1GB Raspberry Pi 5, and memory-driven price rises
(raspberrypi.com)166 points by shrx 2 days ago
166 points by shrx 2 days ago
Firstly, this is not due to inflation. The price increase is explicitly (per the article even) due to increased market demand that is causing raised prices.
Secondly, Computing has always been subject to inflation. It cannot escape inflation. You may not notice it , perhaps due to the increase in performance but the cost of parts definitely has risen in the same tiers if you look over a long enough period to avoid pricing amortization
> the cost of parts definitely has risen in the same tiers if you look over a long enough period
This is especially apparent if you’re a hardware manufacturer and have to buy the same components periodically, since the performance increase that consumers see doesn’t appear.
> if you... buy the same components periodically... the performance increase that consumers see doesn’t appear.
Good point and that should properly be called inflation in the semiconductor sector. We always have general inflation, but the different sectors of the economy exhibit different rates of inflation depending on the driving forces and their strength.
As of today, tariffs are the major driver of inflation and semiconductors are hit hard because the only high-volume, reasonable quality/price country has been practically excluded from the the US market by export bans and prohibitively high tariffs - that's China of course.
The other producers are in a near monopoly situation and are also acting like a cartel without shame or fear of law... which isn't there to begin with.
Inflation simply refers to the rate at which prices are increasing. It's agnostic as to the origin ( any single/combo of demand increase, supply shortage, money printing, price fixing, etc).
Inflation isn’t just "prices increasing". It’s the sustained, broad-based rise in the overall price level. Your comment treats any price increase as inflation, but economists draw a pretty clear line here: a relative price change (say, eggs getting more expensive because of a supply shock) isn’t the same thing as inflation. You can have sector-specific increases (as in this case, with RAM) that are independent of changes in the general price level.
Most in-demand electronics got worse post-2020 and haven't recovered.
That's why I just buy something when I need it or when I think the price is reasonable, because nowadays, if I wait for something to get cheaper like I used to do in the 90s-00s, chances are it's gonna get even more expensive as time passes, not cheaper.
The days when you would wait 6-12 months and get the same thing for 50% off or a new thing with 50% more performance for the same price are over, when there's only one major semiconductor fab making everything, 3 RAM makers, 3 FLASH makers, 2 GPU vendors, 2 CPU vendors, controlling all supply, and I'm competing with datacenters for it.
I know one area of computing that has dramatically risen in price in the past 10-15 years or so is GPUs. Cards that fit into midrange today sell for prices that would've been considered ultra-highend just a few gpu generations ago. Today's highend prices for just a graphics card are higher than I've paid for entire computers in the past. It's ridiculous.
imo this is wrong. what's changing is how high end having a discrete GPU is. as integrated graphics have become increasingly powerful, the discrete GPU has shifted to being more of a luxury item.
There was the issue of hard disk prices for years after the floods in taiwan in 2011.
GPU prices were horrendes when crypto happened (they migrated into a stable issue but it was still because of crypto).
DDR4 jumped because they started focusing on DDR5 before these news right now.
I could probably find more examples but hey
Speaking as someone who used to buy them regularly to support a PC gaming hobby stretching back to the original glQuake -- GPUs were on average very reasonably priced prior to the crypto boom that preceded the AI boom.
So its technically not AI "ruining everything" here, but there was a nice, long before-time of reasonable pricing.
It was always subject to inflationary forces due to money printing like everything else, it was just the one place where natural deflation due to improving technology was temporarily enough to offset it
When Sam Altman buys 40% of global DRAM wafer production, that looks like a demand increase to the market.
Not to mention the other companies panic buying another ~20% (guess).
Memory price fluctuations due to market demand and monetary inflation - the increase in quantity of fiat money, diluting its value - are two separate and unrelated things.
What has changed now in the memory landscape/ai workload in the recent months compared to summer or spring?
Apparently OpenAI locked down 40% of the global DRAM supply for their Stargate project, which then caused everyone else to start panic-buying, and now we're here: https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/
It's kind of depressing to see that it takes just one asshole to screw the entire electronic market. If you read this, Sam, FU.
I got one of the Newegg circulars in my email advertising a sweet little uATX AMD server board and got to thinking that my home FreeBSD server could use a CPU bump and more memory. As soon as I saw how much 128GB of DDR5 ECC would cost my jaw dropped and noped the fuck out. The cheapest 32GB modules are around $300 and upwards of $500. Thought I was going to gift myself early this Christmas. Depressing indeed.
> We need high RAM prices for manufacturers to expand fab
Manufactures aren't dumb, they lost a lot of money in the last cycle and aren't playing that game anymore. No additional capacity is planned, OEMs are simply redirecting existing capacity towards high-margin products (HBM), instead of chasing fragile demand.
The proles will get dumb screens tethered to their sanctioned models; and we will be grateful!
I understand hating at people like Musk who destroys human lifes but what is Sam Altman doing?
Because of (c) of images or just because he bought ram?
> Apparently OpenAI locked down 40% of the global DRAM supply for their Stargate project
That sounds like a lot, and almost unbelievable, but the scales of all of this kind of sits in that space, so what do I know.
Nonetheless, where are you getting this specific number and story from? I've seen it echoed before, but no one been able to trace it to any sort of reliable source that doesn't boil down to "secret insider writing on Substack".
Samsung directly announced that OpenAI expects to procure up to 900,000 DRAM wafers every month. That number being 40% of global supply comes from third party analysis, but the market is going to notice nearly a million wafers being diverted each month however you slice it. That's a shitload of silicon.
https://news.samsung.com/samsung-and-openai-announce-strateg...
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/dram/openais-star...
> Samsung directly announced that OpenAI expects to procure up to 900,000 DRAM wafers every month
The article says: "OpenAI’s memory demand projected to reach up to 900,000 DRAM wafers per month", but not by when, or what current demand is. If this is based on OpenAI's >$1T of announced capex over the next 5 years, its not clear that money will ever actually materialize.
I dont even get this trend, wouldnt OpenAI be buying ECC RAM only anyway? Who in their right mind runs this much infrastructure on NON ECC RAM??? Makes no sense to me. Same with GPUs they aren't buying your 5090s. Peoples perception is wild to me.
OpenAI bought out Samsung and SK Hynixes DRAM wafers in advance, so they'll prioritize producing whatever OpenAI wants to deploy whether that's DDR/LPDDR/GDDR/HBM, with or without ECC. That means way less wafers for everything else so even if you want a different spec you're still shit out of luck.
ECC memory is a bit like RAID: A consumer-level RAM stick will (traditionally) have 8 8-bit-wide chips operating basically in RAID-0 to provide 64-bit-wide access, whereas enterprise-level RAM sticks will operate with 9 8-bit-wide chips in something closer to RAID-4 or -5.
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.
> you just have 9 bits per byte rather than 8 bits per byte physically on the module. More chips but not different chips.
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.)
On the flipside, LLMs are so inconsistent you might argue ECC is a complete waste of money. But Open Ai wasting money is hardly anything new.
Using digital chips instead of some novel analog approach is even greater waste.
> 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...
That DDR5-4800 2x16GB price tend is crazy. It tripled from August/September until now.
Price is an optimization problem, if you raise prices and profits increase, your product was likley too cheap. If you raise prices and profits decrease ("lol I'm not paying $XYZ for an rpi when the clone is $ABC") you are charging too much.
There are myriad other factors that go into this, especially just general inflation, which will likely fill the price gap by the time memory costs go down anyway.
In my opinion rpis have been living off their name/first to market for a long time now with exaggerated low-power usage, and there may come a point where your "too high" scenario happens.
I know I'm comparing apples to oranges here (new to used), but I started buying used 1L PCs instead (Lenovo thinkcentres) for about $20 the cost of a RPi 5 - but with the benefit of it actually coming with the cooling and storage it needs to run and is upgradable, plus runs Intel.
The amount of times I've had a Pi just self-destruct on me is ridiculous. They are known for melting SD cards, and just this week I had one blow the power regulator over USB power and still get hot enough in 2 minutes that it burnt me to touch it. They are considered cheap commodity computing and they aren't cheap enough for that any more.
These scenarios end up being testers to see what people will pay. If people are buying your product at a ridiculous price, why drop it?
Nothing wrong with this. Some applications really are compute bound and don't need much RAM, such as a homemade surveillance camera system I have, presently running on a couple of Raspi 4s. Suppose I wanted to upgrade to Raspi 5, why spend extra money on RAM that's not needed? These things run headless with the only GUI exposed via web server.
> What surprises me the most is the 1GB option is even viable...
There are plenty of non-IoT use cases that are viable with 1GB of general-purpose compute. Hell, I rented an obscenely cheap 512MB VPS until recently, and only abandoned it because its ancient kernel version was a security risk.
Most of my RPi tasks are not memory-bound
I have a Pi3b in a 3D printer, and compiling the software, but also simply apt upgrade feels like it takes forever. Most day to day operations work just fine though.
At work we have a display with a Pi3 (not B) connected, just showing websites in rotation. Websites even with a simple animation are laggy, startup takes a few minutes.
Both of these usecases don't need more than 1 GB of ram, but I want to speed of a 4 or 5.
Usually it's just "same thing but faster". CPU is 2-3x faster, and even boot speed is faster, so it can be handy to not have to wait so long to run updates, compile something, reboot, etc.
Those price increases seem pretty reasonable given the shitty situation. I bought a Jetson 8GB a few weeks ago for $350 CAD from Amazon, I just checked that same listing and it's now $430.
can't just make a new fab in a year and capitalise on spike, and most big investors in it know it.
The article mentions "the $10 Raspberry Pi Zero". I feel this is rewriting history. The Raspberry Pi Zero was $5 when it was released back in 2015. It was mostly out of stock, but I did manage to get one unit at that price eventually.
Nowadays you can no longer get the Raspberrry Pi Zero for less than 12€ or so. I consider the $5 Raspberry Pi Zero to be among the best values on the market and there hasn't been anything else that came close.
RPi Locator is a great service if you're looking to buy a Pi you can afford.
What do you think, when will the ram prices come back down again? Years, months?
It’s sad to see the one area of life that has long resisted inflation (computing) now succumb to inflationary forces. Other than emergency situations such as COVID-19, I’m used to seeing prices going down over time for computers and their components. It’s one of the rare bright spots when everything else is escalating in price, and now that’s disappearing.