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RAM now represents 35 percent of bill of materials for HP PCs
- locusofself 8mo agoJeez. I'm glad I "splurged" for the 24gb RAM in my macbook air. Should last me a few more years..
- tehlike 8mo agoMy canonical example is I bought 12 sticks of 64GB DDR4LRDIMM for 400-430$. Now each stick costs 320$... Just a year ago...
- rafaelmn 8mo agoThe joke is that Apple RAM pricing is now close to market level, they still have margin in there even at market prices, and they are notorious for supply chain management and locking in contracts/prices ahead of time. So doubt Apple will change anything here short term. On the flip side if you're buying a new computer in 2026 - it's going to be even harder to justify not getting a MacBook, the chips are already 2 years ahead of PC, the price of base models was super competitive, now that the ram is super expensive even the upgraded versions are competitive with the PC market. Oh and Windows is turning to an even larger pile of shit on a daily basis.
- b112 8mo agoYeah, but the Linux support is still quite poor unfortunately. I'd buy a mac in a sec otherwise.
- miyuru 8mo agoYes, that’s the reason I am holding back too. If Apple fully supported the Asahi Linux project, I 'll switch in a heartbeat.
- Infiniti20 8mo ago2 years ahead?
- rafaelmn 8mo agoIntel latest series 3 is catching up to M3 level performance ?
- kristianp 8mo ago> The joke is that Apple RAM pricing is now close to market level Probably not quite, but I was pricing a Lenovo laptop last week and this is the first time the lenovo price for RAM upgrades was lower than 3rd party RAM.
- tonyedgecombe 8mo agoApple is releasing new devices next week, I wonder if they will take the opportunity to increase memory prices.
- AuthAuth 8mo agoThe mac chips are ahead in single threaded performance and maybe performance per watt but thats about it. Factoring cost they're competing against the top x86 chips which out preform them in nearly every workload while remaining upgradable and stable.
- deafpolygon 8mo agoApple also uses a different kind of RAM (iirc a custom LPDDR5X to use with their Unified Memory SOC - not the same kind as the commodity RAM that everyone is putting in their PCs. So they aren’t competing with everyone on it. Plus they probably locked in their rates back in 2024 with their suppliers.
- bpye 8mo agoThe packaging might be different, but they're still competing for the same fab capacity.
- KumaBear 8mo agoOnly a matter of time before you hear about missing shipping trucks being stolen. China is opening up more production, but I don’t see any relief coming soon.
- aurareturn 8mo agoChina is fundamentally limited by lack of ASML machines due to a ban. China can only help if they can recreate ASML machines used to produce RAM with good yield and small enough features.
- asadm 8mo agoi am working on my side-product [1] where i was exploring a Rockchip which required external memory (just 1G) which went from $3 to $32 and completely destroyed economics for me. I settled with one with embedded memory and optimizing my code instead :) 1. https://x.com/_asadmemon/status/1989417143398797424 https://x.com/_asadmemon/status/1989417143398797424
- tehlike 8mo agoI suspect game development will be similar - game companies will optimize their games given customer cards are not going to be released for a while or will be too expensive.
- energy123 8mo agoRAM usage is super easy to dial down, it's just texture quality.
- asadm 8mo agowin win, considering the slop game studios are pushing out these days.
- echelon 8mo agoI'm glad we're starting to use the term "slop" for human outputs as well. Especially corporate slop.
- fc417fc802 8mo agoAlways have been. The term "slop" long predates recent AI developments.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- Retric 8mo agoIt’s not exactly new. Pig slop is generally random food scraps etc. Big brother used “slop” for their flavorless penalty food long before LLM’s. Arguably the connotation has changed slightly, but AI slop caught on because it fit so well.
- shablulman 8mo ago[flagged]
- re-thc 8mo agoWhat!? I always thought we could just download more RAM!
- jld 8mo agohttp://computeradsfromthepast.substack.com/p/connectix-ram-doubler http://computeradsfromthepast.substack.com/p/connectix-ram-d...
- hsbauauvhabzb 8mo ago> RAM was expensive at the time. For example, an 8 MB stick cost $300. So why you’re saying is that it could be worse, but not by much?
- bsimpson 8mo agoConnectix was a big deal in its day. RAM Doubler was considered essential software. They also marketed the first webcam, and made emulators mainstream. Their PlayStation emulator is the basis for the case law that says emulators are fair use, decided as a result of a suit from Sony.
- rationalist 8mo agoTo the downvoters that don't get OP's reference: https://downloadmoreram.com https://downloadmoreram.com Idk if the owner changed or what, but the website used to be more comical.
- wraptile 8mo agoon Linux you can actually do that by enabling zram https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zram https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zram
- Aerroon 8mo agoI think Europe should invest into manufacturing RAM. RAM isn't going anywhere, all of modern compute uses it. This would be an opportunity to create domestic supply of it.
- throw_m239339 8mo ago> I think Europe should invest into manufacturing RAM. RAM isn't going anywhere, all of modern compute uses it. This would be an opportunity to create domestic supply of it. It's easy to build factories, much more difficult to train the engineers required to run them... and let's not even talk about all the crazy regulations & environmental rules at the EU level that make that task even more difficult, because yes, chip factories do pollute... a lot. Countries like South Korea or Taiwan have adapted all their legislations and tax, environmental regulations to allow such factories to operate easily. The EU and EU countries will never do that... better outsource pollution and claim they care about the planet...
- trollbridge 8mo agoDoesn’t the EU have an excellent education system?
- throw_m239339 8mo ago> Doesn’t the EU have an excellent education system? Well, the EU has not manufactured a whole lot of chips in the last 30 years, where do you get the people with the professional experience to teach new engineers... Oh you mean you have to import the teachers from South Asia too? /s and it takes what, 5 years at the minimum to train an engineer? France and UK used to produce entire home computers... in the 80's...
- nine_k 8mo agoCome on, STM, Nordic, Infineon, NXP are all European. There is a bunch of chip-making installations in Dresden, Germany (Global Foundries, Bosch, etc), and there's Intel Fab 34 in Ireland. BTW TSMC is planning to open a production facility in Europe in 2027. This is not comparable to Taiwan or the Shenzen area, but it's definitely not nothing. Some local expertise exists, even though it may be not the most cutting-edge.
- SolubleSnake 8mo agoThis is a fairly odd statement given that BOMs are managed in manufacturing systems and for accounting and engineering purposes in multiple different ways. This can be for anything to do with sales data for a client or for guys on the factory floor or for the accountants. There are sales BOMs, manufacturing BOMs procurement BOMs and nested BOMs etc all for different parts of the business process...you would have BOMs within the organisation that were probably nearly 70% etc or those that were 0%!
- blackoil 8mo agoMaybe this RAMmageddon will trigger a wave of optimized softwares that don't need GBs of memory for anything and everything.
- Cyph0n 8mo agoOr you won’t need RAM because everything will be hosted in the cloud and used via browser or just desktop streaming :)
- codebje 8mo agoSure, but if the browser is the only thing that becomes more memory efficient that's still a substantial win.
- medi8r 8mo agoYeah the server needs sunstantially lest ram per user than the PC. Probably 10mb per user vs. 8gb for client to have OS and browser up. Apple could lead here. They sell feels not specs so they could down OS and Browser RAM requirements and sell lower RAM entry models.
- wasfgwp 8mo agoThey did that. But when the AI craze hit turned that all the 8GB base model Macs didn’t have enough space for even basic models (in addition to the 1-2 electron apps you can run simultaneously). Of course seems like local AI is more or less a flop in the consumer market at least? But still IMHO even for general use macos with 8GB is almost unusable unless you use it like an Ipad.
- medi8r 8mo ago8GB is unusable, but is MacOS and Safari optimizabe? The point is they control the stack so they could reduce memory usage. It would be a big selling point, it could make a Mac "experience for experience" price competitive with PCs.
- rubyn00bie 8mo agoI think we’re at the peak, or close to it for these memory shenanigans. OpenAI who is largely responsible for the shortage, just doesn’t have the capital to pay for it. It’s only a matter of time before chickens come home to roost and the bill is due. OpenAI is promising hundreds of billions in capex but has no where near that cash on hand, and its cash flow is abysmal considering the spend. Unless there is a true breakthrough, beyond AGI into super intelligence on existing, or near term, hardware— I just don’t see how “trust me bro,” can keep its spending party going. Competition is incredibly stiff, and it’s pretty likely we’re at the point of diminishing returns without an absolute breakthrough. The end result is going to be RAM prices tanking in 18-24 months. The only upside will be for consumers who will likely gain the ability to run much larger open source models locally.
- haxtormoogle 8mo agoIsn't there a full wafer ai chip mainframe for data centers now that blows anything needing ram out of the water? I don't understand the ram shortage exists companies have surpassed nvidia.
- Infiniti20 8mo agoHow come there’s ASICs for mining but not AI? Seems like there would be almost unlimited demand
- elromulous 8mo agoThere are asics for ai. They're called gpus / tpus.
- mook 8mo agoWeren't the Google TPU stuff that already? Wikipedia says that's from a decade ago.
- tcoff91 8mo agoThere is. It does 16k tokens per second. https://chatjimmy.ai/ https://chatjimmy.ai/
- kcb 8mo agoMining is all compute and no IO. Training particularly is heavy compute and insane IO.
- estimator7292 8mo agoThey've been putting TPUs in processors for a while now.
- Ray20 8mo ago> Isn't there a full wafer ai chip mainframe for data centers now that blows anything needing ram out of the water? Guess what's inside these chips and what equipment they're made on.
- kazinator 8mo ago"Bill of materials" (BOM) is not a monetary invoice, only an itemization of constituent parts. :)
- ketzu 8mo agoReading the title I wondered if this is about more components coming with their own memory, because I've never heard BOM used as a monetary bill.
- stephen_g 8mo agoYes the normal term I’ve always heard and used for what they’re talking about is “BOM cost”, i.e. the combined cost of every item on the BOM to make a single unit.
- SanjayMehta 8mo agoRecently order a number of machines with 32Gb of RAM. Wanted 64, was told prices couldn't be guaranteed nor could delivery dates. Under the pressure of urgency settled for whatever was available that day.
- agentifysh 8mo agoIs there any hope for RAM to stabilize in prices again?
- throwaway2037 8mo agoThis a good question. My guess: As long as the LLM boom continues, and no new DRAM manuf capacity is added, the high prices will remain.
- energy123 8mo agoPrevious RAM price spikes lasted for over a year. This one should last at least that long. It's promising however that the rate of change has slowed down in the last month.
- tonyedgecombe 8mo agoMost economists will tell you the cure for high prices is high prices. We will all adjust and ram manufacturers will invest in more capacity.
- asimovDev 8mo agoif people keep buying the RAM at current prices, then I can't imagine manufacturers will lower the prices
- travisgriggs 8mo agoI had my formative years in programming when memory usage was something you still worried about as a programmer. And then memory expanded so much that all kinds of “optimal” patterns for programming just become nearly irrelevant. Will we start to actually consider this in software solutions again as a result?
- jacquesm 8mo ago> And then memory expanded so much that all kinds of “optimal” patterns for programming just become nearly irrelevant. I don't think that ever happened. Using relatively sparse amount of memory turns into better cache management which in turn usually improves performance drastically. And in embedded stuff being good with memory management can make the difference between 'works' and 'fail'.
- zeta0134 8mo agoThe need to use optimal patterns didn't go away, but the techniques certainly did. Just as a quick example, it's usually a bad idea now to use lookup tables to accelerate small math workloads. The lookup table creates memory pressure on the cache, which ends up degrading performance on modern systems. Back in the 1980s, lookup tables were by far the dominant technique because math was *slow.*
- jacquesm 8mo agoThe way to approach this is to benchmark and then pick the best solution.
- zozbot234 8mo ago> Back in the 1980s, lookup tables were by far the dominant technique because math was slow. This actually generalizes in a rather clean way: compared to the 1980s, you now want to cheaply compress data in memory and use succinct representations as much as practicable, since the extra compute involved in translating a more succinct representation into real data is practically free compared to even one extra cacheline fetch from RAM (which is now hundreds of cycles latency, and in parallel code often has surprisingly low throughput).
- Fr0styMatt88 8mo agoI asked ChatGPT directly how it was fair that OpenAI bought 40% of the world’s RAM supply. It denied this saying that the figures quoted were estimates only, that such massive RAM contracts would be easily obtainable public knowledge and that primarily the recent price increases were mostly cyclical in nature. Any truth to this? Edit to add: I am actually curious; I was under the impression that this 40% story going around was true and confirmed, rather than just hyperbole or speculation.
- binaryturtle 8mo agoHow about you ask a model of a competitor? You could just hitting build-in OpenAI propaganda on their own bot. :)
- ozgrakkurt 8mo agoPlease, just search for it and read some articles. It would take 10 mins
- sourcegrift 8mo agox.com/i/grok
- throwaway2037 8mo agoWill this RAM shortage also affect the price of mobile phones?
- gib444 8mo agoGiven how eagerly companies have used price rises - even unrelated - as an excuse to raise prices disproportionately since 2020 I expect so
- kristopolous 8mo agoThey'll jack them up for any excuse and then stay whisper quiet when the excuse no longer holds
- alephnerd 8mo agoMost base level smartphones are loss leaders and wouldn't be severely impacted and upper-tier smartphones tend to be priced at their true value. It's the mid-tier SKUs that get impacted. Additonally, depending on which country you live in, telecom vendors reduce the upfront cost of the phone purchase and make up the difference via contracts.
- throwaway2037 8mo ago> Most base level smartphones are loss leaders Is this really true? Or rather, how can we know it is true? I tried to Google for some info, but I cannot find any reliable sources.
- holysoles 8mo agoThe Verge had some good coverage about this, but TLDR: probably. Flagship phones may not raise in price to fully reflect it. They might cut costs elsewhere like keeping the same camera, or eat some of the cost increase in their margin. https://www.theverge.com/tech/880812/ramageddon-ram-shortage-memory-crisis-price-2026-phones-laptops https://www.theverge.com/tech/880812/ramageddon-ram-shortage... They discussed it on the decoder podcast as well.
- 8mo ago
- tw04 8mo agoI think China is about to step in and take every last bit of non-ai market share, and then when the bubble bursts companies like micron and samsung are going to be begging governments for a bail out.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- arjie 8mo agoI might not have bought NVDA or timed BTC correctly, but at least I have 512 GB of DDR5 in my server and 128 GB in my Macbook Pro haha. The reality is that these are insanely huge amounts of RAM. I'm glad to have them because I don't need these tab suspender extensions a bunch of my friends use, but really I'd prefer if GPUs were a bit cheaper, and server hardware was generally easier to get. An SXM5 based motherboard is really hard to get these days despite the fact that you can get super powered Epyc 9755s for comparatively nothing. It reminds me of the heady days of Thai floods when hard drives were inaccessible.
- coppsilgold 8mo agoIf you are on Linux you can 'download' some RAM. Enable zram, configure sysctl variables to make good use of it. Note that it won't help you if your workload makes use of all your RAM at once. If you have a bunch of stuff running in the background it will help a lot. I get 2 to 3 compression factor at all times with zstd. I calculated the utility to be as if I had 20GB extra RAM for what I do.
- fredoralive 8mo agoThat’s not particularly unique, Mac OS and Windows have had compressed memory for years. No fiddling with setting needed either.
- AdamN 8mo agoIt's not just that it's compressed - the OS is also intelligently handling which memory should be on hardware vs. virtual. Effectively a lot of the memory concerns have been offloaded to the OS and the VM where one exists.
- the-grump 8mo agoIsn't that literally every modern OS, always, unless you tell it to act differently?
- AdamN 8mo agoYes - I didn't mean to imply it was only one of the OSes. Further up the comments people were talking about how memory efficiency is now more important but I was trying to make the point that with compression and virtual memory it still doesn't matter all that much even if memory is double the price.
- Delk 8mo agoIf running low on memory seems to matter less now than it did a couple of decades ago, I'd rather say that's because fast SSDs make swapping a lot faster. Even though virtual memory and swapping were available even on PCs since Windows 3.x or so, running out of memory could still make multitasking slow as molasses due to thrashing and the lack of memory for disk cache. The performance hit from swapping can be a lot less noticeable now. Of course compression being now computationally cheap also helps.
- Frieren 8mo agoBig tech wants all the chips and they get them. That is Stalinist level of absurd planning. People is missing the point. Mega-corporations distort the market. This is not capitalism this is old aristocratic ruling by power. If all these monopolies were divided in smaller chunks and regulated to not allow them to abuse that power we will not be here. This situation is not normal, big tech is currently above the law and above the market economy and if they fail their plan is to make us pay *AGAIN* for their bad decisions. All businesses and individuals are already paying higher prices for big tech folly, we will be left with the bill when the AI boom fails, too.
- snvzz 8mo ago>AI-driven “end-to-end planning processes" Behold, the RAM cost is being optimized with AI.
- kkfx 8mo agoExpensive PCs/homeservers means more people on mobile crap + someone cloud, means students who do not learn PCs FLOSS when they have time and so on. That's the real point.
- WesolyKubeczek 8mo agoA conspiracy theory I’m entertaining right now is that hogging RAM manufacturing by AI companies is not so much because they _need_ the RAM, but because they want to cripple existing and potential competitors, and that includes on-device models. One thing that might support this is the fact AI companies are purchasing uncut wafers of DRAM. One use might be to hoard and stockpile them somewhere in a cave, so that no one else gets to them. Another thing that might support this is that precisely the same strategy had been in use by software companies during the COVID hiring fever. Companies used to hire people for ridiculous pay with little actual work to perform so that among other things, competitors wouldn’t whisk those people away and be at an advantage. This, of course, ended with massive layoffs once the reckoning came about, and I’m wondering about what is going to happen when (there’s no “if”) the reckoning comes for big AI, too.
- tamimio 8mo ago90s: so little memory, programmers have to optimize their code to run properly. 2010s: so much memory, programmers used electron and chrome wrapping everything in js. 2026: so little memory, programmers have to optimize AI code to run properly.
- m4rtink 8mo agoI guess something needs to be done about the RAM (and to a degree SSD/NAND) production cartel if it can so easily take hostage a major part of the society & starve it of critically needed components that are needed for a functioning modern society.
- mvanbaak 8mo agoWelcome to capitalism
- cedws 8mo agoHow much are these price hikes affecting the ability for people in poor countries to access compute?
- estimator7292 8mo agoIt's so bad that at work we're looking into shipping a big batch of prototypes off to someone to desolder and reball DDR4 chips. We can't get any new chips. At all. We can't launch our new product because nobody could afford the memory even if we could get some. Incredible.
- westurner 8mo agoThen make RAM out of less scarce sustainable inputs.
- panick21_ 8mo agoKind of funny, with the help of AI finding some historical price sheets and 'design' a computer. So like 70s to 80s and I was blown away, how large the RAM cost was. A huge part of the BOM. It totally change the way I think about computer design in this area and why some decisions were made.
- KellyCriterion 8mo agoThis is like in 1993, when I bought a 486-DX2 with mighty(!!! ;-) 4 MB of Ram. MEGAbytes, not GIGAbytes :-D (Graphiccard memory was back then 256KB or 512KB or 1024KB, amount what we have today as L1 cache on throwaway CPUs) Raise your hand if you have been there too! :-))
- estimator7292 8mo agoI still have somewhere my first "real" GPU. I think it was an ATI card with an absolutely unbelievable 128MB of VRAM. I think it ran at 433MHz, and I could overclock it to almost 700. Those were the days!
- rasz 8mo agoThere were multiple periods in history we experienced ram price shocks. 1. Ram was relatively cheap between 1985 and 1987 hovering around $100-150 for 1MB using 256Kbit chips. Then 1987 anti dumping laws lined up with fabs upgrading to lower yielding new 1Mbit chips and things got crazy. In 1988 256Kbit chips went from $3.5 to $7 in less than a month. Some companies coped better than others. Atari was the first to offer computer shipping with 1MB below $1000 thanks to Tramiels little secret of smuggling ram from Japan and skirting anti dumping restrictions :) Even SUN Microsystems was caught buying that smuggled ram from Tramiel. 2. 4MB $150 January 1992, lowest in went would be $100 in December 1992, and back to $130 in December 1994. 3. September 1999 Jiji earthquake. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_Jiji_earthquake#Economic_damage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_Jiji_earthquake#Economic_... https://www.edn.com/panic-buying-sets-dram-prices-on-wild-ride/ https://www.edn.com/panic-buying-sets-dram-prices-on-wild-ri... https://www.eetimes.com/dram-prices-rise-sharply-following-taiwan-quake-2/ https://www.eetimes.com/dram-prices-rise-sharply-following-t... 128MB DIMM prices: May 1997 $300. July 1998 $150. July 1999 $99. September-December 1999 $300. May 2000 $89. Then overproduction combined with dot-com boom liquidations started flooding the market and Feb 2001 $59, by Aug 2001 _256MB_ module was $49. Feb 2002 256MB $34. Finally April 2003 hit the absolute bottom with $39 _512MB_ DIMMs Sadly now is not like any of those times. Its like the Jiji earthquake lasted couple of years straight.
- cestith 8mo agoThere were years in the 1990s and early 2000s when it was easy to get faster runtimes by using more memory, back when even on a multi-user system like Linux or BSD was typically running one main program at a time. We had multiple hardware web servers, multiple hardware email servers, and multiple hardware database servers. Getting the most CPU performance out of the system for your applications was the order of the day. Now, almost everything on the server side is a VM or a container. We have lots of neighbors who want to share the CPU and the RAM, and the RAM is the bigger constraint because the CPUs have 192 cores and each of those cores does a dozen times as much work as a decade ago. Heck, we used to have the memory controller on the motherboard and the last level of cache was a chip or module of SRAM outside the CPU. We also have a situation now in which the multiple in speed of the CPU over RAM has skyrocketed, but the caches have gotten far larger and much smarter. Smaller things arranged differently in RAM make things run faster because they make better use of the cache. Now that RAM is expensive, shared, and program and data size and arrangements are bound to cache behavior, optimization can lean heavily into optimizing for RAM again. Some of these arguments hold true for desktop systems as well. I have wondered for years when the time will come that instead of such huge and smart caches, someone will just put basically register-speed RAM on the chip and swap to motherboard RAM the way we swap to disk. HBM is somewhere close, being a substrate stacked in the package but not in the CPU die itself.
- IAmGraydon 8mo agoI'm willing to bet RAM prices start to fall by June of this year.
- tsoukase 8mo agoThe last spike in RAM price was after an earthquake in Taiwan in April 2024. Now, the shortage will continue until about 2027 when new factories will start shipping.
- rldjbpin 8mo agofor those shopping for new PCs and are open to build one, it seems like the overall BOM has been overall lesser than a few months back. the big caveat being that you need a decent GPU. having been in the market for one, i did make some compromise for the build (single stick of 16 GB for now; a non "future-proof" GPU within the budget). however for a decent spec (last-gen x3D CPU, mid-range RTX) build, the GPU price reduction made up for the premium on RAM. the sad reality since the turn of the decade is that the $1000 mark for a well-rounded (gaming) system has now bumped up to $1500-$2000. crazy time to be alive, where on laptop side, macs are now a "decent" value. especially if you were going to get the higher spec to unlock the specific memory tier. thanks work for setting me up well with one!