Last year I brought two 8G DDR3L RAM stick made by Gloway for around $8 each, now the same stick is priced around $22, a 275% increase in price.

SSD makers are also increasing their prices, but that started one or two years ago, and they did it again recently (of course).

It looked like I'll not be buying any first-hand computers/parts before the price can go normal again.

And that was caught because we had ECC. If not for that we'd be replacing drives, because metrics made it look like it is one of OSDs slowing to a crawl, which usual reason is drive dying.

Of course, chance for that is pretty damn small, bit also their scale is pretty damn big.

For those who aren't well versed in the construction of memory modules: take a look at your DDR4 memory module, you'll see 8 identical chips per side if it's a non-ECC module, and 9 identical chips per side if it's an ECC module. That's because, for every byte, each bit is stored in a separate chip; the address and command buses are connected in parallel to all of them, while each chip gets a separate data line on the memory bus. For non-ECC memory modules, the data line which would be used for the parity/ECC bit is simply not connected, while on ECC memory modules, it's connected to the 9th chip.

(For DDR5, things are a bit different, since each memory module is split in two halves, with each half having 4 or 5 chips per side, but the principle is the same.)

> China's AI Analog Chip Claimed to Be 3000X Faster Than Nvidia's A100 GPU (04.11.2023)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38144619

> Q.ANT’s photonic chips – which compute using light instead of electricity – promise to deliver a 30-fold increase in energy efficiency and a 50-fold boost in computing speed, offering transformative potential for AI-driven data centers and HPC environments. (24.02.2025)

https://qant.com/press-releases/q-ant-and-ims-chips-launch-p...

I would not want to rerun a whole run just because of bit flips and bit flips become a lot more relevant the more servers you need.

Even when the sticks are completely incompatible with each other? I think servers tend to use RDIMM, desktops use UDIMM. Personally I'm not seeing as step increase in (b2b) RDIMMs compared to the same stores selling UDIMM (b2c), but I'm also looking at different stores tailored towards different types of users.

Since DDR5 has 2 independent subchannels, 2 additional chips are needed.

I'd been planning to upgrade my desktop as a christmas present for myself.

Now I have the cash and was looking at buying my PCPartPicker list, the cost of the 64GB DDR5-6000 RAM I planned to buy has gone from £300-400 to £700-800+, a difference of almost the price of the 9070 XT I just bought to go in the computer.

I guess I'll stick with my outdated AM4/X370 setup and make the best of the GPU upgrade until RAM prices stop being a complete joke.

Manufactures aren't dumb, they lost a lot of money in the last cycle and aren't playing that game anymore. No additional capacity is planned, OEMs are simply redirecting existing capacity towards high-margin products (HBM), instead of chasing fragile demand.

Enterprise wise, the used servers kinda always have been cheap (at least compared to MSRP or even after discount price), just because there is enough companies that want a feel good of having a warranty on equipment and yeet it after 5 years.

The article says: "OpenAI’s memory demand projected to reach up to 900,000 DRAM wafers per month", but not by when, or what current demand is. If this is based on OpenAI's >$1T of announced capex over the next 5 years, its not clear that money will ever actually materialize.