←back to thread

Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening

(www.buysellram.com)
160 points redohmy | 1 comments | 15 Nov 25 02:45 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
Show context
mrsilencedogood ◴[21 Nov 25 21:22 UTC] No.46009135[source]▶
All I can say is,

- the insane frothing hype behind AI is showing me a new kind of market failure - where resources can be massively misallocated just because some small class of individuals THINK or HOPE it will result in massive returns. Even if it squeezes out every single other sector that happens to want to use SDRAM to do things OTHER than buffer memory before it's fed into a PCIE lane for a GPU.

- I'm really REALLY glad i decided to buy brand new gaming laptops for my wife and I just a couple months ago, after not having upgraded our gaming laptops for 7 and 9 years respectively. It seems like gamers are going to have this the worst - GPUs have been f'd for a long time due to crypto and AI, and now even DRAM isn't safe. Plus SSD prices are going up too. And unlike many other DRAM users where it's a business thing and they can to some degree just hike prices to cover - gamers are obviously not running businesses. It's just making the hobby more expensive.

replies(20): >>46009293 #>>46009325 #>>46009327 #>>46009366 #>>46009534 #>>46009576 #>>46009665 #>>46009724 #>>46009733 #>>46010134 #>>46010139 #>>46010163 #>>46010207 #>>46010410 #>>46011013 #>>46011039 #>>46011204 #>>46011260 #>>46011299 #>>46011459 #
Retr0id ◴[21 Nov 25 21:43 UTC] No.46009327[source]▶
I wonder, is there any way to avoid this kind of market failure? Even a planned economy could succumb to hype - promises that improved societal efficiency are just around the corner.
replies(3): >>46009438 #>>46009667 #>>46010758 #
1. smallmancontrov ◴[21 Nov 25 21:55 UTC] No.46009438[source]▶
There is a way, and if anyone tells you we have to go full Hitler or Stalin to do it they are liars because last time we let inequality cook this hard FDR and the New Deal figured out how to thread the needle and proved it could be done.

Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be the flavor of politics on tap at the moment.

Sam Altman cornering the DRAM market is a joke, of course, but if the punchline is that they were correct to invest this amount of resources in job destruction, it's going to get very serious very quickly and we have to start making better decisions in a hurry or this will get very, very ugly.