I love the Linux community, because this memory shortage has prompted two quite significant developments. Firstly, quite a substantial speedup of the Zram/Zswap (whichever one it is) systems (and a little improvement on compression), secondly, a potentially whole new memory compression stack referred to as CRAM that could allow reading compressed memory directly at near-DRAM speeds.
While making current memory management more efficient won’t in any case effectively solve the memory shortage, as none of these savings are comparable to effectively giving you a free extra stick, it is awesome that people have spent significant effort on this front.
CRAM is an excellent name
It really is.
Make RAM Doubler Real 👏
Just download more ram lmao
Can we just observe what a bizarre fucking moment we are living in?
Everyone knows the collapse of the AI bubble is imminent and most of those people know it’s going to be the proximal trigger for a global financial collapse and at the very least a long recession.
Everyone knows except the people who are investing billions of dollars into AI and their press.
Everyone knows except the people who are investing billions of dollars into AI and their press.
A lot of them do know and are planning to be the ones not left with the bag
Eh kind of. AI is not going to go away. It’s going to be just like the internet in the early days. With a similar crash to the dot-com crash.
They’re just all trying to be the one that doesn’t go bankrupt during the crash.
trying to be the one that doesn’t go bankrupt during the crash == planning to be the ones not left with the bag
I wonder if some people don’t understand that saying anymore. “Get that bag” means getting a full money bag. “Left with the bag” or “left holding the bag” means you have an empty money bag that has been emptied by others.
There’s a full discussion of the phrase here
Your interpretation, to be left with an empty bag that previously had something valuable, is one of several interpretations, but not the earliest.
The original seems to be, the member of the group holding a bag of contraband when the authorities intervene.
I think this second meaning is the more compelling: the group sought a benefit but only one bears the cost. Or, each member of the group took the risk but that risk only materialised for one member.
I mean, after you share out a bag of gold, including giving yourself a share, the bag will be empty.
Oh wow! I had no idea. I think of it in money schemes. Thanks !
No, I know what it means. I don’t think it applies here. It would apply to something like a pump and dump scheme, where the people know the bag is already empty, but they fluff it up and try to pass it off on someone else before the whole thing collapses.
That’s not what these companies are doing. They legitimately believe that AI will eventually become profitable and are trying to corner the market and be the dominant player. They WANT the crash. They just want to be the ones that survive it. That’s not the same as trying to leave someone else with the bag at the end of it.
I thought “get that bag” was specifically to encourage women chasing money to buy synecdochic luxury purses.
I don’t think that’s really the same. Not being left with the bag means you know already know the bag is empty and pass it on to someone else before they realize it’s empty. Like a pump and dump scheme.
That’s not what these companies are doing. They’re not trying to leave investors holding the empty bag. They are legitimately trying to turn profitable and corner the market.
The fibre in the ground from the dotcom bubble was still used… eventually.
Most of the 100’s of billions of dollars of GPUs that have just been sitting on shelves in warehouses and will continue to sit there for years even if there isn’t a crash will be nearly worthless (relative to the prices paid) whether they try to mass liquidate at a small fraction of the purchase price to pay back some of their 10%+ interest loans they used to buy them or they sit around for a decade until there’s a place to put them and at that point they could be so inefficient, they’re not worth the money to install them and power to run them.
Yeah, chips are more of a perishable good than any kind of durable infrastructure, and at the end of the day, the models themselves have no durable value because information is never truly scarce, regardless of how they try to make us pretend it is or poison the well with lies. There’s no magic solution to making LLMs actual AGI or even effective tools outside of their narrow scope. Not only that, the way they’re using it is extremely reckless, deeply inefficient, and supremely cost intensive, on a level that makes the Manhattan Project look wholesome. There isn’t going to be a “last man standing” to win, it’s just going to go up like flash powder and take everyone in the dogpile with it.
That’s if they don’t decide the best course of action is to launch them into LEO lol. If they do (they will–they’re that stupid), the infrastructure will burn up in less than five years.
The LOE stuff is the dumbest shit possible I’ve ever heard for data centers I swear to God. Who the hell comes up with these ideas 😭 space is such a difficult environment to work in, absolutely not suited for data centers. You barely get any benefit out of it at all, just somewhat more efficient solar panels that could have been worked around by having more down on earth
There’s a pretty big benefit to the solar panels: more efficient and also can be placed in a solar-synchronous orbit that is always illuminated. I can’t imagine that power advantage outweighs the disadvantages of cooling power-hungry hardware with no way to reject that heat to air or water. I’m with you: WTF are they thinking?
I heard Google just launched a test bed. Basically one mini server the size of a refrigerator that can only operate for 15 minutes before it needs to shut off to prevent heat damage. I’m guessing that thing will prove the case against celestial data centers, but we’ll see. The only good thing to come of this is that it might help advance cooling tech for satellites and suchlike.
I didn’t say AI is going to go away. I said there are many unscrupulous investors that are trying to game the system to take money from suckers knowing full well there is a crash coming and planning to pull out at the top.
Just so we are clear the dot com crash was a result of over commercialization and venture capitalization of the World Wide Web (hence “dot com” crash and not Newsgroup crash). The Internet was nearly 30 years old at that point. What became AOL went online in 1985, 8 years before commercial interests were allowed on the WWW, just as one for instance.
I think a more concise explanation is that everyone knows that shares are over-valued, but no one really knows by how much.
Thats why they are pumping these IPO valuations
Oh they know
We all know that an industry that spends more than it earns should collapse but I’m not so certain it is imminent.
“Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.” feels like a quote that holds very true in today’s market.
Oh they definitely know, it’s a deliberate and methodical way to pump the money around between corporations, move it from consumers to corporations and from corporations to the C-suite. They know the bubble will burst. They only care about how much money they have extracted from it to still come out on top after it all comes crashing down.
It’s a pyramid scheme, we’re the ones at the bottom and we can’t get out.
The investors know too. They just need to hype it up so the next is bigger than them and bail them out.
It’s a pyramid scheme for billionaires. They just hope they’re not at the bottom of the pyramid.
Same as NFTs and every other bubble where it was clear that it was a bubble
There is going to be a LOT of used hardware on the market if it does.
Put it together aligning with the housing collapse and we gonna be living great.
Everyone knows the collapse of the AI bubble is imminent
Paul Krugman was predicting the Housing Crash as early as 2004 in his NYT column.
Everyone knows except the people who are investing billions of dollars into AI and their press.
The theory of the modern tech industry is that you can simply outrun your problems. Meta/Facebook has done this repeatedly, leaping over multi-billion-dollar failure after failure based entirely on the inertia of their core product growth combined with low interest rates and a bullish long term economic outlook.
Even in the worst-case scenario, we have such an enormous array of tools to manipulate markets - as demonstrated in 2008 and 2014 and 2020 - that investors are reluctant to sell with a massive federal bailout always on the horizon. And we’re far from the worst-case scenario. '26 Q2 was a historic earnings season. We are in the middle of the biggest bull market in history.
Well, sure, as far as government policy is concerned, the stock market is the economy, no wonder it’s going to be goosed until it collapses.
That is why you sell shovels rather than mine the gold yourself. These memory companies know what they are doing…
Here’s the thing about bubbles - when people believe that collapse is imminent, they hold back and don’t dive in. It is only when the overwhelming majority believe that this new thing can’t lose, is going to change the world, and that we are in a “new paradigm” where the old rules don’t matter, that the bubble has peaked and collapse is imminent. We’ve probably got another year or so before collapse. Too many people are still skeptical.
Timing a bubble pop is notoriously difficult.
I think one thing that’s helping people hang on to delusion is the scarcity of real information. For instance, it’s prefectly possible that 2/3rds of NVIDIA GPUS purchased for data centers are just sitting in a warehouse somewhere, uninstalled. But that’s just a guess based on available data, but we can’t know for sure.
I think with Anthropic and OpenAI’s upcoming IPOs, we’re going to get a lot of information that will eventually filter through the slavish business press and into public consciousness as facts instead of opinions.
I think this bubble is a bit different and not really reliant on the general public’s view or support. They will attempt to ram this down our throats, with violence where necessary, because the more buy-in the better, but the clock is already ticking because they made promises of profit they cannot keep and when the debt comes due they will not be able to pay
They know their promises cannot be kept. They are building a surveillance state for the government. When the bubble bursts, the government will swoop in and bail them out because they are too big to fail and hand over most of these AI resources to the US government.
Bond market already knows. But this time it’s an ugly double whammy as it’s both the AI companies and the US government that won’t be able to pay their debt, and they are interlinked.
If it comes to it, the US is constitutionally barred from just defaulting on its debts. And the US government can just print more money. Which will massively devalue the USD, tanking the economy and killing their ability to borrow more in the future, but it’ll still technically allow them to pay off the current debt.
Technically, yes - but not in a way that foreign investors would want to lend any more money in the future.
I feel like we just left the era of delusions of “new paradigm” and entering the skepticism part. Of course plenty of people have always been skeptical, but not the people with enough money to cause this.
OTOH, timing can still be difficult to predict. Surely people knew tulips weren’t worth more than homes, yet it took years after tulips reached that price for the peak to be reached iirc. Even if people know the crazy is irrational and cannot go on forever, there is still FOMO. The peak is likely to happen after a lot of people know the thing will have to crash eventually, but enough continue to try to eek would a little more profit while not being left holding the bag.
The peak only happens after a good majority think the crash is imminent and are ready to sell off to avoid being left with nothing. Hence why many of these companies are trying to be added to indicies quickly so that pension/retirement funds can be the one stuck with much of the losses while the billionaires just to onto their next grift.
Pretty sure they know too. They’ve simply arranged things so that they will still come out well ahead even so.
I wondering if there is any benefit for me in having all the RAM my motherboard allows for when this bubble burst, and Ram prices fall like a rock to rock bottom.
Honestly, probably not.
I think we’ve reached the top of the S-Curve for personal computing hardware. People are staying with their old hardware longer and software is no longer targeting high end and future devices.
So unless there’s a reason you think you might need that RAM, I’d put the money somewhere else.
People are staying with their old hardware longer
Absolutely 100% my experience too, my computer is a mix of 2-5 year old hardware, and I’m still on the AM4 socket which is 9 years old now! It is a newer motherboard but I started on that socket way back in 2017! The upgrade path for AM4 has been insane. 😋
In the 90’s I wouldn’t have a single component that was 2 years old.
IDK if that’s because I’m older, but definitely it seems the advantage of upgrading every year is diminishing, and the price is increasing. Sometimes I would even buy a new GPU 2 times in the same year. 😜My desktop is 10-year-old gaming PC. If you look at the Steam Survey, it’s about middle-of-the-road today.
It’s not just PC. It’s an open question whether anyone is going to be the next gen of game console, and that’s partially because gaming itselfhas been enshittified, but also for the same reason people aren’t running out to buy 8K TV’s–the minimal improvement in subjective experience is not worth the price.
People are more likely to replace phones because they break than because they are upgrading–partially why Apple and Samsung are doing their DARNEDEST to lock down repairs, so they can drive up the cost of repairs to force people to buy a new phone.
We’re approaching a world where we think of what was formerly “high technology” the same way we think of refrigerators–as basic devices that can generically and permanently do a necessary set of tasks.
I always hated consoles, as a waste of a good computer you couldn’t do anything with but game.
But I think consoles will be fine, consoles are mostly for children, and they will get exclusives to drive up sales.
But this is a bad time to make a new console, still AFAIK both Sony and Microsoft are planning new ones next year?The economics of consoles are in shambles.
It used to be you’d get highish-end hardware at cheaper price because of mass production and manufacturer incentives (made up for on games).
Now with people carrying massive game libraries, they’re less likely to buy new games, at the same time as console gaming becomes enshittified cash grabs, at the same time as tech has hit diminishing returns in an industry where generational hardware sales drive software purchases.
Playstation has a few exclusives, but XBox has literally none–it’s all cross compatible with Windows, and almost every single one of those titles is playable via Steam on Linux. You can build an equivalent PC for the same price or less than the equivalent console, and have improved upgrade and repair paths, plus mods, plus Steam sales… consoles make less and less financial sense every day.
The only console that is doing well is Nintendo, and that’s because they built around content not hardware.
And that said, most kids are growing up gaming on tablets and phones, and they haven’t gone through the evolutionary learning process that a 35-year-old life-long gamer. Chances are you hand an 8-year-old a complex two-stick game and they’ll do about as well as my father would.
I think likely we’ll have a profusion of quirky handheld consoles, but the big box consoles will be replaced with computers.
the big box consoles will be replaced with computers.
I think you are wrong, the PC is dying, and the consoles will have even bigger advantage from mass production in the future.
Most people don’t care to maintain a PC just to play games, and most people don’t really have any other use for a PC anymore.
Even without subsidies from Microsoft and Sony, the current gen consoles were cheaper than an equivalent performing PC when they arrived. But in the future that may not be true, it’s all down to profit maximization, because there is no doubt a console can be sold cheaper than an equivalent performing PC.
Depends on what you wanna use it for. If you wanna host a bunch of services, do scientific computing, or play modded video games with really bad memory leaks and memory optimization, perhaps?
The problem is memory is expensive because fabs have switched to making HBM3 and EEC LPDDRX5 (soldered memory, like what’s in a phone and some laptops). So even when the crash happens, we won’t get a mass sell-off of useful consumer hardware. Likewise, the “GPUs” don’t even have video outputs.
I’m just a casual user today, I used to stress my computers to the limit, but not anymore.
So I most definitely would make very poor use of maxing my RAM.Back in the day I loaded DVD 's into virtual drives in RAM, to make games load faster.
For some reason the Linux kernel works best with a swap disk, so I had that in RAM too, and of course temporary files.These things are of course banal although they were extremely efficient back in the day, and this was a thing I learned already back in the 80’s where the Amiga made similar things possible.
Today with fast SSD drives I don’t feel the need, and to be honest I already have more RAM than I need. And since I don’t program anymore either, which I always found interesting to explore the capabilities of new hardware, I have become an “average” user. 😳
It’s not a crisis when it’s artificial… Just stop allowing companies to hoard shit…
But hoarding shit and accumulation is what capitalism does.
The fact that we as a species have not already collectively decide to enforce the rule that once you get to $100M you get a “YOUR DID IT” trophy and a spot on a private tropical island where you can do hookers and blow for the rest of your life while any further increases in your wealth are nationalised is proof we are, in fact, a bunch of fools.
That’s a bingo! I personally think anything that becomes a monopoly or serves more than 50% of the population of any given state/province/territory should be nationalized. At the very least Grocery stores and telecoms should be. It’s not like there still wouldn’t be other stores as they all wanna win capitalism too.
The government gave us the completely discredited food pyramid and you want them to be in control of grocery stores?
You know there’s more than one government in the world right?
You’re right, better to leave the mentally ill in charge than elected officials.
The future you want: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VBWpVjzJXIs
The future I want is people bidding for trade routes through a wormhole?
That should be long enough to make sure consumer electronics, especially PCs, are dying.
and the industry inflicted it upon itself with the shit eating grin
On purpose to make you rent your compute rather than own it.
Yup the only solution is piracy now
quite literally - that’s what’s going to happen
and even that compute relies on tech not really designed for that kind of scope but there is no point in pushing new tech when the money flow that well. it would backfire real hard.
I think we are “lucky” that it effects all computer like electronics (laptops, PCs, gaming consoles, phones). If it was only PCs, the PC as we know it would die out.
My prediction is that all software will use less ram and less GPU in the coming years. If companies keep on shifting towards higher requirements year after year, people won’t buy it anymore because it will simply not run on a mainstream machine anymore.
Nope. As long as demand exists. And you can’t just make it disappear like that.
A ‘memory crisis’ they created artificially and deliberately in order to price gouge as hard as possible.
Why do you think that? Not that they are saints, but the demand shock is a real thing, not something the DRAM manufacturers created artificially. And that prices rise with demand is not price fixing.
the ram cartels have been hit for price fixing time and time again for decades. this most recent has been driven by the irrational over-investment into ai, but it’s a tale old as… commodity RAM lol.
https://tech4gamers.com/ram-price-fixing-lawsuit-exposed/ 2026
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_industry_price_fixing 2002
https://www.aol.com/articles/80s-had-ram-oil-crisis-021700000.html the 80s
I’m not sure if this is what they are referring to, but they’ve said they aren’t increasing production . It would take a number of years for new production to spin up, so they are either happy to just reap the new massive profit margins or they believe the demand won’t be there for that long.
I think it’s a little of both, but one of my friends left my company producing weird semiconductors to go work at Micron making RAM. They’re definitely ramping up a little, but the equipment and techniques to fab those chips is very specialized. Imagine trying to drill zillions of really tiny, deep pits, and then making sure the very bottom of those pits get coated while the sidewalls are completely unaffected… and you have to do it everywhere uniformly on a hundred 350mm wafers per minute.
This is ON SALE, from MicroCenter today- they’re known for having amazing deals.
THIS IS NOT OKAY
that’s server ram (registered ecc), which costs a lot more than ‘normal’ modules
It is yes, but it was 1/4 the price 1 year ago.
Huh, I wonder what’s been happening the last year that would make RAM chips that are almost exclusively used by businesses to go up in price like that?
I uh- are you saying we should be okay with it? You seem to have a strange perspective on it.
Still WAY to much, let’s be real. It doesn’t even cook breakfast.
I never understood why my dad was always so cheap until now.
You “used” to pay this much for something and now it skyrocketed, so you can’t live with yourself paying that higher price when it has been much cheaper for so long. Maybe he thought prices were going to come down again.
I don’t think the prices of RAM are ever going to come down. At least as long as people keep paying, which they do.
Well, people aren’t really paying. Theoretically, large AI investment groups are paying. I say theoretically because as far as I understand it, they’ve mostly promised to buy the output but I don’t think have actually made good on buying it. The manufactured scarcity is being realized as increased memory costs, but the contracts are still landing even though the biggest contract may not actually be filled in the future (AI bubble). It’s why memory makers are trying to get Apple and co to commit to today’s prices for the next 3 years, because if they do and the big contract falls through, they still get their insane profit margin baked in for a bit and then can stockpile / price fix / sell through to market.
The big wrench here will be if Chinese memory fabs come online. If that big contract (AI) defaults, existing contracts are going to be very much worthless as folks would rather cancel them and fill orders at CXMT. So you may see a lot of consumer memory start filling from those fabs as they take market share while traditional players try to price fix. So the real question is, will cxmt try to capture market or play price fixing with the current cartel? My money is on market share.
My guess is price fixing, maybe slightly undercutting the current giants. Entering the market is only worth it because the prices are high.
Eh, I think they see more power and influence in gaining market share and being the provider of that technology, and then cornering the market. Prices are currently high, but they tend to do a better job of playing the long game.
Just in time for China to scoop up the entire market, smart.
You mean just in time for the US to declare “Chinese ram” a national security risk and ban it’s import right?
Full support this. Cheaper ram for the rest of us.
Even if they do having the cartels demand in China cut is going to hurt. Demand is dropping in the datacenters market and supply is hitting, this is all fear lingering from them to get us to buy now at the peak
You’re being downvoted but I’m here for you. Americans deserve to be cut off from all trade at this point.
Its existence will still lower prices.
won’t they be supplying their own market first? they’re doing the data center ai bullshit too.
Probably, but China is REALLY good at scaling manufacturing, in general. Hopefully they’ll be able to quickly scale up their memory production.
Yeah, but guys… Be reasonable.
At best AI will be amazing and steal our jobs, enrich the wealthy further, and destroy the environment.
And at worst it will reach a wall it can’t overcome and continue to fuck up humanity.
It’s a win-win!!1!
microsoft’s own evaluation chills me, because it’s spot on, and THEY STILL WENT FULL FUCKIN HOG deepthroating this garbage:
“Millions of people around the world will soon consider large models ‘hoovering up’ all their work to be an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions,” an internal Microsoft document admitted.
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/ai-is-creating-doom-loops-all-over-the-economy
“we’re literally creating the need for a communist revolution, but the stockholders demand it!”
I mean, OK, we’re all accelerationists now I guess, ducky!
yeah I was kinda surprised to see that level of honesty from the slop factory.
The massive financial crash that will wipeout those assholes might the only real “win” the rest of us get.
Of course, judging by the last one in 2008 (which, IMHO, I suspect will turn out to be smaller than the AI one), governments the world over will try to save the assholes and make the rest of us pay for it with Austerity - if there’s one thing I’ve learned from living through a couple of major crashes (in the very industries most hard hit) and several minor ones is that when those in power see that they can rescue the wealthy whilst making the rest pay with no consequences for themselves, they’ll do it again and again in ever more extreme ways, until things at a societal level rather than just crack, actually blow up.
We shall see - there is really no way the rest of us can stop the desperate feeding frenzy amongst the increasingly panicked elites and their politician minions before the whole thing crashes from the systemic accumulation of inbalances, so no matter what we (the common folk) do, we’re going to get a massive AI crash - probably as big as the Net Crash and the 2008 Crash together - the more the feeding freenzy lasts (and governments as usual are activelly trying to delay the day of reckoning, hence making the feeding frenzy last longer and hit deeper) and the more of the broader Economy the sharks can reach, the worse it will be.
We should organize raiding parties on data centers to get PC parts, pirate style yarrrr, and disrupt AI while doing it. Burn it down to leave no trace.
Jokes on you we will soon be raiding data centers for fresh water
Two birds…two birds
Because what are we going to do with PC parts when we don’t have any electricity anymore. Sadface
Pull in close and fire grapeshot broadside!
Please don’t shoot frag into the booty you want to loot.
Jam the robot guard dogs and use thermite to burn through locks you mean. Break open the server racks, grab the loot, burn the rest.
Unless you can actually afford the ram prices, just play older games. There’s a ton of AAA games that I’ve never played.
Then there’s tons of remastered games too. I haven’t touched those. Older games are affordable and run on max settings with any modern computer.
We already have a life time of quality games and computer parts in circulation.
I think when we look back at this time we will see how new games are optimized and intended to run on lower end hardware rather than the “look how real it is” formula.
A good example is borderlands. Cell shading was created because it was aesthetically pleasing while also consuming the least amount of resources. When optimization and performance were no longer a problem, games like border lands used cell shading but still required all lot of resources.
Still playing tf2 <3
Are you a furry, a queer or a nazi? (Not exclusive) (Im pootis man)
I love how these, accurately, are the only people playing TF2. Of those now i am queer
Also indie games tend to be quite good, I’m currently playing Obenseuer and my buddy and I are doing a run of Abiotic Factor with Valheim and possibly Permafrost on the list. Have to see how Permafrost plays.
My main computer is 13 years old, with a graphics card that is even older. No, I haven’t played a lot of the newer games, but there are more than enough to keep me occupied and happy that can run perfectly well on my hardware.
It might be different if I was into multiplayer games, but I’m not.
Last one might need more then a fried potato to run lol
The main problem I have with RAM increasing in price is not the RAM itself. I personally have enough RAM in my PC and I’m not looking to upgrade at any point in the near future.
No, my issue is how everything else becomes more expensive because of it.
Infrastructure requires two things these days: fuel and computers. And both are getting fucked over. Because of all the things that rely on this infrastructure, everything, even mundane things, will increase in price.
And when the bubble eventually pops, everyone below the ultra rich will suffer for it, another major economical crash like 2008. And of course the people responsible will get away with it.
“the people responsible will get sway with it”
Not only will they get away with it, but they will make massive profits off of it. They will be buying up foreclosed houses, colluding with their friends to short stocks of businesses they buy up and and run into the ground, buying the dip, and still having more than enough leftover to live how they are currently living.
Every time there is one of these recessions or economic crisises, the rich get a lot richer. To them it’s just “buying season”. They have enough money to wait it out.
There’s a saying these fucks have: “Fortunes are made when there’s blood in the streets.”
When they say it’s predicted to last another three years what they mean is they hope it lasts another three years because that means they’re Investments will be worth more when the bubble finally does burst.
They can’t predict the market any more than anyone else can so this doesn’t really mean anything. We wait as well be asking tarot card readers if RAM prices are going to decrease anytime soon.
OpenAi is set to run out of money mid next year. All the other dominos in this bubble will follow. Chip factories will be begging for consumer demand well before 3 years
Yup. We even know when it’s going to hit - 2027-8.
https://www.groundbrkr.com/p/the-teaser-period-why-the-ai-boom?subscribe_prompt=free
STOP BUYING TECH. FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, STOP. THE ONLY REASON PRICES KEEP GOING UP LIKE THIS IS BECAUSE PEOPLE AREN’T WILLING TO SACRIFICE COMFORT TO MAKE A POINT.
Buy used. Use hand me downs. Learn a new operating system to get new life out of stuff you already HAVE.
If people can’t give up access to shitty software to save tech, there’s no hope for the species. Period.
The prices are going up because big tech is buying it all up. Consumer sales quantities are way down due to the prices.
Nvidia hasnt even mentioned consumer grade GPUs seperately anymore in their quarter year rapport. It has been moved over to edge computing. Their main income is data center GPUs now.
I think consumer GPUs are like a hobby for Nvidia at this point. They would make more money if they stopped making them so they could use that fab time for their higher margin enterprise GPUs instead.
Sadly not. Their 2026 consumer revenue is the highest it’s ever been. 2020, they made 11 billion, of which 5.5 was consumer. FY 2026 was 215 billion, of which 16 was gaming.
Their 2026 gaming revenue was bigger than their total revenue for 2020, and it’s also irrelevant to their bottom line.
Prices have gone up too, but I don’t think the average gaming GPU has gone up significantly more than 3x and probably less, so unit count is either unchanged or increased.
They have tripled in price it’s insane, OP is talking about RAM not GPU but they both have similar trends.
My bad, I was reading the sibling comment to mine which was about nvidia specifically and replied to the parent one, which was not. RAM has indeed way more than tripled. A 5060ti is about 50% expensive, so nvidia’s consumer unit counts are up still, but my comment was aimed somewhat wrong lol.
5060 came out last year, 2025, no?
Prices are high because demand is driven by AI companies with mountains of investor cash. A consumer RAM boycott doesn’t move the needle.
My eight year old computer is going to be getting towards eleven years old by the time I upgrade it again at this rate.
Could you upgrade one part at a time or is it a laptop? A used GPU could be a cheaper upgrade, or a cpu if you’re not maxed out for the socket
That’s the age of the motherboard and cpu. The cpu could be upgraded significantly, but the main problem I’ve been seeing is insufficient pci-e lanes, which would require the motherboard replacement I’d been vaguely planning for early this year.
I’m still perfectly fine in my 6+ years old Gaming PC with 16GB.
But then again I switched from Windows to Linux about 2 years ago.
Since the time I started using PCs (over 3 decades ago), I went down the route of squeezing as much as I could from my desktop PCs by upgrading the hardware piece by piece rather than periodically buying a new one - to the point that I think I’ve done maybe just 3 full replacements in those 3 decades - the upgrades most of the time being memory, graphics cards and storage upgrades as those tend to be the best bang for the buck, though a few times all the way to replacing the motherboard (which sometimes forces things like memory upgrades and once even a computer box and power source upgrade, in the transition to ATX physical format).
All this to say that in the last few years since Windows has become so bloated and inneficient, Linux’s capabilities to run Windows software have become so good and the prices of the usually best value hardware upgrades (memory, graphics cards) have become so high that, in my (I believe informed) view, the best performance upgrade for one’s PC right now for most people is literally to replace Windows with Linux.
This isn’t fanboyism speaking - I’ve been using Linux for fun since the early 90s when I would install Slackware from floppy disks, professionally for a large part of my career (which was developing software for the server side, were Linux became dominant in the 00s) and only switched my Gaming PC to it 2 years ago because I before I didn’t feel it wasn’t at all hassle free to game in Linux and I didn’t want to come how to unwind from spending all day programming and doing bug-fixing just to be stuck at diagnosing problems running some game or other in Linux - this is genuinelly my analysis based on my experience of improving my PC almost always by targetted upgrading piece by piece to improve performance rather than regularly buying new machines.
In fact, I’ve done this upgrade not just for myself but also for a family member whose Windows 8 (!) PC had become incompatible with pretty much everything the used - put Linux in, put up the desktop shortcuts for them to get to what they use (browser, e-mail), configure the thing to auto-update and it’s problem solved.
Many people have been delaying their upgrades for a long time already. I bought my old RAM 2015 and tried to convince myself for so long that it’s still fine until I finally upgraded this year.
Buying RAM used often isnt really a good idea unless you have a friend who makes you a good deal. For example I could find the RAM type I wanted for 180€ used or pay 220€ for new parts. That’s not worth it for me and also doesn’t make a dent into the market.
Also remember that most new hardware is sold to either computing providers or businesses. ~70% of memory produced is consumed by AI data centers, leaving only 30% for mobile devices and personal computing.
Don’t get me wrong, consuming less and buying used are still good ambitions, but it realistically has no impact on how prices are formed.
CEX in the UK do 5 year warranties on used hardware. Realistically you would probably just get a voucher rather than cash if it failed but you could then buy another replacement at least.
I’m not building a PC or buying a computer because I can make due with what I have a few years longer. But I do desperately need a new laptop at the office, so work is paying an outrageous sum of money for a new computer.
I’m also getting a few new employees - each of which is gonna need a computer
It businesses, not hobbyists paying these increased prices.
Buying used is per se not a bad idea, but the high RAM prices also mean more scammers, as it is now very profitable to scam people with fake RAM. And people need tech, so not a really an option to stop buying completely.
And I doubt prices would go down if consumers would stop buying or buying less RAM. The prices are high because the tech corporations are willing to buy RAM at basically any cost. Consumers are just a drop in the ocean at this point.
If tech is going to be usurped entirely, then reject it. I’ve started doing everything I can by mail and physical presence. Don’t buy the hype that you NEED tech. If your friends won’t let you change how you get in touch with them, then they’re not that good of friends and you don’t really need them.
If all of my stacked 15 year old computers here stop being able to access Lemmy? Oh well. It’s been fun.
This is a war. They are winning because we are willing to have a point where we say, “Well, this is the limit… I have to capitulate now.” They rub their hands together gleefully waiting for you to cave.
Don’t. Be stubborn. Because if we don’t it’s already over. Legislators and underfunded foundations are not going to save us.
Yeah I’d rather no computer or no internet at all than to accept the cloud. I’ll find other hobbies and entertainment.
They don’t care about hobbyists. They don’t need the tech.
But business users do.
So it creates a world where normal people no longer use tech, and the vast majority of tech is used by businesses for productivity purposes in the office while everyone else makes due with real life?
Like in the 90s?
Sounds like paradise to me. Starve out these cash-grab. psychologically manipulative disposable code subscription services.
If they can triple the cost for businesses while losing the hobbyists they aren’t being “starved out”. They’re making a fuckton more money while making a smaller variety of products, locking in contracts, and not having to deal with us.
I’ll still have tech but my spec requirements will decrease based on price. If that means I am compiling CDDA on a 2008 pentium laptop then so be it!
I would rather somewhat more modern and more energy efficient hardware, but when costs of hardware are so high then the energy costs of old hardware matter less.
Linux plus junk PCs. I’ve got a bunch of old computers my workplace tossed out because they wouldn’t take Windows 11 and I’ve never been happier with my tech setup in my life.
It’s probably some sort of mental condition, but I freaking love going trash-panda on our recycle PC pile and refurbing old hardware.
listen buddy, I’ve been getting computer junk every month for 20+ years. It’s all I think about and I still haven’t gotten addicted. If life has taught me anything is that the only thing you can’t get addicted to is free computer junk . how can I be addicted if it makes me happy? Computer junk is therapy, junking computers is LITERALLY my therapy. Life is free computer junk, everyday I wake up and I think about free computer junk. Every morning I grab my laptop and start looking on craigslist while I make my morning coffee. It’s literally all I think about, I can’t be at peace if I don’t junk at least 20$ a day. BUYING NEW IS JUST A PHASE. but I know a big junk pile is always right around the corner that’s why I’ll keep junking IT equipment until my wife leaves me.
