5 ms·
This reminds me of the recent LaurieWired video presenting a hypothetical of, "what if we stopped making CPUs": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2OJFqs8bUk http
by MPSimmons 10mo ago
This reminds me of the recent LaurieWired video presenting a hypothetical of, "what if we stopped making CPUs": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2OJFqs8bUk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2OJFqs8bUk
Spoiler, but the answer is basically that old hardware rules the day because it lasts longer and is more reliable of timespans of decades.
DDR5 32GB is currently going for ~$330 on Amazon
DDR4 32GB is currently going for ~$130 on Amazon
DDR3 32GB is currently going for ~50 on Amazon (4x8GB)
For anyone where cost is a concern, using older hardware seems like a particularly easy choice, especially if a person is comfortable with a Linux environment, since the massive droves of recently retired Windows 10 incompatible hardware works great with your Linux distro of choice.
- christkv 10mo agoA friend built a new rig and went with DDR4 and a 5800x3d just because of this as he needed a lot of ram.
- wkat4242 10mo agoI have exactly this and was planning to upgrade to AM5 soon :'( Looks like AM4 will live on for many more years in my flat
- fullstop 10mo agoIf everyone went for DDR4 and DDR3, surely the cost would go up. There is no additional supply there, as they are no longer being made.
- MPSimmons 10mo agoUndoubtably the cost would go up, but nobody is building out datacenters full of DDR4, either, so I don't figure it would go up nearly as much as DDR5 is right now.
- fullstop 10mo agohttps://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/ https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/ You can see the cost rise of DDR4 here.
- MPSimmons 10mo agoAwesome charts, thanks! I think it bears out that the multiplier for older hardware isn't as extreme as the newer hardware, right?
- fullstop 10mo ago~2.8x for DDR4, ~3.6x for DDR5. DDR5 is still being made, though, so it will be interesting to see how it changes in the future. Either way, it's going to be a long few years at the least.
- oskarkk 10mo agoUnless the AI bubble pops.
- bombcar 10mo agoOne possible outcome is the remaining memory manufacturers have dedicated all their capacity for AI and when the bubble pops, they lose their customer and they go out of business too.
- bigiain 10mo agoI wouldn't be too surprised to find at least some of the big ram foundries are deeply bought into the fake money circles where everybody is "paying" each other with unrealised equity in OpenAI/Anthropic/whoever, resulting in a few trillion dollars worth of on-paper "money" vanishing overnight, at which stage a whole bunch of actual-money loans will get called in and billion dollar companies get gutted by asset strippers. Maybe larger makerspaces and companies like Adafruit, RasPi, and Pine should start stockpiling (real) money, and pick themselves up an entire fab full of gear at firesale prices so they can start making their own ram...
- acdha 10mo agoAt some point that’s true, but don’t they run the n-1 or 2 generation production lines for years after the next generation launches? There’s a significant capital investment there and my understanding is that the cost goes down significantly over the lifetime as they dial in the process so even though the price is lower it’s still profitable.
- fullstop 10mo agoUnless plans have changed, the foundries making DDR4 are winding down, with the last shipments going out as we speak.
- mlyle 10mo agoThis is only true as long as there's enough of a market left. You tend to end up with oversupply and excessive inventory during the transition, and that pushes profit margins negative and removes all the supply pretty quickly.
- phil21 10mo agoCurrently trying to source a large amount of DDR4 to upgrade a 3 year old fleet of servers at a very unfortunate time. It's very difficult to source in quantity, and is going up in price more or less daily at this point. Vendor quotes are good for hours, not days when you can find it.
- fullstop 10mo agoWe're looking to buy 1TB of DDR5 for a large database server. I'm pretty sure that we're just going to pay the premium and move on.
- georgeburdell 10mo agoAnd that’s why everybody’s B2B these days. The decision-making people at companies are not spending their own money
- patates 10mo agoI think it's not about own versus someone else's money. Hardware is usually a small piece of the financial puzzle (unless you're building a billion dollar AI datacenter I guess) and even when the hardware price quadruples, it's still a small piece and delivery time is much more important than optimizing hardware costs.
- Suppafly 10mo agoThe price of the hardware, even with inflated prices, is probably equal or less than the combined price of all the software licenses that go on that machine.
- derefr 10mo agoHave you considered dropping by in person to your nearest computer recycler/refurbisher? As a teen I worked at one, and the boxes and boxes of RAM sticks pulled from scrapped machines (usually scrapped due to bad main boards) made a strong impression. They tend to not even put the highest-spec stuff they pull into anything, as refurbished machines are mostly sold/donated in quantity (to schools and the like) and big customers want standardized SKUs with interchangeable specs for repairability more than they want performance. Workers at these places are often invited to build personal machines to take home out of these “too good” parts — and yet there’s so much that they can’t possibly use it all up that way. If someone showed up asking if they could have some DDR3, they might literally just let you dig through the box and then sell it to you by weight!
- diabllicseagull 10mo agoa 2x16 ddr4 kit I bought in 2020 for $160 is now $220. older memory is relatively cheap but not cheaper than before at all.
- shoo 10mo agoI wondered how much of this is inflation -- after adjusting for CPI inflation, $160 in 2020 is worth $200 in today's dollars [$], so the price of that ddr4 kit is 10% higher in real terms. [$] https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/
- fullstop 10mo agoUSD is also weaker than it was in the past.
- bullen 10mo agoYes, DDR3 is the lowest CAS latency and lasts ALOT longer. Just like SSDs from 2010 have 100.000 writes per bit instead of below 10.000. CPUs might even follow the same durability pattern but that remains to be seen. Keep your old machines alive and backed up!
- mrob 10mo agoCAS latency is specified in cycles and clock rates are increasing, so despite the number getting bigger there's actually been a small improvement in latency with each generation.
- bullen 10mo agoNot for small amounts of data. Bandwith increases, but if you only need a few bytes DDR3 is faster. Also slower speed means less heat and longer life. You can feel the speed advantage by just moving the mouse on a DDR3 PC...
- mrob 10mo agoRAM latency doesn't affect mouse response in any perceptible way. The fastest gaming mice I know of run at 8000Hz, so that's 125000ns between samples, much bigger than any CAS latency. And most mice run substantially slower. Maybe your old PC used lower-latency GUI software, e.g. uncomposited Xorg instead of Wayland.
- bullen 10mo agoI only felt it on Windows, maybe tht is due to the special USB mouse drivers Microsoft made? Still motion-to-photon latency is really lower on my DDR3 PCs, would be cool to know why.
- CyberDildonics 10mo agoYou are conflating two things that have nothing to do with each other. Computers have had mice since the 80s. Still motion-to-photon latency is really lower on my DDR3 PCs, would be cool to know why. No it isn't, your computer is doing tons of stuff and the cursor on windows is a hardware feature of the graphics card. Should I even ask why you think memory bandwidth is the cause of mouse latency?
- thedangler 10mo agoNice, My current PC uses DDR4 Time to dust off my 2012 PC and put Linux on it.
- xboxnolifes 10mo agoUnfortunately, older RAM also means an older motherboard, which also means older socket and older CPUs. It works, but it's not usually a drop in replacement.
- maximilianthe1 10mo agoCan't you use DDR3 in DDR5 compatible board?
- forthefuture 10mo agoUnfortunately not, each version of RAM uses a different physical slot.
- 0x457 10mo agoWell, they're entirely different, not just slot. Intel 12th/13th/14th gens all support DDR4 or DDR5. However, the motherboards you buy can only support one or the other. I don't think there are a single AMD CPU that supports both?
- layer8 10mo agoNo, the different generations have fundamentally incompatible interfaces, not just mechanically, but in terms of voltage and signaling.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- NexRebular 10mo ago> works great with your Linux distro of choice. ...or you could go with FreeBSD. There's even a brand new release that just came out! https://www.freebsd.org/releases/15.0R/announce/ https://www.freebsd.org/releases/15.0R/announce/
- tucnak 10mo agoI bought 384 GB of DDR5-4800 RDIMM a few months back for a Zen 4c system with lots of I/O like dual 25G NIC's and ten MCIO x8 ports... So far it has been the best value for money compared to any memory before it. The bandwidth is nuts. Power consumption went DOWN compared to DDR4. Doesn't matter much if you got two sticks, but as soon as you get into 6+ territory, it does matter a lot. The same goes for NVMe's.
- rcarmo 10mo agoI’m really happy I padded out one of my home servers with 128GB of DDR4 a couple of years back. I am, however, quite sad that I missed the opportunity to do the same to a newer one…