay in your lane, the industry operates on very long cycles and needs scale to function at any reasonable price at all. You don't just dust off your backyard fab to make the odd bit of memory whenever it is convenient.
Nobody is going to do anything if they can't be sure that they'll be able to run the fab they built for a long time and sell most of what they make. Conversely fabs don't tend to idle a lot. Sometimes they're only built if their capacity is essentially sold already. Given how massive the AI bubble is looking right now, I personally wouldn't expect anyone to make a gamble building a new fab.
* Someone explained this at length on here a while ago, but I can't seem to find their comment. Should've favorited it.
Sure, yes the cost of producing a wafer is fixed. Opex didn’t change that much.
Following your reasoning, which is common in manufacturing, the capex needed is already allocated. So, where does the 2x price hike come from if not supply/demand?
The cost to produce did not go up 100%, or even 20%
Actually, DRAM fabs do get scaled down, very similar to the Middle East scaling down oil production.
> Sometimes they're only built if their capacity is essentially sold already.
"Hyperscalers" already have multi-year contracts going. If the demand really was there, they could make it happen. Now it seems more like they're taking capacity from what would've been sold on the spot or quarterly markets. They already made their money.
I just looked at the invoice for my current PC parts that I bought in April 2016: I paid 177 EUR (~203 USD) for 32GB (DDR4-2800).
It's kinda sad when you grow up in a period of rapid hardware development and now see 10 years going by with RAM $/GB prices staying roughly the same.
Well, I've experienced both to some degree in the past. The previous long time with very similar hardware performance was when PCs were exorbitantly expensive and commodore 64 was the main "home computer" (at least in my country) over the latter 80s and early 90s.
That period of time had some benefits. Programmers learned to squeeze absolutely everything out of that hardware.
Perhaps writing software for today's hardware is again becoming the norm rather than being horribly inefficient and simply waiting for CPU/GPU power to double in 18 months.
I was lucky. I built my am5 7950x Ryzen pc with 2x48gb ddr5 2 years ago. I just bought 4x48gb kit a month ago with an idea to build another home server with the old 2*48gb kit.
Today my old g.skill 2x48gb kit costs Double what I paid for the 4x48gb.
Furthermore I bought two used rtx3090 (for AI) back then. A week ago I bought a third one for the same price... ,(for vram in my server).
> It's kinda sad when you grow up in a period of rapid hardware development and now see 10 years going by with RAM $/GB prices staying roughly the same.
But you’re cherry picking prices from a notable period of high prices (right now).
If you had run this comparison a few months ago or if you looked at averages, the same RAM would be much cheaper now.
We’re just consuming a lot of DRAM in general.
I paid about GBP 20K for the 192MB RAM in a Sun SPARC 5 workstation in 1995. That’s maybe $27K USD in 1995 dollars. Gulp.
I think that goes to show that official inflation benchmarks are not very practical / useful in terms of buckets of things that people actually buy or desire. If the bucket that measured inflation included computer parts (GPUs?), food and housing - i.e. all that the thing that a geek really needs inflation would be wayy higher...
> If the bucket that measured inflation included computer parts (GPUs?), food and housing - i.e. all that the thing that a geek really needs inflation would be wayy higher...
A house is $500,000
A GPU is $500
You could put GPUs into the inflation bucket and it wouldn’t change anything. Inflation trackers count cost of living and things you pay monthly, not one time luxury expenses every 4 years that geeks buy for entertainment.
Also we’re likely comparing RAMs at different speeds and memory bandwidth.
If the sticker price stayed the same since 2016, it got about 35% cheaper due to inflation.
I just gave up and built an AM4 system with a 3090 because I had 128G of ddr4 udimms on hand the whole build was for less than just the memory would have cost for an AM5/ddr5 build.
Really wish that I could replace my old skylake-x system but even ddr4 rdimms for an older xeon are crazy now let alone ddr5. Unfortunately I need slots for 3xTitan V's for the 7.450 TFLOPS each of FP64. Even the 5090 only does 1.637 TFLOPS for FP64, so just hopping that old system keeps running.
My 64gb DDR5 kit started having stability issues running XMP a few weeks out of warranty. I bought it two years ago. Looked into replacing it and the same kit is now double the price. Bumping the voltage a bit and having better cooling gets it through memtest thankfully. The fun of building your own computer is pretty much gone for me these days.
Doubled in the last 4 months https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5Zc-FsUDCM
Upgraded by adding 64GB.. last Friday I sold the 32 GB I took out for what I paid for the 64 GB in July... insane
Time to start scouring used-PC sales to reclaim the RAM and sell it for a profit?
Have you not noticed the domain of the submitted article? Others are way, way ahead on that already.
(Including the submitter. In their comment history is "Tip: You can sell used server RAM or desktop modules through BuySellRam to recover value from old hardware." at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45800881 and all of the submissions of this domain are from this user: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=buysellram.com )
If you can find used PCs being liquidated with DDR4 RAM that is fast enough for a modern build, then you might.
Old RAM that comes out of the PCs being sold at fire sale prices isn’t really in demand though. Even slower DDR4 grades aren’t seeing much demand.
Why do we all need 128GB now? I was happy with 32.
Close a few Chrome tabs, and save some DDR5 for the rest of us. :-)
Last night, while writing a LaTeX article, with Ollama running for other purposes, Firefox with its hundreds of tabs, multiple PDF files open, my laptop's memory usage spiked up to 80GB RAM usage... And I was happy to have 128GB. The spike was probably due to some process stuck in an effing loop, but the process consuming more and more RAM didn't have any impact on the system's responsiveness, and I could calmly quit VSCode and restart it with all the serenity I could have in the middle of the night. Is there even a case where more RAM is not really better, except for its cost?
> Is there even a case where more RAM is not really better, except for its cost?
It depends. It takes more energy, which can be undesirable in battery powered devices like laptops and phones. Higher end memory can also generate more heat, which can be an issue.
But otherwise more RAM is usually better. Many OS's will dynamically use otherwise unused RAM space to cache filesystem reads, making subsequent reads faster and many databases will prefetch into memory if it is available, too.
Firefox is particularly good at having lots of tabs open and not using tons of memory.
$ ~/dev/mozlz4-tool/target/release/mozlz4-tool \
"$(find ~/Library/Application\ Support/Firefox/Profiles/ -name recovery.jsonlz4 | head -1)" | \
jq -r '[.windows[].tabs | length] | add'
5524
Real memory size: 2.43 GB
Virtual memory size: 408.30 GB
Shared memory size: 746.5 MB
Private memory size: 377.3 MB
But you can easily have 128GB and still on 2 modules
Intel's consumer processors (and therefore the mainboards/chipsets) used to have four memory channels, but around the year 2020 this was suddenly limited to two channels since the 12th generation (AMD's consumer processors had always two channels, with exception of Threadriper?).
However this does not make sense, as for more than a decade the processors have only grown increasing the number of threads, therefore two channels sounds like a negligent and deliberately imposed bottleneck to access the memory if one use all those threads (Lets say 3D render, Video postproduction, Games, and so on).
And if one want four channels to surpass such imposed bottleneck, the mainboards that nowadays have four channels don't contemplate consumer use, therefore they have one or two USB connectors with three or four LAN connectors at prohibitive prices.
We are talking about consumer quad-channel DDR4 machines ten years old, wildly spread, keeps being competent compared with current consumers ones, if not better. It is like if all were frozen along this years (and what remains to be seen with such pattern).
Now it is rumoured that AMD may opt for four channels for its consumer lines due to the increased number of pin connectors (good news if true).
It is a bad joke what the industry is doing to customers.
Mainboards have two memory channels so you should be able to reach 5600mhz on both and dual slot mainboards have better routing than quad slot mainboards. This means the practical limit for consumer RAM is 2x48GB modules.
It depends on what you are doing.
If you are working on an application that has several services (database, local stack, etc.) as docker containers, those can take up more memory. Especially if you have large databases or many JVM services, and are running other things like an IDE with debugging, profiling, and other things.
Likewise, if you are using many local AI models at the same time, or some larger models, then that can eat into the memory.
I've not done any 3D work or video editing, but those are likely to use a lot of memory.
I like to tell people I have 128GB. It's pretty rare to meet someone like me that isn't swapping all the time.
The cost of inventory on the shelves basically doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is the market rate.
If those retailers didn’t increase their prices when the price hike was announced, anyone building servers would have instantly purchased all of the inventory anyway at the lower prices, so there wouldn’t actually have been weeks of low retail RAM prices for everyone.
Every once in a while you can catch a retailer whose pricing person missed the memo and forgot to update the retail price when the announcement came out. They go out of stock very rapidly.
> If those retailers didn’t increase their prices when the price hike was announced, anyone building servers would have instantly purchased all of the inventory anyway at the lower prices
But that retailer would have made a lot of money in a very short time.
In the scenario where they don't raise prices, they sell out immediately. In the scenario where they do raise prices, it's too expensive so you don't buy it. In the scenario where they keep prices low, and do a lottery to see who can buy them, you don't get picked.
No matter what, you are not getting those modules at the old price. There are few things that trip up people harder than this exact scenario, and it happens everywhere. Concert tickets, limited releases, water during crises, hot Christmas gift, pandemic GPUs, etc.
Once understood you can stop getting mad over it like it's some conspiracy. It's fundamental and natural market behavior.
Yeah you are not alone here being annoyed. I think we need to penalise all who drive the prices up - that includes the manufacturers but also AI companies etc...
Those price increases are not normal at all. I understand that most of it still comes from market demands but this is also skewing the market now in unfair manners. Such increases smell of criminal activity too.
> I think we need to penalise all who drive the prices up - that includes the manufacturers but also AI companies etc...
You want to penalize companies for buying things and penalize companies for selling things are market rate?
There are a lot of good examples through history about how central planning economics and strict price controls do not lead to good outcomes. The end result wouldn’t be plentiful cheap RAM for you. The end result would be no RAM for you at all because the manufacturers choose to sell to other countries who understand basic economics.
Such is life. I suggest finding a less volatile hobby, like crocheting.
Actually, the textile market is pretty volatile in the US these days with Joan's out of business. Pick a poison, I guess? There's little room for stability in a privately-owned-world.
and the guy that sold it to you stole it from where ?
> I have no idea if/when prices will come back down but it sucks.
Usually after the companies are fined for price-fixing
I think it's somewhat useful long term advice, and I would add that parts prices tend to be asynchronous.
Building a PC in a cost efficient manner generally requires someone to track parts prices over years, buy parts at different times, and buy at least a generation behind.
The same applies to many other markets/commodities/etc...
Dram alternates between feast and famine; it's the nature of a business when the granularity of investment is so huge (you have a fab or you don't, and they cost billions -maybe trillions by now). So, it will swing back. Unfortunately it looks like maybe 3-5 years on average, from some analysis here: https://storagesearch.com/memory-boom-bust-cycles.html
(That's just me eyeballing it, feel free to do the math)