This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
The ‘AI’ angle is purely cover for the manufacturers actively choosing to now behave like the pharmaceutical industry. They’ve identified a window to pull this shit, and coordinated this opportunistic collusion.
The only meaningful response is to create a diverse production base to remove the choke point the current incumbents are leveraging, but that would require a concerted, collaborative effort by parties who can’t see and/or don’t understand the problem.
To play devil's advocate; it might be that the RAM producers see AI as a bubble, and it would be incredibly risky to expand their production now, when it won't come into effect until a handful of years from now.
RAM and SSD manufacturers have already seen many many dips and rises in price over decades.
However, that all of them are deciding not to expand and potentially rake in the cash is more than a little sus.
I'm not sure how to feel about it personally. I hope the true cost of maintaining these AI models gets passed down to customers soon so that it either crashes and burn, or at the very least stabilises the market.
Type shit that happens to me when I earn my own money
Thought I could wait to build a new PC, but at this point, it'll be another 5-10 years before things start getting better. After the price of the steam machine, I ordered parts to build my own. Such a bad time to build, but it's just gonna get worse the longer I wait.
If they get better. By the time the AI sector collapses under the weight of its own bullshit, things will have already gotten significantly worse. You’ll be less worried about RAM prices and more worried about bread prices.
I could crash the prices by tomorrow if I wanted to. All I'd have to do is buy some ram today.
I am figuring on selling off my previous machine once the teething issues with the new one has been resolved. Given these specs, what would be a fair price, Lemmings? I was guessing around $2,250 without the drives, but I am not really on the pulse of the market.
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CPU = Ryzen 5950x + Noctua heatsink with Kryosheet.
PSU = SeaSonic Vertex GX-1200
MOBO = Crosshair Hero VIII + WiFi
CASE = Rosewill Thor V2
RAM = DDR4 3600, 128gb total, came as a kit of 4 sticks.
STORAGE (OPTIONAL) = x2 to x5 4tb SSD SATA drives, non-NVME.
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The biggest issue here is doing an RMA on the CPU. It is unstable when PBO is enabled. Since I suck at techno surgery, I wouldn't be able to install the replacement without forking over money to a technician. Maybe I can make that contingent on buying at least 2 SSD SATA drives?
My new machine has only 4 SATA ports, and the SATA card to support all five SSDs and the optical disc drive is taking up a GPU slot. Being able to buy some 2280 M2 drives would solve that problem for me. That would gel nicely with a technician handling the transfer of the SATA SSDs back to the old machine for the new owner, since the tech can also get the M2 and a third GPU into my new PC.
Things are probably going to get worse in the short term, but the AI bubble is going to burst. Magnitude? We'll see, but when investors realize that these companies cannot make a profit, and open source frontier models that allow you to run AI in house are removing vendor lock in, things are going to change. Also, LLMs are a dead end, and have little room to improve.
Newer paradigms are appearing, such as Yann LeCun's JASP, which actually learns, and other approaches, which will make LLMs obsolete, and are way less hardware intensive.
Another factor is the Chinese closing in in consumer grade RAM. If it can be proven that no backdoor or other shenanigans are there, they will balance things somewhat.
While current reality is what it is, there may be a massive social and traditional media manipulation by the big three and other interested parties to fuel fear of rising prices forever, to push people to buy as much as they can at these prices. I have no proof of this, but I don't think it's far fetched.
And let's not forget that for media outlets, fear and tragedy sells. (I think Hearst or some other news mogul said that last century.)
Yann LeCun's JASP
Wait, this is my first time reading about this. Got an ELI5 or TL;DR?
I've come to terms with the fact I'm not going to be buying any new computer-type devices until the bubble pops.
I'm just terrified what happens if one of my existing devices breaks. If a RAM stick goes bad, I might have to mortgage my non-existent house.
In case you are being serious, there are ways around faulty RAM sticks, usually just a few cells/rows are affected. In case anyone needs to know this, here is a pretty good summary on stackoverflow on how to deal with this on linux. In general, look for "memmap".
Keep your hardware running as long as possible! Iirc newer RAM is unfortunately somewhat more susceptible to failing. My DDR3 is still working fine.
How long does it take a company already established in the sector to build a RAM factory?
Around 4 years. The creation of any microchip requires extremely stable geology, pristine rooms, high levels of training, Scrooge McDuck moneybins, and so on. It isn't an industry that can turn on a dime.
4 years after they break ground. God knows how long to decide the location, bribe the authorities to get tax breaks...
Time to hit the books, explore the mountains, build a chicken shed, grow something in the garden, buy a plot of land and grow something... Build a house myself idk things like that.
Yep, definitely not buying any new computers any time soon. If anything breaks I’ll try to live with it as much as I can.
Fuck this pricing.
it will be ironic when consumers cant afford the end user devices needed to interact with the AI servers. House of cards??
Let me put on my tinfoil hat really quick.
They want to kill personal computing. You don't need a full blown computer, you need a fire stick style device that plugs into your monitor and allows you to remotely access the virtual machine you rent from Microsoft on a monthly basis.
There is no tinfoil about it. Jensen Huang and the other tech oligarchs have openly stated that is their goal.
this has been “the plan” since 2005. when i was in high school trying to figure out what the heck “cloud computing” was, this is what they were talking about: anything requiring more compute than secure authentication and pixel drawing would be rendered in the cloud and delivered to dumb terminals. this is what netbooks, Chromebooks, and smartphones have been a step towards if not an implementation of.
Looking back at computing history, cloud computing is basically reverting back to the original mainframes and dedicated terminals.
There was a hype of using thin clients, the concept is that you get just enough hardware and software to be able to connect to a session running on a shared server, the admin can allocate more resources like CPU cores, RAM and storage as individual needs change over time.
As an IT guy, I do like the concept in a corporate environment, especially when looking at the SunRay system from Sun, which used smartcards for easier access, you put your card into the client and if configured properly, you got your old session loaded and ready in a few sec, regardless of which client you put your card into.
The YT channel Clabretro has several interesting SunRay videos.
It sucks that the world we live in is the way it is because in theory this would be an ideal model for so many people. Older adults I know really just need a Facebook terminal but are required to buy a whole computer. If anything at all goes wrong with it they freak out and buy a brand new one. So much tech waste and so much hardware not being used for the majority of the time. If they had lightweight terminals there'd be less issues on their end but even if they replaced it at the first issue, it wouldn't be an entire computer getting trashed. Since all they use is the occasional facebook the mandatory internet thing wouldn't even be an issue. Plenty of younger people might also be good candidates for this since they basically exclusively use online features too.
Obviously I would never trust this kind of service for a variety of reasons, but in theory the world could really benefit from that model.
Yup, there's a cycle between centralization and edge. Started with centralization, mainframes, went edge with the first PCs (and game consoles) and ever since corpos have been trying to pull it back to the center in waves. Thin client, cloud compute, arguably phones (as apps processing in the cloud), Geforce Now, AI. So far it's always gone back to the edge for most of the population, except for niche cases (or not in the case of phones). As internet gets faster and more reliable the chance of it sticking longer in the central zone increases (IMO).
As internet gets faster and more reliable the chance of it sticking longer in the central zone increases
It also allow the opposite, the fediverse is a living example of it, the more internet is faster the more we can organize better to decentralize, it's harder that someone get in contact with the decentralized internet but it's more probable that it happen now than 7 years ago
Some companies also would still continue to sell consumer hardware (like Framework, probably)
I see it as a fight, companies are currently winning sadly but we have the power to win too
Heartily agree. I was trying for objectivity, personally you'll take my general purpose computers from my cold dead hands, and I will encourage everyone I can to support it.
I take some solace from the general pendulum nature of the process (and societal evolution in general), this too shall pass. Doesn't mean we don't need to fight. Evil triumphs when good people do nothing.
Sun ray was cool.
We had them at university with smart cards.
Even those contain RAM.
Yes, but they can get away with a tiny amount of it. Perhaps we are back at the start of personal computing and arcade machines era, where every byte counted.
Yes, but they can get away with a tiny amount of it
Not really. Developers have forgotten how to write small, efficient code. Everything is a web page these days, and so the bare minimum app is a web browser, and a web browser is huge.
Dumb terminals don't need much RAM. Unfortunately, the minimal RAM would come with maximum rentiership and exploitation.
The RAM I bought in 2019 for $100 is now over $500. at this rate I'll sell it in a few years to put my daughter through college.
I see this as an opportunity to get invested in non-tech hobbies because there’s nothing else I can do
Yup, was going DDR5 this year, got a new bike (Marin Larkspur) instead, such a good decision, renewed my love of cycling, having a ball.
Books my man, books.
Mini painting, get addicted to plastic crack. Seems to be cheaper than tech hobbies these days.
Get a resin printer and you can print infinite minis.
That would probably be too close to a tech hobby and considering what some of the tech giants are doing. 3D printing will be labeled under criminal activity
Already happening. Those printed gun laws that are being pushed in multiple states are not about guns, they're an assault on small scale manufacturing and the right to self repair.
At this rate I'll be able to sell my ddr3 from over a decade ago and make a profit compared to what I paid originally
These price gouging assholes should probably be prosecuted along with the "AI" fraudsters.
