Bought a second hand Dell server a week ago. The entire rig with a 12-core CPU and 32GB DDR4 ecc RAM cost as much as I'd pay to buy 64 GB of DDR RAM alone. I hope there's an end to this absurdity soon enough otherwise the pain will affect other markets too. I read the other day that PC case sales have collapsed by more than 40%.
Poor people are already being priced out of cheap phones due to rise in RAM-related unit costs. https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/smartphone-sales-to-plummet...
It makes me sad for the Neo 2.0. More ram is the only thing stopping me switching to it from a Pro.
I feel like by the time the AI bubble bursts the PC market will be irreparably damaged. Manufactures who have been making "enterprise" parts aren't going to go back to making consumer parts because there will be no market for it. And with a glut of datacenters not making any money on slop, they are going to be repurposed for saas, stuff like OnShape but for every application.
Most users don't seem to care about storing everything they generate in cloud services and this could easily be sold as an alternative to owning "expensive" desktop or laptop hardware.
They’re going to pivot to you renting desktop cloud compute instead of owning anything.
Enjoy your HP laptop subscription, it's all the computer you're going to get moving forward.
It's the reason I just build a new PC, despite the insane prices, I'd rather overpay than have reasonable prices but no stock to buy. With any luck I'll get 8-10 years out of this one and by then the PC landscape will be something else entirely.
“Bubble”
I have an alternative take.
If hyperscalers are using more RAM, and that RAM is not available for consumers, it means all the heavy stuff will happen in the cloud. Why would we want both the hyperscalers and consumers to have RAM simultaneously? Consumers would want more RAM to run local models but then hyperscalers capacity will be unused.
Because RAM isn’t in PCs only. It’s in tablets, phones, laptops, DIY computers like the Raspberry, mini PCs, watches, smart TVs, game consoles, cars, routers, cameras, all smart appliances from refrigerators to washing machines, fitness trackers, printers etc. Cloud services are irrelevant to most of these categories.
A chip that produces refrigerator ram is also capable of producing hbm3 ? Don't they require retooling? Won't the same problems surface as required to establish new fabs?
They do require retooling and that's what's happening here. RAM manufacturers decided that it's way more lucrative to focus on HMB production than DDR 4/5 production. Capacity is the issue and that's capped unless you build new fabs but they won't do it because there's no guarantee that the demand will keep the same in the next years.