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[–] 12 points 8 hours ago (3 children)

The prices keep going up because the willingness to pay isn't slowing down. As long as people are willing to over pay, the prices will keep going up! Of course the suppliers are predicting price increases, they know there's a crowd that HAS to have the latest and greatest even when previous gen hardware still hangs, and they have deep pockets and no patience. Then u have people paying for cloud services and shit, increasing demand. This isn't even getting into the AI craze or cloud computing. I have a friend that won't build a gaming PC because "it's cheaper to pay to stream a PC from my laptop" while complaining about ram shortages, which he is actively funding. I am perfectly happy with my ryzen 5 running ddr4 and a rx6600, it plays everything on my 1080p 75hz monitor just fine. I won't dare think about upgrading till the madness stops, and if it doesnt then fine I've been priced out of gaming. My sub 800$ PC is already more expensive than half the cars and motorcycles I have owned 😭 no I'm not spending 2k to build a rig jeeezum

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  • [–] 8 points 5 hours ago* (2 children)

    Yes, this is true that prices are continuing to rise because they're still being bought at that high price, but most of that isn't consumers (and/or "enthusiasts") absolutely needing it no matter the cost.

    The price is what it is because ai and cloud compute companies are willing to pay that insanely inflated price, so if you want even the chance to get any dram, you need to be willing to pay more than OpenAI/Microsoft/Google/NVIDIA/etc are, for Samsung/SK Hynix/Micron to even consider you.

    Why would they bother selling their dram chips in consumer packages for a fraction of what enterprises are willing to pay. The price is what it is, because that's the price that it becomes worth it for the dram manufacturers to actually care about the consumer market.

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  • [–] 5 points 5 hours ago (1 child)

    It's also not consumer ram that is taking up the fab capacity either, they've shifted to producing more HBM because it allows huge models to be loaded fast.

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  • [–] 3 points 5 hours ago*

    Yeah exactly, why bother making DDR4/5 memory when HBM makes so much more money since companies are willing to pay insane amounts for it.

    So the price of DDR4/5 will rise to whatever price AI and compute companies are willing to pay for HBM as that's the only point it becomes somewhat worth it for manufacturers to care.

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