Crucial exiting the consumer memory market

[maflynn]

After nearly 30 years, Crucial will stop selling RAM to consumers

The company cited heavy demand from AI data centers as the reason for abandoning its consumer brand, a move that will remove one of the most recognizable names in the do-it-yourself PC upgrade market.

Sad, I wonder if the AI is a bubble that bursts, they'll see the error of their ways.

 

[chabig]

If that happens, I see no reason why they can't reenter the consumer market.

 

[Queen6]

Of course they will as there will be a vacuum and a hungry audience. This is just the start; RAM prices are going to double again if not more, Nvidia & AMD are talking about only producing high end GPU's (5090 etc.), and stopping providing memory for their partners.

Once current contracts/cycle finish up anything using silicon prices will soar for the next 3 years or so... This the primary reason why I bought a new gaming PC recently. If the AI bubble bursts prices will normalise, if it doesn't will get a lot worse. I'm based in Asia and starting to see the price creep, will be much worse in the West can guarantee that much. Daughter needs a new notebook for uini next year. Am shopping now as after January could be a very different landscape...

Q-6

 

[mentaluproar]

I just built a DDR4 based home server with an intel GPU to stream the few games I care about. Used older gen parts as the current stuff is too expensive aside from that intel GPU. I'm just going to have to wait this out and hope for the best, but its looking more like this market will blow up after th AI bubble pops and will be going back to paper for everything.

 

[Queen6]

Speaks volumes... Think Steve is right, if you cant buy the HW you will be compelled to rent computing time.

Q-6

 

[pshufd]

We've used them since around 2000. Quite a shame but the impact on consumers will be worse.

 

[Arran]

Someone will make bank from this today, but it's a short-sighted move. From the article:

For Micron, the calculus is clear: Enterprise customers pay more and buy in bulk.

Huge enterprise customers only pay more now because all us little guys (consumers) are competing to buy the same RAM. Once Micron quits us, the big guys will have Micron right where they want them. And those big guys negotiate to win. Us little guys just pay sticker price.

 

[maflynn]

Huge enterprise customers only pay more now because all us little guys (consumers) are competing to buy the same RAM

The problem is that consumers were not the only competition, other businesses, and even governments. If everyone and their brother is building out new data centers, its clear that demand is not going to decrease any time soon.

I wouldn't be surprised to see other manufacturers do the same thing

 

[Queen6]

The problem is that consumers were not the only competition, other businesses, and even governments. If everyone and their brother is building out new data centers, its clear that demand is not going to decrease any time soon.

I wouldn't be surprised to see other manufacturers do the same thing

Soon enough...

Q-6

 

[weckart]

Huge enterprise customers only pay more now because all us little guys (consumers) are competing to buy the same RAM. Once Micron quits us, the big guys will have Micron right where they want them. And those big guys negotiate to win. Us little guys just pay sticker price.

There aren't many other primary manufacturers of RAM chips. With the rising demand of the AI bubble, I would suppose that Micron isn't having to offer much in the way of bulk discounts to the big boys either.

 

[Queen6]

Safe to say should the AI bubble pop, Micron or any of it's subsidiaries will not be a brand I'll be considering regardless of price. They walked away from us, is a two-way street...

Q-6

 

[Biro]

I’ve been mostly using OWC memory for my Apple computers over the past few years. I may now have to resort to them for the occasional Windows machine I build or update. But the truth is, unless one is building from scratch, there are fewer and fewer machines that permit any upgrades. And I’ve noticed that both Crucial and OWC don’t seem to be offering consumers truly fast RAM these days. Sure, you can get DDR5 memory. But usually not faster than about 4800 Mhz.

 

[pshufd]

I’ve been mostly using OWC memory for my Apple computers over the past few years. I may now have to resort to them for the occasional Windows machine I build or update. But the truth is, unless one is building from scratch, there are fewer and fewer machines that permit any upgrades. And I’ve noticed that both Crucial and OWC don’t seem to be offering consumers truly fast RAM these days. Sure, you can get DDR5 memory. But usually not faster than about 4800 Mhz.

We used G-Skills for our last build and it works fine. We've also used Corsair Vengeance which is nice for the heat spreaders and color package.

Samsung is currently an option too.

I have 128 GB on a 2020 build and I use that system when I need a lot of RAM. It's not fast by any means but it can handle large workloads.

 

[popup]

Also it is a way to make the normal home users to use "cloud" "AI" tools and not to build their own gigs and use LLMs locally. The data must be online, not at the people's computers. Or you pay 4-5 hundreds of dollars for a machine with decent amount of RAM or you use the online tools. Win-win for the big tech.

 

[WarmWinterHat]

I used build my own computers, starting back in the mid 90s, but gave that up a little over a decade ago when I switched to only using laptops. I used crucial ram a lot, and so this makes me a little sad, but I'm not a gamer and probably won't go back to a built-desktop anytime soon.

Also it is a way to make the normal home users to use "cloud" "AI" tools and not to build their own gigs and use LLMs locally. The data must be online, not at the people's computers. Or you pay 4-5 hundreds of dollars for a machine with decent amount of RAM or you use the online tools. Win-win for the big tech.

Normal home users never were going to have large ram machines to run local LLMs. That's not a use case for the average person. This will affect PC gamers more than anyone.

 

[Hajj.david]

Apple is now saying "Expensive RAM upgrades my ass" we live in a time where you can get 128GB of Apple RAM for less than DIY ram sticks for a custom built PC.

Interesting times.

 

[weckart]

Apple is now saying "Expensive RAM upgrades my ass" we live in a time where you can get 128GB of Apple RAM for less than DIY ram sticks for a custom built PC.

Interesting times.

I would guess that Tim Apple being the supply side expert he is would have stockpiled a while back anticipating the rise in demand. We shall have an idea if next year's M5 offerings either climb in price or try to reintroduce 8GB as a base RAM offering.

 

[splifingate]

I built my AM5 EPYC 4005 system earlier this Summer, and secured two Crucial DDR5-UDIMM 64GB modules as fitment into my Supermicro H13SAE-MF.

With only 28 lanes of PCIe available on the 4005 EPYC Platform, there are limitations; notable on the SM MB is a dynamic PHY between the x16 PCIe slots (X16/nil, or X8/X8). The subtle (and awkward) nuances of this have made for a rather head-scratching solution.

I'm getting ready to bench-test the new ASUS Pro WS B850M-ACE SE, and I'm now feeling satisfied that I previously secured compat. RAM.

 

[klasma]

We used G-Skills for our last build and it works fine. We've also used Corsair Vengeance which is nice for the heat spreaders and color package.

DIMM manufacturers like Corsair and G.Skill don’t manufacture the DRAM chips themselves, they source them from Hynix/Micron/Nanya/Samsung/etc. Micron leaving the consumer market might mean that they also won’t sell to those consumer-market DIMM manufacturers.

 

[Happy_John]

This is bad news. A few years ago we reschedule a point where large capacity HDDs themselves were more expensive than the same HDDs in an external enclosure and SATA to USB card, so people were buying external drivers just to „shuck” the HDDs out of them.

I imagine there’s a lot of people realising that soon it might be worth buying laptops and pre-build desktops just to shuck and resell the RAM and NVMes.

 

[Hajj.david]

This is bad news. A few years ago we reschedule a point where large capacity HDDs themselves were more expensive than the same HDDs in an external enclosure and SATA to USB card, so people were buying external drivers just to „shuck” the HDDs out of them.

I imagine there’s a lot of people realising that soon it might be worth buying laptops and pre-build desktops just to shuck and resell the RAM and NVMes.

Lel I did this in the hayday of the GPUs for mining. My business contracts with dell allowed me to buy like 50 computers with the bare minimum spec and 4090s and I sold them all for way more than I paid on the computers. Good times.

 

[weckart]

This is bad news. A few years ago we reschedule a point where large capacity HDDs themselves were more expensive than the same HDDs in an external enclosure and SATA to USB card, so people were buying external drivers just to „shuck” the HDDs out of them.

True but it masked the fact that a lot of these HDDs were manufactured specifically to be used as external storage with tiny amounts of cache and slower seek times, so that money saving hack only went so far. That shucking only lasted up until the likes of WD and Seagate decided to incorporate the USB header into the drive so they couldn't be used conventionally as a main drive in a laptop. As far as I know, the larger 3.5" drives were spared this but SSDs were already starting to eat into this market.

Let's hope we don't see similar innovations in budget pre-builds to circumvent such scavenging. Soldered on RAM and storage is bad enough in notebooks.

 

[Happy_John]

Lel I did this in the hayday of the GPUs for mining. My business contracts with dell allowed me to buy like 50 computers with the bare minimum spec and 4090s and I sold them all for way more than I paid on the computers. Good times.

But it’s NOT “good times”. That’s the point.

What you did wasn’t a “cool hack”, it’s simply proof of an unhealthy market.

 

[cjsuk]

If that happens, I see no reason why they can't reenter the consumer market.

Their retail op is a huge global supply chain op. They also sell to OEM and custom build market as well. If they kill this off they aren't coming back. No one will want to do the capex spend again.

This is all about their sales dropping to zero due to the pricing. They can't afford the operational expenditure to sit this one out.

 

[diamond.g]

I wonder if someone will buy Crucial/Ballistix brand from Micron like they did Lexar.