Imagine if auto manufacturers all refitted their factories and supply chains to produce military vehicles for a war effort. New family cars would run dry, and when the war ended, some folks would figure out make clever use of some surplus military vehicles for street travel and commerce, but most of the surplus would just be shifted to other military markets and family car production would take some time to resume.
Meanwhile you've got OpenAI buying up all the DRAM and maybe just piling it in a warehouse so no one else can have it or they figure out what to do with it. Microsoft recently said they don't even have a power source to plug the ton of GPUs they just bought into so they're also just sitting around collecting dust. What is even happening?
Bit like you could get NVIDIA Server cards before things went crazy but they’re on ancient cuda etc so not exactly as glorious as one would imagine
It's more useful to construct multiple separate inflation measures that represent different types of people. Like a "typical renter" inflation figure vs a "typical homeowner" inflation figure. It wouldn't be hard to do and would shine a light on inequality and help explain the rise of populism in certain segments of society.
An even better measure would somehow appropriately normalize the figure by the average disposable income in each of the segments to come up with a figure that measures the felt impact better.
The figure would be negative for wealthy people (who actually benefit from inflation because of asset price inflation) and positive for poor people (whose disposable income mostly goes to rent).
https://www.yesigiveafig.com/p/part-1-my-life-is-a-lie
I don't exactly agree with the numbers, but I think the basic ideas are true
So the dollar's value has increased by roughly a factor of 36700 over those 38 years, averaging 32% per year.
That would be an average yearly inflation of -24%.
Too bad you can't live in DRAM or eat it when you're hungry.
We should be measuring it by the amount of RAM in a typical household PC in 1987 and today.
Even though a "meg" of RAM costs less than 1 cent today, I can't do anything useful with it.
Even if we are generous and buy a whole $1 of RAM today, it only gets us 150 MB of RAM, which, while infinitely more useful than 1MB, is still completely useless for running a modern OS/Browser.
What does your math say about that?
Economics says you're spending newly abundant resources freely in order to conserve those that are still scarce. Economics also predicts that people will adapt to RAM prices doubling by using RAM more frugally, spending more of other resources to compensate.
Even current DDR4 3200 DIMM prices are at an all time high.
These are 6+ year old chip specs now!
I even thought stuff was overpriced four years ago in mid-2021 already, but this is a whole new level.
Some sample long term data for those:
And then there are other factors like more sticks of ram stressing things further. I had to downclock to get memtest stable when running 4 sticks even though each kit ran fine on it's own. But that is expected as well as 4 sticks stresses the memory controller even further.
I confess I don't have any real recent experience with DDR5 though, mostly with DDR4 on Ryzen 1000-5000 series.
Here the price hike was pretty instant as secondary effect of DDR5 evasion in two waves. I July and now in October.
There is usually no shortage of old working PC components as they also are avalable used and tested from people decommissioning and upgrading systems. These are not some rare parts in normal market situations.
I made a habit of maxing out motherboards a year or two before upgrading to an new platform. This was always dirt cheap until like 5 years ago.
You can take a look at the 5800X3D and how it was at its cheapest about 2 years ago when AMD was winding down production and Zen 4 had been launched.
Unfortunately now they're too late on making the bank with DDR5, too: https://www.reuters.com/commentary/breakingviews/chinas-chip...
Even Samsung is running into this issue now: their own internal foundry is refusing to give them a long term contract now so the S26 series will become more expensive.
If this happens to Samsung, what leverage will a player like Valve have?
These large corpos are so greedy to the point they harm themselves. I remember something similar with Amazon, where the Amazon shop had to redo the whole architecture from some microservice setup back to a monolithic approach because they used AWS and paid these weirdly structured prices like everyone else. Which made running a monolithic architecture under such constraints inherently cheaper. Not sure what the resulting compounded business cost for this "endeavor" was, but more often that not such things are never accounted for, so they don't show up as an issue.
Their interest isn't necessarily in squeezing out the most margin on each unit. If unexpected market conditions let them more or less hit their original margin targets but get far more units installed in homes, that could be much better for them in the long term.
There's a lot we can't know as outsiders, at the moment.
i agree. Valve's money machine is with the steam platform, rather than any hardware sales - breaking even on hardware is sufficient imho.
Valve's existential threat is from microsoft closing off windows somehow (or extracting rent...like a store!). Therefore, pushing steam machines which can be run without windows, is both business expansion as well as an insurance policy.
Wasn't that true with the previous incarnation of the steam machine, the valve index, steam controller, etc.? IIRC their VR gear was some of the most expensive consumer level gear on the market.
The steam deck, and now the (newer) steam machine is looking to push into the mass market of consoles, and i reckon it would be more successful. Not to mention the more mature steamOS and compatibility layer now (compared to before).
I have high hopes for it. I want PC gaming to break free of microsoft windows.
Being pragmatic, I wonder if Valve benefit from the health of the PC market, whether they'll also put efforts into helping people get more life out of their existing machines, or individuals/businesses refurbishing to sell on the used market with more confidence. There's already an angle for reducing e-waste with the win10 end of life if it can be tied into installing linux.
Companies had supply agreements in place but they will find essentially any excuse to "delay" delivery. You might eventually get your product but fat lot of good it does for you while you're mired in court and not getting anything anyway.
The particularly amusing example is a project continuously selling spot LNG while saying it's not yet operational, stiffing the companies with which they'd signed long term contracts with on a technicality.
I wonder how much price increase it takes for Apple to raise theirs.
- $25 / GB ($200 for 8 GB for the M5 MacBook Pro and the M4 MacBook Air)
- $16 / GB ($400 for 24 GB for the cheapest M4 Pro MacBook Pro)
- $12.5 / GB ($200 for 16 GB and then $800 for 64 GB more for the most expensive M4 Pro and M4 Max MacBook Pros)
and Apple's RAM is faster than PC RAM.
Are you sure about that? The M5 memory has a max bandwidth of ~150 GB/s, meanwhile there is PC memory that reaches 200 GB/s
https://www.mooreslawisdead.com/post/sam-altman-s-dirty-dram...
AWS, MS, Oracle, and Google demand is growing ~100% in 2026. Nvidia demand is growing ~50% in 2026. Supply isn't forecast to improve at all until H2 2026 and it's probably ~all spoken for through at least EOY 2026.
All of it is being murdered by the AI bros. Before them it was the crypto bros. It’s one thing after the other and I hate it so much.
The prices are wild tho.
I bought that ram in March 2024 for $384.81. Now it's priced at $1,172.99. LOL
PC gaming is not "murdered", it's doing better than ever.
In 2015 there were 3,000 games released to Steam, last year there were 18,000. In 2015 Steam's peak concurrent user count was 8.6 million. This year it's 41 million.
The inflation-adjusted price per gigabyte of RAM has dropped from $3/GB to $2/GB over the last 10 years, even including the recent price hikes.
So spare me the hysterics, your hobby is fine.
And you know what? The increased demand for compute always spurs innovation, so you'll probably get a better computer in the end as a result. You're welcome.
This is like saying "Spotify's subscriber count grew by 800% over the last 10 years. Music is doing better than ever!"
That means that yes, it will probably by more expensive than before this raise, but no, not nearly as much as today.