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I hope this AI craze will crash soon enough. Maybe then various things normalize in price again. And consumers get cheaper products with less limitations.

• 654wak654 1y ago
  Best we're getting is probably a stop to the price raises, but no price cuts. Kids will continue to grow up not knowing a $600 flagship GPU or a $1000 gaming PC.
  • add-sub-mul-div 1y ago
    That's exactly how it works. A whole generation is already unaware that you used to be able to buy PC games anonymously, offline, without a rent seeking middleman service.
    • nostrademons 1y ago
      I think there's always been a rent-seeking middleman service. In the 80s it was retail: you'd go to a physical computer store to buy a game for $50 (note: that's $150 inflation-adjusted, more expensive than most games today), and the retail store, the distributor, and the publisher would all take a cut. In the 2000s it was the developer's ISP, web developer, and credit card payment processor, which were non-trivial in the days before Wix and Stripe. The shareware/unlock-code economy of the 90s was probably the closest you'd get to cutting out the middlemen, where you could download from some BBS or FTP server without the dev getting involved at all and then send them money to have them email you an unlock code, but it was a lot of manual work on the developer's part, and a lot of trust.
      • philipallstar 1y ago
        None of this is rent-seeking.
        • andreybaskov 1y ago
          Retail store literally had to pay rent to a landlord. How’s that not a rent seeking business?
          • philipallstar 1y ago
            That's not what rent-seeking is. Rent-seeking is charging for something that's free before, generally through seeking legal enforcement. If you think the concept of renting stuff is bad, you've missed somewhat.
      • candiddevmike 1y ago
        You used to be able to resell PC games too
      • littlestymaar 1y ago
        > credit card payment processor, which were non-trivial in the days before Wix and Stripe. Stripe is way more expensive than regular payment processors. Convenient for sure, but definitely not cheap.
  • gordonhart 1y ago
    $1000 in 2010 is ~$1500 today — kids won't know these prices because the currency has been debased pretty rapidly in recent years.
    • NullPrefix 1y ago
      This ram price spike is literally part of the currency debasing
      • bozhark 1y ago
        Why does everyone pretend like prices are not post-pandemic gouged still? Absolutely prices should adjust appropriately… once… oh never mind
    • littlestymaar 1y ago
      Pet peeve: Contrary to a persistent popular belief, inflation != currency debasement. (You can have inflation while your currency go up relatively to all the others on the FX market, like what happened to USD in 2022-S1, or you can have massive inflation difference between countries sharing the same currency, like it happened in the Euro Area between 2022 and today).
      • gruez 1y ago
        >Pet peeve: Contrary to a persistent popular belief, inflation != currency debasement. Not to mention that "debasement" doesn't make sense anymore given that there basically aren't any currencies on the gold standard anymore. At best you could call a pegged currency that was devalued as being debased (with the base being the pegged currency), but that doesn't apply to USD. "debasement" therefore is just a pejorative way saying "inflation" or "monetary expansion".
        • littlestymaar 1y ago
          I think it's fair to keep using debasement for the act of letting your currency go down against other currencies on the FX market. > "inflation" or "monetary expansion". This is my second pet peeve on the topic, inflation and growth of the money supply are independent phenomenons. (they are only correlated in countries with high inflation regimes and, hyperinflation aside, the causation is essentially reversed: the money supply grow because of the inflation, higher price leading to an increase of loans).
  • zonkerdonker 1y ago
    It really is a damn shame, but before AI, it was cryptomining. Desktop GPU prices have been inflated to nonsense levels for gamers, to the point where console vs. PC isnt even really question anymore.
    • Ekaros 1y ago
      And even with increased priced you often still get paltry amount of RAM. All for market segmentation due to AI use cases. Which is bad as requirements have crept up.
      • MyOutfitIsVague 1y ago
        Really frustrating for a hobbyist 3D artist. Rendering eats gobs of RAM for complex scenes. I'd really love a mid-level GPU with lots of VRAM for under $500. As is, I'm stuck rendering on CPU at a tenth the speed or making it work with compositing.
        • zargon 1y ago
          3d rendering can use multiple GPUs right? Maybe pick up a couple MI50 32GB cards off Alibaba. A couple months ago they were $100 each but it looks like they're up to ~$160 now.
    • some-guy 1y ago
      In some ways though, the increase in visual fidelity has been _marginally_ improved on a per-year basis since the PS4/Xbone era. My GPUs have had much, much longer useful lives than the 90s/early-2000s.
      • LaurensBER 1y ago
        Exactly plus upscalers are pretty amazing. Upscaling from 1080p to 4k is 80-100% of the quality of native rendering at a far lower cost. Now if only major studios would budget for optimizations..
      • 1y ago
  • nostrademons 1y ago
    Depends whether or not there's a big bubble burst that involves bankruptcies and Big Tech massively downscaling their cloud computing divisions. Most likely they'll just end up repurposing the compute and lowering cloud rates to attract new enterprise customers, but if you see outright fire sales from bankruptcies and liquidations, people will be able to pick up computer hardware at fire sale prices.
  • jonas21 1y ago
    For $50, kids these days can buy a Raspberry Pi that would have run circles around the best PC money could buy when I was a kid. Or, for $300, you can buy an RTX 5060 that is better than the best GPU from just 6 years ago. It's even faster than the top supercomputer in the world in 2003, one that cost $500 million to build. I find it hard to pity kids who can't afford the absolute latest and greatest when stuff that would have absolutely blown my mind as a kid is available for cheap.
    • sapiogram 1y ago
      > Or, for $300, you can buy an RTX 5060 that is better than the best GPU from just 6 years ago. It's even faster than the top supercomputer in the world in 2003, one that cost $500 million to build. RTX 5060 is slower than the RTX 2080 Ti, released September 2018. Digital Foundry found it to be 4% slower in 1080p, 13% slower in 1440p: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57Ob40dZ3JU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57Ob40dZ3JU
    • wiredpancake 1y ago
      [dead]
  • nubinetwork 1y ago
    The Radeon 8500 from 2001 was even cheaper than that, roughly 300 USD... the voodoo 3 3500 from 1999 was roughly 200 USD... if you ask me, we don't need graphics chips as intense as we have now, but the way they crank them out every year and discontinue the older models ruins most of the value of buying a GPU these days.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• embedding-shape 1y ago
  Is that really the cause of this price increase? I still don't understand if this price surge is specifically for the US (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45812691 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45812691) or if it's worldwide, I'm not sure I notice anything here in Southern Europe, so either that means it's lagging and I should load up RAM today, or this is indeed US-specific. But I don't know what's true.
  • confirmmesenpai 1y ago
    you should look more carefully, RAM prices are up across Europe, 40% or so
    • embedding-shape 1y ago
      I did (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45812691 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45812691), the RAM I bought in March 2024 currently costs about the same as when I bought it, seems the price stagnated rather than increased for that specific example. Do you have some concrete examples of where I can look?
  • zrm 1y ago
    In the US some of it could be tariffs. Micron is a US company with some US fabs but most of theirs are in other countries and Samsung and Hynix are both South Korea.
    • walterbell 1y ago
      U.S. tariffs inadvertently kept prices low, due to stockpiling of memory when prices were cheap, before tariffs took effect. As that inventory is depleted, new supply chain purchases are much more expensive and subject to tariffs.
  • overfeed 1y ago
    > that means it's lagging and I should load up RAM today, or this is indeed US-specific. But I don't know what's true. This is a global issue that is most severe in the US due to its share of hyperscalers and their, uh, scale. You may not feel the effects yet, but it is matter of time until someone notices your market has a RAM glut, while 30-55% of their orders aren't being fulfilled. In all likelihood, the supply channels to your locality have a low turnover rate, and DRAM has a long shelf-life. If the high prices stay high for long, it's going to impact prices when your retailers try to restock. If the price shock ends soon, your retailer may not even notice it. Whether you ought to buy or not depends on your outlook on how things will shake out
• KurSix 1y ago
  Even if the hype around LLMs dies down, the demand for AI compute won't disappear. It will just shift from giant language models to more specialized areas: computer vision, scientific computing (like AlphaFold), drug discovery. All of that requires massive amounts of hardware
• ksec 1y ago
  Beware of what you wish for. Without the so called AI craze you wont get enough money to fund the current 2-3 years cadence of leading edge Fab development.