1GB Raspberry Pi 5, and memory-driven price rises

Not to mention the other companies panic buying another ~20% (guess).

Indeed, it makes mini computers with soldered ram actually end up being quite cheap by comparison. HP will currently sell you 128GB AMD or Nvidia boxes for 1.7-2.8k depending on your flavor of choice. Not ECC though.

Exactly this.

I'd been planning to upgrade my desktop as a christmas present for myself.

Now I have the cash and was looking at buying my PCPartPicker list, the cost of the 64GB DDR5-6000 RAM I planned to buy has gone from £300-400 to £700-800+, a difference of almost the price of the 9070 XT I just bought to go in the computer.

I guess I'll stick with my outdated AM4/X370 setup and make the best of the GPU upgrade until RAM prices stop being a complete joke.

> We need high RAM prices for manufacturers to expand fab

Manufactures aren't dumb, they lost a lot of money in the last cycle and aren't playing that game anymore. No additional capacity is planned, OEMs are simply redirecting existing capacity towards high-margin products (HBM), instead of chasing fragile demand.

> Samsung directly announced that OpenAI expects to procure up to 900,000 DRAM wafers every month

The article says: "OpenAI’s memory demand projected to reach up to 900,000 DRAM wafers per month", but not by when, or what current demand is. If this is based on OpenAI's >$1T of announced capex over the next 5 years, its not clear that money will ever actually materialize.

It reminds me very much of the crypto mining craze, when there was a run on GPUs and one couldn't be had for any less than 5x it's MSRP. I know that eventually passed and so too will this but it still sucks if you had been planning to purchase RAM or anything needing it.

I don't think DDR4 is even being manufactured anymore, so the rush is clearing out that inventory for good.

You forgot to mention that everyone else also raised their price because, you know, who don't like free money.

Last year I brought two 8G DDR3L RAM stick made by Gloway for around $8 each, now the same stick is priced around $22, a 275% increase in price.

SSD makers are also increasing their prices, but that started one or two years ago, and they did it again recently (of course).

It looked like I'll not be buying any first-hand computers/parts before the price can go normal again.

> Anyone buying ECC RAM for servers is buying on the same market as you building a new desktop computer.

Even when the sticks are completely incompatible with each other? I think servers tend to use RDIMM, desktops use UDIMM. Personally I'm not seeing as step increase in (b2b) RDIMMs compared to the same stores selling UDIMM (b2c), but I'm also looking at different stores tailored towards different types of users.

> you just have 9 bits per byte rather than 8 bits per byte physically on the module. More chips but not different chips.

For those who aren't well versed in the construction of memory modules: take a look at your DDR4 memory module, you'll see 8 identical chips per side if it's a non-ECC module, and 9 identical chips per side if it's an ECC module. That's because, for every byte, each bit is stored in a separate chip; the address and command buses are connected in parallel to all of them, while each chip gets a separate data line on the memory bus. For non-ECC memory modules, the data line which would be used for the parity/ECC bit is simply not connected, while on ECC memory modules, it's connected to the 9th chip.

(For DDR5, things are a bit different, since each memory module is split in two halves, with each half having 4 or 5 chips per side, but the principle is the same.)

Till they hit your program memory. We just had really interesting incident where one of the Ceph nodes didn't fail but started acting erratically, bringing whole cluster to a crawl, once a failing RAM module had some uncorrectable errors.

And that was caught because we had ECC. If not for that we'd be replacing drives, because metrics made it look like it is one of OSDs slowing to a crawl, which usual reason is drive dying.

Of course, chance for that is pretty damn small, bit also their scale is pretty damn big.

Random bit flips is their best path to AGI.

Good point! But they are slightly more energy hungry. At these scales I wonder if Stargate could go with one less nuclear reactor simply by switching to non-ECC RAM

Most server CPUs require RDIMMs, and while non-ECC RDIMMs exist, they are not a high-volume product and are intended for workstations rather than servers. The used parts market would look very different if there were lots of large-scale server deployments using non-ECC memory modules.

Do you have a source for this?

I would not want to rerun a whole run just because of bit flips and bit flips become a lot more relevant the more servers you need.

not much use for the 100GB+ AI boards or server RAM for consumers. Tho homelab guys will be thrilled.

Enterprise wise, the used servers kinda always have been cheap (at least compared to MSRP or even after discount price), just because there is enough companies that want a feel good of having a warranty on equipment and yeet it after 5 years.

If you believe the US government will reopen the door to China sales, then yes. Highly rumored to be a thing soon.

They "can". It happened during COVID and they got trapped by it so they're not taking the bite anymore.