I upgraded my pc about this time last year (new CPU, RAM, and motherboard).
I was originally going to just get 64GB of DDR5-6000, with the option of adding another 64GB later, thinking the price might drop even further. At the last minute, I decided to get the whole 128GB instead. Glad I did.
When Gaben's 11 organize a heist to steal the RAM wafers from the high-security vault in Sam Altman's basement, the price of the steam machine will drop below $1000 USD.
As someone currently dealing with pricing changes for DDR5 volume contracts (admittedly, only ~30k DIMMs, but still), those contracts are a lot less rigidly priced than we (engineering) realized at the time - “agreed price” is a lot more... flexible... until the pallet is delivered. Especially because our contract is with our manufacturer who has their own contract with a DIMM manufacturer who has their own contract with the DRAM manufacturer. DRAM is substantially more like a spot market than the average consumer would expect (at least at my volumes). The same is true for my HDDs (~100k unit/year contract) and my CPUs (10k unit/year contract). At least for HDDs our contract quantities are getting honoured (and we actually still have Seagate and WD fighting for our business), which I’ve heard hasn’t been the case for smaller orders.
For a while, yes. But I'm sure they will want to sell it for longer than a year or so.
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?
That's their costs, not our costs. Regular PCs will cost more, which means Valve can price their consoles higher and collect margin, because there's no other competition/substitutes.
Maybe, but from a platform and brand development perspective, there may be smarter strategies.
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.
> that could be much better for them in the long term.
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.
> i agree. Valve's money machine is with the steam platform, rather than any hardware sales - breaking even on hardware is sufficient imho.
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.
> What specifically happened in June to set this off?
Tariffs implemented by this administration:
"Inflation has begun to show the first signs of tariff
pass-through," said Ellen Zentner, chief economic
strategist at Morgan Stanley Wealth Management. "While
services inflation continues to moderate, the acceleration
in tariff-exposed goods in June is likely the first of
greater price pressures to come. The Fed will want to hold
steady as it awaits more data."[0]
The problem is that training these models and using these models has required exponentially increasing amounts of memory.
ChatGPT has existed for years and in those years it's userbase and model size has increased tremendously. Not to mention the fact that a lot of competitors have sprung up in the wake of GPT. Including the likes of cloud based open model hosting services.
On October 1st OpenAI signed two simultaneous deals with Samsung and SK Hynix for 40% of the worlds DRAM supply... the shock wasn’t that OpenAI made a big deal, no, it was that they made two massive deals this big, at the same time, with Samsung and SK Hynix simultaneously! In fact, according to our sources - both companies had no idea how big each other's deal was, nor how close to simultaneous they were. And this secrecy mattered. It mattered a lot.
Had Samsung known SK Hynix was about to commit a similar chunk of supply — or vice-versa — the pricing and terms would have likely been different. It’s entirely conceivable they wouldn’t have both agreed to supply such a substantial part of global supply if they had known more...but at the end of the day - OpenAI did succeed in keeping the circles tight, locking down the NDAs, and leveraging the fact that these companies assumed the other wasn’t giving up this much wafer volume simultaneously…in order to make a surgical strike on the global RAM supply chain…and it's worked so far...
OpenAI isn’t even bothering to buy finished memory modules! No, their deals are unprecedentedly only for raw wafers — uncut, unfinished, and not even allocated to a specific DRAM standard yet. It’s not even clear if they have decided yet on how or when they will finish them into RAM sticks or HBM! Right now it seems like these wafers will just be stockpiled in warehouses – like a kid who hides the toybox because they’re afraid nobody wants to play with them, and thus selfishly feels nobody but them should get the toys!
The cynic in me thinks this would be a convenient way for these memory producers to manufacture demand, while also making OpenAI look good on paper. It’s not like they haven’t been caught price fixing in the past. Win win for these companies and a loss for everyone else.
If manufacturing fake demand (warehousing 900,000 memory wafers per month?) doubles and triples customer prices, it would decrease real demand, hurting the manufacturers after the artificial demand ends.
> Had Samsung known SK Hynix was about to commit a similar chunk of supply — or vice-versa — the pricing and terms would have likely been different
Wouldn't this be ... collusion?
Implicitly arguing that the memory oligopoly should have been coordinating is ... quite something.
OpenAI may well be doing something anticompetitive by cornering supply to foreclose competitors, but saying "they tricked the suppliers into not colluding!" is certainly a take you can have I guess.
No, it's not collusion to ask for more money from OpenAI if you hear that they are trying to buy 40% of the world's supply. Increased demand leads to higher prices, that's normal.
OpenAI, by doing simultaneous deals, hid the true demand from the suppliers, thus lowering their price and raising everyone else's.
Novice question: If they built something other than classic dram modules with the wafers maybe they could achieve faster bus speeds? How does Apple do it?
I hate this. PC gaming is my hobby, the only one that’s lasted my whole life. It’s always been there. It’s how I met my wife. It’s how I relax after a long day. It’s how I’ve participated in so many stories that stick with me and given me so many memories.
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.
Just live with the PC you have for two more years. It's probably not a big deal? A moderately capable machine from 5 years ago is still marginally capable.
There is more than a lifetime of incredibly great PC games that run on your existing hardware, and if this is your life's hobby, then paying an extra $100 or so every year or few is a drop in the bucket of your gaming expenses
Increased demand for computer components for purposes other than gaming constitutes "AI bros murdering your lifelong hobby"?
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.
I mean its pretty rare to buy more RAM after completing your PC build + that single PC is going to last you 5+ years. Also mobos usually only have 4 slots in total so its not like its even going to take a lot. I'm rocking 2x48gb sticks and that's plenty for gaming.
The prices are wild tho.
I bought that ram in March 2024 for $384.81. Now it's priced at $1,172.99. LOL
I'm finding that getting an LGA socket to give me two reliable memory channels is far more valuable than the sticks that go into them. I've got at least two motherboards in use at my home right now with only one working channel of memory. There are sticks just sitting around.
A lot of the goods won't be essily repurposible for consumer or small business work loads.
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.
If we measure the value of the dollar against megabytes of RAM, well, in 01987, the difference between a StarBoard with "2 megs space" and a StarBoard with "2 megs installed" was US$484 (https://archive.org/details/amazing-computing-magazine-1987-...), so a "meg" of RAM cost US$242. Today https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/ says "DDR4-3200 2x8GB" costs US$108; if that means 16GiB, as in 16384 "megs", a "meg" of RAM costs US$0.0066 today.
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.
They seem to fail to capture a whole lot of things. Supposedly $1 in 2000 is worth $1.88 in 2025. So 88% inflation over the 25 years. Meanwhile the median home price has increased by 150%. Family insurance by 350%. Median college tuition by 225%. Childcare costs have risen by 200%. But sure. We can buy super cheap 65" tvs now. Hurray for us! Literal kings who lived hundreds of years ago couldn't possibly imagine a world with cheap large screen tvs. So the poorest among us should rejoice at the wonders they are able to enjoy while they skip meals and ration their insulin.
The inflation basket only represent a hypothetical average person, who doesn't even exist.
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).
To put this in long term relation.
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:
https://geizhals.eu/?phist=2151624&age=9999
Dang, I'm going to have to put my old RAM on ebay. I thought it was worthless, but I was clearly wrong.
anyone want to buy a 2x16 GB DDR4-3200 kit that only fails memtest86 some of the time?
Funny how many dot-com esq things are popping up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing_scandal
As I mentioned in a prior post 7/18/2023 - G.SKILL Trident Z5 RGB Series 64GB (2 x 32GB) 288-Pin PC RAM DDR5 6000 - $253.
Today - G.SKILL Ripjaws S5 Series 64GB (2 x 32GB) 288-Pin PC RAM DDR5 5600 (PC5 44800) Desktop Memory Model F5-5600J3636D32GX2-RS5W - $620.
Prices from Newegg.
A possible answer as to why this is happening. https://thememoryguy.com/some-clarity-on-2025s-ddr4-price-su...
Scroll down. The same trend is happening for DDR5 prices. It's AI demand.
Is he saying the supply of ddr4 went down because they’re switching to ddr5?
I upgraded my pc about this time last year (new CPU, RAM, and motherboard).
I was originally going to just get 64GB of DDR5-6000, with the option of adding another 64GB later, thinking the price might drop even further. At the last minute, I decided to get the whole 128GB instead. Glad I did.
If these prices don't return back to normal I just don't see how Valves steam machine is less than $1,000 USD.
When Gaben's 11 organize a heist to steal the RAM wafers from the high-security vault in Sam Altman's basement, the price of the steam machine will drop below $1000 USD.
They would already have contracts in place.
As someone currently dealing with pricing changes for DDR5 volume contracts (admittedly, only ~30k DIMMs, but still), those contracts are a lot less rigidly priced than we (engineering) realized at the time - “agreed price” is a lot more... flexible... until the pallet is delivered. Especially because our contract is with our manufacturer who has their own contract with a DIMM manufacturer who has their own contract with the DRAM manufacturer. DRAM is substantially more like a spot market than the average consumer would expect (at least at my volumes). The same is true for my HDDs (~100k unit/year contract) and my CPUs (10k unit/year contract). At least for HDDs our contract quantities are getting honoured (and we actually still have Seagate and WD fighting for our business), which I’ve heard hasn’t been the case for smaller orders.
For a while, yes. But I'm sure they will want to sell it for longer than a year or so.
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?
That's their costs, not our costs. Regular PCs will cost more, which means Valve can price their consoles higher and collect margin, because there's no other competition/substitutes.
Maybe, but from a platform and brand development perspective, there may be smarter strategies.
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.
> that could be much better for them in the long term.
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.
> i agree. Valve's money machine is with the steam platform, rather than any hardware sales - breaking even on hardware is sufficient imho.
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.
What specifically happened in June to set this off? It can't just be "waves hands AI/LLMs" because ChatGPT has existed for years.
> What specifically happened in June to set this off?
Tariffs implemented by this administration:
0 - https://www.reuters.com/business/us-inflation-expected-rise-...Afraid not. This has not happened across the board to all components.
"Waves hands at AI/LLMs"
The problem is that training these models and using these models has required exponentially increasing amounts of memory.
ChatGPT has existed for years and in those years it's userbase and model size has increased tremendously. Not to mention the fact that a lot of competitors have sprung up in the wake of GPT. Including the likes of cloud based open model hosting services.
Perhaps some tariff shenanigans?
https://www.mooreslawisdead.com/post/sam-altman-s-dirty-dram...
The cynic in me thinks this would be a convenient way for these memory producers to manufacture demand, while also making OpenAI look good on paper. It’s not like they haven’t been caught price fixing in the past. Win win for these companies and a loss for everyone else.
If manufacturing fake demand (warehousing 900,000 memory wafers per month?) doubles and triples customer prices, it would decrease real demand, hurting the manufacturers after the artificial demand ends.
> Had Samsung known SK Hynix was about to commit a similar chunk of supply — or vice-versa — the pricing and terms would have likely been different
Wouldn't this be ... collusion?
Implicitly arguing that the memory oligopoly should have been coordinating is ... quite something.
OpenAI may well be doing something anticompetitive by cornering supply to foreclose competitors, but saying "they tricked the suppliers into not colluding!" is certainly a take you can have I guess.
No, it's not collusion to ask for more money from OpenAI if you hear that they are trying to buy 40% of the world's supply. Increased demand leads to higher prices, that's normal.
OpenAI, by doing simultaneous deals, hid the true demand from the suppliers, thus lowering their price and raising everyone else's.
They have, rather famously, been caught doing financial shenanigans before. [0]
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing_scandal
A competitive auction would not be collusion.
Novice question: If they built something other than classic dram modules with the wafers maybe they could achieve faster bus speeds? How does Apple do it?
By "they", do you mean Samsung and SK Hynix, or another company?
Apple system config upgrades not looking so bad anymore
Came here looking for this comment.
I wonder how much price increase it takes for Apple to raise theirs.
Time for Intel to re-enter the memory market?
Who are the main players that make or benefit from these inflated DRAM prices?
Make? The market of course.
Benefit? The manufacturers of course.
Stagflation!
I hate this. PC gaming is my hobby, the only one that’s lasted my whole life. It’s always been there. It’s how I met my wife. It’s how I relax after a long day. It’s how I’ve participated in so many stories that stick with me and given me so many memories.
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.
Just live with the PC you have for two more years. It's probably not a big deal? A moderately capable machine from 5 years ago is still marginally capable.
There is more than a lifetime of incredibly great PC games that run on your existing hardware, and if this is your life's hobby, then paying an extra $100 or so every year or few is a drop in the bucket of your gaming expenses
Increased demand for computer components for purposes other than gaming constitutes "AI bros murdering your lifelong hobby"?
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.
I mean its pretty rare to buy more RAM after completing your PC build + that single PC is going to last you 5+ years. Also mobos usually only have 4 slots in total so its not like its even going to take a lot. I'm rocking 2x48gb sticks and that's plenty for gaming.
The prices are wild tho.
I bought that ram in March 2024 for $384.81. Now it's priced at $1,172.99. LOL
the other side of the AI bubble are a huge amount of 2nd hand parts of all kinds going to come onto the market?
Waiting for all my out of use 4, 8, and 16GB DDR3 DIMMs that I have somewhere in a drawer to become the new gold standard first.
My pile of worthless 512MB DDR1 sticks has bad news for you
I'm finding that getting an LGA socket to give me two reliable memory channels is far more valuable than the sticks that go into them. I've got at least two motherboards in use at my home right now with only one working channel of memory. There are sticks just sitting around.
Memory chips are divertied to registered server RAM and those will not fit most workstations
All in a pretty bad state of wear, I imagine.
A lot of the goods won't be essily repurposible for consumer or small business work loads.
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.
You can buy old rackmount servers on ebay for relatively cheap and used them as desktop PCs AFAIK (though they can be on the noisier side).
I would snag up every possible H100 and H200 if the AI bubble burst and their prices went into steep decline.
No, they'll be shipped off to developing nations to be dissolved for rare earths for the next boom cycle.
Memory chips don't contain rare earths, and e-waste recyclers pay a tiny fraction of what used-hardware buyers do.
Inflation metrics seem to fail to capture the increase in leading-edge tech products of the past 18 months.
If we measure the value of the dollar against megabytes of RAM, well, in 01987, the difference between a StarBoard with "2 megs space" and a StarBoard with "2 megs installed" was US$484 (https://archive.org/details/amazing-computing-magazine-1987-...), so a "meg" of RAM cost US$242. Today https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/ says "DDR4-3200 2x8GB" costs US$108; if that means 16GiB, as in 16384 "megs", a "meg" of RAM costs US$0.0066 today.
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.
Sure how does it compare to similar low, middle, high end cpu prices? NVME drives?
They seem to fail to capture a whole lot of things. Supposedly $1 in 2000 is worth $1.88 in 2025. So 88% inflation over the 25 years. Meanwhile the median home price has increased by 150%. Family insurance by 350%. Median college tuition by 225%. Childcare costs have risen by 200%. But sure. We can buy super cheap 65" tvs now. Hurray for us! Literal kings who lived hundreds of years ago couldn't possibly imagine a world with cheap large screen tvs. So the poorest among us should rejoice at the wonders they are able to enjoy while they skip meals and ration their insulin.
The inflation basket only represent a hypothetical average person, who doesn't even exist.
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).
They don’t capture anything going up because that would shame dear leader