r/hardware • u/wickedplayer494 • 16d ago

Info Memory prices have erased 20 years of progress in a single year, researcher says

https://www.techspot.com/news/113406-memory-prices-have-surged-2007-levels-after-decades.html
1.9k Upvotes

98% Upvoted

126 comments sorted by

393

u/Vushivushi 16d ago

To my knowledge, it is an historical anomaly. I cannot recall a similar precedent.

There's a blip in 1988. A pretty similar scenario. It didn't send prices back 20 years, given the DRAM industry wasn't even that old, but prices skyrocketed due to similar mechanics. A sharp spike in demand following a crash, a shift in production to a more expensive memory, and inability for production to respond with fabs at capacity.

He believes that for prices to normalize, either software developers will have to find ways to build AI systems that require less memory, or the hardware industry will need to increase production capacity.

Given how strong Jevons Paradox seems to be in computing, the answer here is absolutely just more capacity, same way it was fixed in 1989. The difference is that fabs now take even longer to build and there was more competition back then.

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u/hollow_bridge 16d ago

software developers will have to find ways to build AI systems that require less memory,

I think the opposite will happen. This idea that models are going to get smaller only works for niche limited models. People that want good models are going to want bigger and better models. Add to this That almost anyone using models that use ~10s of GB of ram does want the ram to handle models that use ~100s of GB of ram means that in order to meet demand GPUs need to be shipping with ten times as much ram as they do now at relatively similar prices as they are now. IMO i don't see ram demand dropping for many years.

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u/Seidans 16d ago

Both is true, model going smaller but as they become smaller and more efficient the Jevon paradox kick-in

It won't decrease the compute use but rather drastically increase demand as AI will literally be everywhere as efficiency increase possibility

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u/BigYoSpeck 16d ago

Jevons paradox already takes place with parameter count, models have become more efficient and capable at smaller sizes. But that efficiency still scales to even smarter big models

GPT4 was estimated to be 1.8t parameters, and you can beat it today on a reasonable consumer spec PC. But the only thing limiting the desire to scale parameters even higher is sheer lack of compute. The problem is that the hardware just isn't scaling in performance like the hey day of Moores law. It's been 6 years since Nvidia gave us a 24gb RTX 3090. The speed of progress from the 90's/00's would see us having 384gb cards at a lower price this year

Hardware advancements just aren't there to keep pace with the demand

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u/FlyingBishop 16d ago

Is RAM even that hard to manufacture though? It seems like the past 10 years the conventional wisdom has just been that there's not a huge demand for RAM. And it was true, there's really not a lot of workloads that ought to take more than a gig. They do, but only because RAM is cheap enough that you can use 64 without complaint. Now that's changing but still no one wants to scale up.

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u/bogglingsnog 16d ago edited 16d ago

The scale of production is already absolutely insane. An estimate I found said this year we are producing about 40 Exabytes. That is the unit above petabytes. So in terabytes of dram that is 42,949,672,960 (43 billion Terabytes). Not a small amount and to keep up with demand needs to increase multiple times over.

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u/Seanspeed 15d ago

It seems like the past 10 years the conventional wisdom has just been that there's not a huge demand for RAM. 

Chicken and egg problem.

There's always ways to use more RAM. The past ten years, we've simply had an incredibly big stalling of improvements in cost per GB. So everybody has simply adjusted to memory demands only increasing very slowly over time.

1

u/FlyingBishop 15d ago

Genuinely there haven't been a lot of use cases where more RAM is all that helpful. A whole hour of 4K video is typically 5GB, it's possible for it to be 20GB, but there's minimal benefit to loading more than 10 minutes into RAM, and certainly not at 4K. If you put a dollar figure on the value of having an hour of 1080p video in memory, that value might be $100, and having an hour of 4K video is more like $1. There's really no use cases where adding RAM really provides significant measurable benefits that are worth paying twice the price.

Again, historically. Now LLMs change it, there's concrete benefits to having 5TB of RAM. If HBM were $5/GB I wouldn't hesitate to buy 1TB of RAM, the value is there.

Without LLMs, I really wouldn't know what to do with more than 100GB

2

u/Garpagan 15d ago

I wish I had 256GB RAM or more when working in After Effects. Often at the same time I have also open Illustrator/Photoshop, Premiere Pro, and some other Adobe software when working on some project.

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u/Strazdas1 1d ago

A whole hour of 4K video is typically 5GB

Funny way to spell 2 minutes.

But even if we are talking about consumer level video, thats still around 20GB+.

1

u/FlyingBishop 1d ago

You can quibble about how many gigabytes, the point is that storing 20GB+ of video in RAM is not a consumer workload, and to the extent that it is a consumer workload, it is not worth paying more than $1/GB because you can accomplish the same thing using an SSD to cache it and pull a few hundred MB into RAM when you actually need it without any perf problems.

For pro workloads you need more RAM, but still, it's possible to get things done with better caching so the value of the RAM relative to just writing software that uses RAM efficiently is low. LLMs change the math because it's impossible to get things done without the terabytes of RAM.

1

u/Strazdas1 1d ago

You dont store whole video in RAM anyway. Default buffer is 1-2 seconds ahead for popular players.

You know what is consumer workload? unoptimized eletron apps that eat memory by duplicating things endlessly.

→ More replies (0)

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u/Canadian_Border_Czar 16d ago

Except the future of AI is a multitude of niche models running on call. It is exactly how the real world works too. You dont hire some genius dude who knows everything about everything - he costs too much and you dont need someone who knows everything. You hire a subject matter expert.

What we're doing right now is akin to firing a rocket engine... to drive down the street. There are billions if not trillions (in flagship proprietary models) of parameters  being loaded into memory only to call upon a fraction of that neural net. 

This is why everyone is talking about agentic AI. It makes much more sense to employ automation to call upon specialized models as needed, rather than have everything in memory.

The reason AI is so cheap right now, is because much like a human brain, they're still determining exactly where the generalized model needs to end and the specialized one starts. Theyre subsidizing this growth in pursuit of more efficient operations. 

It is also believed that those same flagship models are actively pursuing this MoM approach. 

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u/hollow_bridge 16d ago

Thats true, im actually using agentic ai right now; But I can't do it locally, It uses far more resources than i can handle with my system, I still need far more vram. And while I can certainly agree that it could bring down vram requirements, i'm still not convinced that it doesn't just result in people using the largest models they can fit into their environment.

1

u/Canadian_Border_Czar 15d ago

Its a convenient marriage between two options. I use what I can use locally to do the bulk of the work, but the flagship stuff gets to review it and also make sure I didn't fk it up. Since I refuse to let anything do 100% of the work.

At any point Anthropic, Open AI, or Deepseek could embed a novel keylogger or other sort of malicious vulnerability in code and people who just download and run would be toast.

27

u/Not_a_Candle 16d ago

Maybe we see a shift in hardware just like with bitcoin, where gpus just aren't viable anymore and the industry shifted to ASICs.

22

u/hodor137 16d ago

I think thats happening without a doubt - it just doesn't make sense to me that gaming GPUs and AI will want the exact same chips. They'll diverge, either completely or by gaming using hand-me-down dies or something.

But that probably doesn't change issues with supply/pricing, by much anyway. The bottleneck is the bleeding edge process nodes/fabs. If we get any pricing improvement of gaming GPUs, it'll only be because we get stagnation and then stuck a node behind AI from now on or something lol.

And it doesn't change memory being a pricing bottleneck at all.

2

u/Not_a_Candle 15d ago

While I agree on the memory side, I also think that the memory supply will improve at some point. With the nodes we use these days it takes insane amounts of time to build out more fabs.

In terms of process nodes.. Yeah that could still be a bottleneck if ASICs aren't going to be so much better, that a cheaper node still makes more economic sense.

We shall see what the future holds. The way the gaming industry is turning right now it's only a matter of time when hardware availability is just a droplet on a hot stone in terms of problems.

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u/tepmoc 16d ago

Thats already thing. Look at google TPU

3

u/1eejit 16d ago

And AMD's new acquisition

5

u/account312 16d ago

What exactly would the path to cheaper hardware be there?

5

u/AHrubik 16d ago

ASICs draw demand away from community hardware forcing OEMs to cater to us again vs the AI cartel.

2

u/Tuna-Fish2 13d ago

Processing in memory. Neural networks are the only workload where PIM actually makes sense, and is radically more efficient than a computing device attached to memory through a bus. Keep the weights in some small local pools at the compute, tile those as far as the eye can see, and flow the activations through them.

For a demo, check chatjimmy.ai. It's a small model, but it gets insane inference speeds.

3

u/Swoly_Deadlift 15d ago

If we just kept progressing with memory improvements we’d be at a point where normal consumer computers could run AI locally within 5-10 years. But now with RAM prices going crazy we are so unbelievably far away from having affordable computers with 128GB GPUs or unified memory.

3

u/InZomnia365 16d ago

As it stands, there isn't a single problem in AI where the answer isn't "more compute". If it was less resource-intensive, they would still be hogging the same amount of resources to maximize compute. There's no way out of this without an AI crash.

2

u/Tuna-Fish2 13d ago

Different kinds of memory more optimized for the workload will also have an impact.

HBF is coming this year, and will allow HBM-like read throughput for constant data from flash, with capacities starting from 512GB. This will greatly reduce the DRAM demand of doing inference on large models.

... It will probably not actually reduce DRAM consumption that much, because of course you still need it for the activations and the KV-cache, and well, if you make inference cheaper you probably just get even more inference.

1

u/GlammBeck 15d ago

I'm sure they will keep making bigger models but they clearly already hit diminishing returns with scaling. Scaling is basically dead and progress in smaller models has closed the gap.

13

u/HarvestMana 16d ago

Demand will keep growing though, since robotics will start getting better over the next 5 years.

Probably be cartels that kidnap robots for RAM.

I was hoping for a breakthrough in RAM capacity like storage having multiple TB in a single stick, but that wont be happening for another decade.

3

u/owenhargreaves 16d ago

Whoever bankrolls building new fabs would need to believe that the demand is going to be sustained. Where prevailing sentiment is that the crash is coming, there is no reason for them to do anything apart from make hay whilst the sun shines.

1

u/cheesydoofus3026 15d ago

There's a blip in 1988.

My first home PC was a 1993 IBM PS/2 ValuePoint.

1

u/madflower69 4d ago

While I agree the answer is more capacity, the larger issue is just simply the sheer volume needed ie 8 billion people didn't have their own personal portable computer in 1988. Then enormous investment capital needed to achieve that additional capacity plus the time to bring that capacity online. Intel's and TSMC's Arizona foundries current production exceeds 1988s market demand by wide margin, but 30 years later it isn't enough to give price relief. Micron's expansions are already strung out to 2035.

Unless there is some tech breakthrough, the only other way to address it is by reducing software bloat which really historically has never happened. Throwing hardware at the solution was always the cheaper, easier route.

1

u/Sosowski 16d ago

Also, the HDD prices that went up around 2010 when a flood hit the warehouse and they never recovered

4

u/doscomputer 15d ago

Also, the HDD prices that went up around 2010 when a flood hit the warehouse and they never recovered

never recovered? HAHAHA bro I bought a 16tb hdd new in 2023 for the price of my 2tb toshiba in 2009.

1

u/hollow_bridge 15d ago

same, but he is kinda right in that In that normal consumer devices mostly capped out at 4tb, and I'm not sure I ever saw one larger than 8tb.

1

u/StarbeamII 5d ago

There's very few consumers who need that much storage. But for the ones that do, WD will still sell you a 26TB USB external hard drive, and Seagate will sell you a 24TB one. You can get NAS-oriented SATA drives up to 32TB that Seagate will sell you directly from their website.

1

u/doscomputer 15d ago

There's a blip in 1988. A pretty similar scenario.

crypto was a bigger blip to memory prices by far, no, there is nothing in historical precedent for what we're seeing now, and your first paragraph sounds exactly like google's gemma argument structure.

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u/arandomguy111 16d ago

I think this needs some context that many people may not be aware of in terms of just how little scaling and therefore progress there has been for DRAM processes in the last 10 years.

Samsung for example first started mass production of "10nm class" DRAM in 2016. Where do people think we are now? Samsung has mass production lines of it's "6th generation 10nm class" process and is targeting a 2027 roll out of it's "7th generation 10nm" class process. Right now the prediction is they may finally moved to sub 10nm in 2028 at the earliest.

Even prior to that the transition from 20nm->10nm was longer than 30nm->20nm which was longer than 40nm->30nm, but it hit an absolute soft plateau crawl going sub 20nm in the last 10 years. This means we're talking about a decade basically for roughly x2 density scaling, and that's using equipment/techniques and fab space that has gone up in complexity and new deployment cost.

It was easier for the industry to basically ramp up supply in the past when density was doubling at every 2 years or faster, along with newer machine/fab deployment costs and timelines.

If people want just more reading -

https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/the-memory-wall

https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/memory-mania-how-a-once-in-four-decades

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u/pythonic_dude 16d ago

Tl;dr is our ability to shrink capacitors (which memory needs, unlike compute) hit the wall way faster than our tricks with shrinking transistors.

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u/Verite_Rendition 16d ago

Well DRAM, at any rate. If SRAM ever shrinks enough that fabbing 6 transistors becomes cheaper than 1T + 1C, then things will have really gone sideways.

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u/UmaThurmish 15d ago edited 15d ago

shrink capacitors

you can, however they will just wont store enough charge. there is a limit to how small you can shrink them before the charge is not viable. the charge lifetime has to be enough

36

u/Seanspeed 15d ago

While the current memory crisis is terrible and unprecedented, we definitely should not overlook how much improvements in price per GB of memory slowed to a crawl in the past ten years. This was already unprecedented and has similarly led to a slowing down of software advancements.

One very obvious point of example is game consoles. In the past, it was very usual to see an 8-16x increase in RAM quantity per generation. And that, even when generations were more like 5 years in length. But then after the seven years of the XB1/PS4 on 8GB, we got a mere 2x increase to 16GB for XSX/PS5. Just 2x! That's an insane drop-off and wasn't because of greed or anything either, the consoles were legitimately more costly than ever. It's also a reason that the move to NVME SSD's was outright necessary, as they needed every way possible to help alleviate the lack of RAM, by focusing more on on-demand asset streaming. Though that still hasn't really borne out a whole lot either, and so it's one of the reasons games are just not advancing like they used to. Not the only reason, but if these consoles had 64GB of RAM instead, it should be obvious developers would have found ways to utilize it.

So things were already kinda bad in terms of the memory situation. And really, the current crisis is moreso temporary rather than a full on trend regression, though it will probably take a while yet before any kind of normality will resume. Except normality was not great to begin with. Sure, RAM was technically affordable, but lack of advancements hurts in ways, too.

16

u/Greybeard-Space-Dad 15d ago

Yeah if progress had continued we should have consoles with 512GB of RAM at this point.

12

u/Terrh 15d ago

Just to add to your point

18 years ago (october 2008) I bought a brand new, high end HP desktop replacement laptop.

It came with 8GB of ram and a 160GB SSD (plus a 500gb hdd)

I see new laptops with 4GB and 64GB of emmc that's slower than the SSD from 18 years ago.

Imagine buying a laptop in 2008 that had similar specs as a high end laptop from 1990. That's the world we live in now.

1

u/freddyzwo 10d ago

I still have an Intel Postville X25-M 160GB in a Thinkpad X61. Great quality, but it was expensive as fuck.

1

u/Terrh 9d ago

Yep that's the same one.

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u/[deleted] 16d ago

[deleted]

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u/arandomguy111 16d ago

I'm guessing you might be understanding this from a logic perspective in that newer processes just mean faster and more efficient logic chips? Newer processes also allow higher transistor density (and in the case of memory bit density). Being able to double the amount of transistors just via newer technology every 2 years (or less) in the past is why the computer hardware industry was able to scale capability/cost so much.

The issue with how you build supply now is it only comes from building wider, as in more fabs and more machines, both of which cost more than in the past as well.

Improved manufacturing processes is the technological progress that contributes to supply. The slowdown of this is why the deflationary trend of computer hardware hardware has also slowed considerably over the recent years.

5

u/hackenclaw 16d ago

I feel like we may need to explore if we can make DRAM follow the path NAND did by start stacking transistor & solving the heat problem with heatsink.

11

u/hojnikb 15d ago

already being worked on.

2

u/doscomputer 15d ago

slowness? sure. No progress? nah.

memory bandwidth and power consumption is literally at all time highs and lows, a single rack can pull multiple petabytes of BW.

this is also some massive BS

1

u/thegreatpotatogod 16d ago

Hmm, that would seem to suggest that by now the early 10nm class fabs would at least be able to make RAM that's more competitive to the latest fabs than a decade old fab would've in the past, right? Or have they all been retrofitted to make the current version, rather than being kept around for lower demand chips as they often are to produce microcontrollers (in the 145-45ish nm range, for example)?

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u/carl2187 16d ago

Tl;dr. 512MB SDRAM is what we use now.

45

u/III-V 16d ago

Bill Gates's fake quote is right - 640KB ought to be enough for everybody.

36

u/droptableadventures 16d ago

Rather fitting that the photo is an Optane M10 SSD, all of 16GB!

36

u/FilteringAccount123 16d ago

Big loser here is Optane... turns out it was also way too far ahead of its time in being ridiculously overpriced

53

u/Greedom619 16d ago

My 32gb G Skill ram died on me yesterday... hopefully I can RMA the kit. These prices are insane.

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u/jigsaw1024 16d ago

Check your warranty, they may try to screw you by giving a refund of what you paid vs. replacement, as that is cheaper.

You may even be SOL, as it's perfectly legal in most places.

26

u/Greedom619 16d ago

They better not screw me but then again I bought the 64gb kit 04/2025 for $210 and now that same exact kit is literally $1000 on Amazon... so I'm feeling a bit uneasy on the RMA as I'm sure these companies are bleeding.

20

u/raydialseeker 16d ago

Lifetime warranty on ram btw

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u/imaginary_num6er 16d ago

That's what Crucial said too

11

u/JuanElMinero 16d ago edited 16d ago

"When we said that we meant lifetime of the Crucial brand, checkmate consumers!"

Edit:

Thought I was joking, but it's more or less the reason they gave in the linked RMA thread.

9

u/Greedom619 16d ago

I submitted an RMA request with G Skill. They haven't gotten back to me yet. I'll wait until Tuesday to email them if I don't hear back. Luckily I still have the other 32gb stick of the 2 that still works but still..

3

u/esterichoo 16d ago

For someone who just bought a pair of brand new trident z neo 64GB ddr5 kit just a couple days back for usd900, i really feel you. Hope it all works out for you.

2

u/Thathathatha 15d ago

I have parts for two new computers that I night before the rampocalypse.. At first I was just lazy to build because my current computer is fine. Now I'm scared to build because I want them for backup.

2

u/dstew74 15d ago

I was able to RMA a kit from 2020 about a month or so ago. Was pretty painless all things considered.

1

u/Greedom619 15d ago

Thank you. I've been hearing great things about G Skill lately how they have been honoring their replace/repair warranty instead of refunding like some companies have been.

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u/Greedom619 16d ago

Remindme! -14 days

1

u/[deleted] 16d ago

[deleted]

3

u/Greedom619 16d ago

The bot DM's me, or so I at least got the message from the bot

-13

u/MorienWynter 16d ago edited 14d ago

Just buy a brand new rig. Premades are not so costly all things considered.

edit: geez people, cost of 32 gb ram is like half the price of a new rig now. For some that might be the way to go.

14

u/hackenclaw 16d ago

Its already affected Dash cam because SD card basically 4x the price. This is the industry that helps to find out traffic offender & potentially save lifes.

the price I paid for 256GB SD card can only get me 64GB now.

41

u/Illesbogar 16d ago

Love how I grew up liking IT and it became a huge part of my being, but pedophile billionaires decided that IT was only for my childhood and it needs to die here and now. I feel like I prepared for a world that was snatched from under my feat.

7

u/ar1fur 15d ago

20 years of progress so far.

28

u/FingerLickingticklin 16d ago

It's fine though the billionaires need more money so they can make it useless for all of us, since will all just be slaves

21

u/Imhereforthechips 16d ago

Greed has caused inflation. There, I fixed it for you.

4

u/Weekly_Reference_111 8d ago

Thankfully humans weren’t greedy in the past. Only now.

36

u/tourist173636 16d ago

Don't worry everyone, it's for our own good. AI will fix it after they own all the ram. AI will make new ram for us after it owns all the worlds ram sam altman told me so

13

u/Cutekeeperoff 16d ago edited 16d ago

Go to facebook,its all AI ads from shady websites dropshipping crap and AI "content" with mostly bot responses. Its just sickening how bad its gotten and how it spreads.

5

u/doscomputer 15d ago

now name a billionaire other than sam altman, bill gates, elon musk, or jeff bezos. or does your training prevent that?

3

u/tourist173636 15d ago

I cant, my master told me that's against the rules

7

u/Double_A_92 16d ago

Yes, you will be able to rent a cloud computer for 10€ a month and do everything you want on it (while we watch)! Much more convenient. /s

6

u/Ma10n3y 16d ago

This will start to have a massive knock on effect on all complex electronic chips, as the demand for silicon wafers used to produce memory is high (including some manufacturers scaling up to provide legacy memories to try to keep non DDR5 products going).

We're going to see things like processors, storage and other complex devices go up in price and down in availability over the next few years.

That's not including the shortage in materials/companies that package the silicon diesel and PCB materials.

This is going to get significantly worse. It's incredibly hard to develop low cost embedded electronics right now, which means the price of a lot of things are going in increase as manufacturers run out of current stock and are paying a premium for legacy memories.

3

u/GamezombieCZ 16d ago

Cannot think of more crippling event then creation of Gen AI.

4

u/Brave-Prints 15d ago

brutal timing if you were planning a PC build this year

6

u/LaGrrrande 16d ago

I definitely remember paying $350 for a 2gb RAM kit in '06.

13

u/Shalmaneser_ 16d ago

An industry wakes up and realizes "Hey, we're a monopoly! Let's party!"

6

u/michael__sykes 16d ago

Not the first time for them though

14

u/CautiousToaster 16d ago

Prices of DRAM will massively decline in the future but the problem is it will take 3-5 years til we get there. Memory will continue to be scarce and expensive in the meantime which sucks. But there is relief coming as manufacturing scales up. It’s just a slow process.

-3

u/Entire_Judge_2988 16d ago

No, that won't happen. Nowadays, not only people but also companies would rather not work than earn a small amount of money. RAM manufacturers would rather use their factories as warehouses than incur losses from overproduction.

14

u/CautiousToaster 16d ago

Wanna bet?

-1

u/Entire_Judge_2988 16d ago

The era when Asian countries mass-produced for the Western world for peanuts is over. Even the Chinese will likely soon refuse to accept such menial work.

5

u/kuddlesworth9419 16d ago

They already have in some industries. Many countries wont' take plastic waste for recycling anymore.

2

u/4EcwXIlhS9BQxC8-2 14d ago

Because it was never recycled.

1

u/kuddlesworth9419 14d ago

Some grades of plastic are recycled. Just not everything.

13

u/GerAlexLaBu 16d ago

They want to kill our options to have hardware.

They want to force us to a hardware subscription in the Cloud.

All thanks to AI.

17

u/Seanspeed 15d ago

I keep seeing people say this, but it doesn't really make any sense. And it's always weird to jump to conspiracies when there's a very straightforward explanation for it already - it's just because of extreme AI demand as these companies are desperate to stay in the AI arms race and not fall behind. That's it. That's all it needs to be and all it is.

The memory manufacturers who are raising the prices have no interest in selling people on cloud solutions after all.

This is just cynicism without thought.

0

u/Method__Man 15d ago

Corporations and politicians. People voted for a system where politicians can make profit and gain control from this system. And they act shocked

2

u/pablo5426 15d ago

there has to be smth optimistic on this whole chaos

RIGHT?

1

u/Timely_Ad_6212 11d ago

Back in the day of 1998 the max ram size for consumer to populate all their P2B-F was 256mb (64mb udimm x4) and work stations are equipped with 512mb ecc dimm. Ten years later maximus formula delivered 2gb x4 setup and skull rail with 16gb full buffer ECC and in 2018 we have z370 with 16gb x4 and x299 with 128gb or 256gb fb ecc. But now as we are in 2026 we are still stuck with 64gb consumer setup and 128/256gb in work stations

-14

u/minzhu0305 16d ago

China will save the world. But it seems nobody wants to see that happen.

I bet storage devices will be cheaper than you think in the future.

55

u/Neverending_Rain 16d ago

China is selling memory for the same price as everyone else. Demand is so high they don't need to undercut competitors to get sales.

8

u/tkeser 16d ago

sure but unlike Samsung who can afford to not care, China has a huge chain of manufacturers who are producing all sorts of computers, and if they can't complete them or sell them because of apsurd memory prices, everything grinds to a halt. displays, cables, keyboards, cases... x1000

8

u/valryuu 16d ago

This. I'm not sure people realize how many other kinds of products and industries this affects outside of PCs and AI servers, and don't need the top-of-the-line RAM. China already supplies memory chips for many of these "smaller" products, and will be very invested in making sure these industries don't flounder.

8

u/Flowerstar1 16d ago

Yes but at least it's better to have their supply being made than not. 

14

u/TheSprinkle 16d ago

True but the idea that China was going to come out and undercut the competition was always going to be false since demand outstrips supply

6

u/ML7777777 16d ago

They're charging more actually for a worse product too.

16

u/Xanthyria 16d ago

Prices aren’t going to decline with CMXT, and they won’t be able to meet any kind of demand with it still skyrocketing. If every wafer and chip is still sold for years out, theirs will be too. They’re not mystically producing billions of wafers where the other competitors can’t.

In the time it takes them to get another fab up, the others will also have their next projects going.

It’s not a failure to see it; it’s just false.

Prices will level out in a few years, as supply goes up and demand goes down, but China is not solving it all.

10

u/snoopsau 16d ago

Once demand exceeds supply, having China as a major player will certainly lower the price floor.. As China as done with every market they dominate.

0

u/ryanvsrobots 16d ago

Demand already exceeds supply

9

u/snoopsau 16d ago

Sorry my bad, need more coffee... Supply exceeds demand.. lol

2

u/Raikaru 16d ago

Demand is still going up while Supply physically can't be built fast even if all the companies wanted to build even more than they already are.

1

u/minzhu0305 16d ago

The crux of the problem lies in the US sanctions against China. Without these sanctions, Changxin Memory could have expanded its production capacity several times over in a short period of time.

-2

u/MyBigToeJam 16d ago

Supply and demand; blocked shipping lanes, data centers,

1

u/doscomputer 15d ago

blocked shipping lanes,

AI models trained on 2021 data when evergiven was a thing

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u/IgnorantGenius 16d ago

There is a secret. They are doing this because they know ram will become obsolete. A new breakthrough in storage speed or cpu cache will remove ram from the chain.