Remember when 16 GB of RAM was high-end for anything a typical user would need?
That really wasn't so long ago.
On the road to fully automated luxury gay space communism.
Spreading Linux propaganda since 2020
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Remember when 16 GB of RAM was high-end for anything a typical user would need?
That really wasn't so long ago.
I was chuffed when I got a 16KB upgrade for my ZX81.
7 years ago 16gb wasn't enough for me and all I do is play games and watch YouTube. 16gb means Minecraft + chrome crashed videos.
Now I have 32gb and don't use chrome and memory no longer causes any issues.
I have never owned any device with more than 8 GB of RAM, still playing games and having many dozens of Firefox tabs open simultaneously.
I dedicate that much to vanilla minecraft, we have very different expectations on results I think. If I'm playing modded I dedicate 16 just so I don't ever have to worry about running out.
Firefox almost halved my browser ram usage back in the day though.
Me having always played games on a laptop, and then seeing people in the last 15 years with their $2000+ rigs, gives a Winter Palace feeling.

I have a laptop, it's just unreasonable. Need the ability to just pick it up and walk off. I figure if I spend more time on my laptop than anything else it probably should be one of my most high end things.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BORRBce5TGw
OpenAI bought 40% of all the RAM in the world for the next year.
Lex Luthor stole 40% of all the RAM. that's four tens. and that's terrible.
the price increase will be worth it if we get to see a gamer go joker mode
Imagining the person who Luigi's Sam Altman just immediately doing a fortnite dance while looking directly at the nearest security camera.
They are going to put all the gamer words on those bullets too.
Did they actually or did they say they're going to
I don’t understand the deals and I’m not sure the terms are even public, but they apparently negotiated something like first purchase rights or a guaranteed price on up to 40% of the wafers to be produced. This of course caused every other big RAM customer to panic buy all at once as soon as it was announced.
Basically, all RAM is manufactured by three companies. RAM pricing operates on a 4~5 year pricing cycle where high prices encourage a increase in production which in turn lowers prices and discourages production which raises prices and so on.
There hasn't been much investment to increase overall manufacturing capacity of RAM and the factories to do so aren't quick to spin up. RAM was already at low prices earlier this year which indicated a decrease in production. Then OpenAI announced they'd be buying 40% of the global RAM supply, a massive amount. This has led to retailers starting to jack up RAM prices. I panic bought a 2x16GB kit for $200 at the beginning of the week. That same SKU is now $400.

As a warning, this RAM shortage will affect EVERYTHING with RAM in it, GPUs, phones, etc.
Then OpenAI announced they'd be buying 40% of the global RAM supply
did they actually put in orders or is this just sam altman pulling another trick to squeeze a little more air into the bubble?
Just another Sam Altman trick to make shit worse for the commoners.
The latter as far as I know. Retailers are raising prices on existing stock. I've seen a few SKUs go out of stock only to be reposted with a different, more expensive SKU.
Is it terrible to still be on DDR4 these days? A month or so ago I got 32gb(16/16) DDR4 for 60 bucks.
Edit: The ram I got is out of stock on newegg, even the DDR4 is around 100-150 or more for 32gb now
My pc that runs my mc server is still on ddr3 lmao
I panic bought a 2x16GB kit for $200 at the beginning of the week. That same SKU is now $400.
Damn. Congrats, quick draw 
Can't wait for smart technology to become unaffordable to the masses and this shit backfiring on their faces in some years.
We need it for the chat bots. This is the best and most rational system.
"Prices of Memory" sounds like it'd be a brutal tech death album name
Atticus Ross (frequent collaborator of Trent Reznor) has this instrumental, down-tempo-y track with Sea Power vibes titled "Memory to Media" that this made me think of.
I yoinked 96gb of ddr5 on sale less than a year ago for 140 bucks. That same kit of RAM is approaching 600. Absolutely wild.
I used to love speccing out PC builds, even purely hypothetically just to see how good a setup I could put together for X amount of money. But then during the crypto boom and COVID it got way less fun and has mostly stayed that way...
riding my 10 year old rig till it disintegrates at this point. maybe the silver lining to the AI bubble popping will be that we finally see part prices fall, but nothing cool ever happens so probably not.
wtf happened 😭 i bought 32GB RAM in april and it was like $45. granted it was SODIMM and probably not high performance gaming RAM or whatever but still...
i looked it up and the kit i got is now $180 😬
Its like 350$ in India for a 32GB Kit.
The economy has depression
I was thinking about throwing together a linux box and running a smol deep seek model locally but it looks like ima put that on hold for a while. I just checked ebay and used prices for 64GB are out of control as well. Any chance big ai is influencing this? They really seem desperate to get revenue on the books. I am getting hit up for ai services at every turn now. Firefox is asking me if I want my web browsing summarized by ai (NO), google wants me to let them review my email (NO), github trying to force me to use copilot (i use a free model), Insurance tape worms are advertising their use of ai and I'm just waiting for chase bank to push it on me (NO)
Look into used workstations and servers. They’re available for relatively cheap still and will do what you want.
Wow, I bought almost that exact same ram in March for $115.
That's brutal.
I hope Sam Altman fucks himself with a rusty spoon.
Damn, I upgraded my SSD and ram for like $200 last year, just looked at the same parts and it would run me like $700 now what the fuck.
urgently needs to catch up in computing technology. Western
are out of their minds.
Datacenter demand is the purported reason for the 3x spike
It won’t be better after the crash either because the gpus and sticks the modules are going into are hbm and ecc.
If you think there’s a crash coming that you wanna take advantage of it would be good to learn about workstations and servers.
Damn I lucked out. Two years ago when I built my current PC 128GB of DDR5 ended up costing me like $230 (4x32GB). If I bought the same DIMMs today it would be $1160. What. The. Fuck.
Also OpenAI is full of shit and they won’t be buying the amount they claimed.
Doesn't matter. They've made computing far more expensive now which will affect consumers and smaller businesses while Ram manufacturers will be able to jack up price as much as they want since they're selling to data centers now.
and here I am under my rock singing lullabies to my DDR3
Just checked and a 32GB kit I got on sale for ~$85ish a few months ago is now pushing $330
Yea just do a DNA from amazon for the cheaper parts (below 500). Jeff bezos will give it to you for free.
Edit: wrong post
Uhh fuck Sam altman?