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Crucial exiting the consumer memory market
- Thread starter maflynn
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I actually live 10 minutes from a Crucial depot. It was easy to nip over there when I needed RAM, but I see they've already announced its closure next month. It was all consumer distribution. Been there a long time.
I just checked the DDR5 prices in Europe, and they’re absolutely crazy! I’m glad I updated my Daughters PCs this summer. The RAM prices have more than doubled.
499€ versus 1199€ for the 96GB DDR5 6000 Set i bought this Summer.
The same PC from the Summer would cost 900€ more it was 3.900€ vs 4.800€ now.
499€ versus 1199€ for the 96GB DDR5 6000 Set i bought this Summer.
The same PC from the Summer would cost 900€ more it was 3.900€ vs 4.800€ now.
This is why I pulled the trigger on a new gaming PC. While based in Asia, so have some cushion equally the writing is on the wall. New machine will last me through the price crisis and the very obvious colapse...
Q-6
Was great times for me lol making around 50k in 2 months was plenty healthy for my pockets lol.
Again, you’re missing the point. It’s not that you profited from a dysfunctional GPU market, it’s that the GPU market was highly dysfunctional.
It’s not about you, positive or negative. I don’t care if you’re the tech equivalent of an ambulance chaser, and if you think that’s something to brag about. It’s about the bigger picture.
AI is making the RAM and NAND markets dysfunctional in the way cryptomining made the GPU market dysfunctional.
That you made a buck out of it doesn’t make it good. Looking at the bigger picture, it’s a very bad development.
In a more normal situation, producers will increase supply to meet increased demand, and prices will eventually normalise.
But AI is not a normal situation, as financially it is a bubble driven by speculative investment, not by actual return. So NAND and RAM producers will throw consumers under the bus to meet big AI enterprise orders instead of increasing supply, because increasing supply means spending a lot of money, and if the bubble bursts, that’s a lot if money down the drain.
So they’ll hedge their bets, produce less consumer RAM ( as we’re seeing with Crucial, basically producing none).
This will keep pushing up RAM and NAND prices for consumers and those that resell to consumers. Any “shucking” loophole might give a short term benefit, but financial pain to consumers and resellers in the mid- to long- term.
To bring it back to the GPU examples, even when supply and demand normalised, prices of GPUs for consumers and resellers were, and are, significantly higher, and these price points won’t ever be going back to their previous levels.
That’s not something to cheer about.
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That what happen, did not even want it to, by putting all the extra ram sticks I had no use for up for sale.
Yeah, it is like making a profit off shortages during the pandemic. It does not make the pandemic “good times.”
It's funny, because I just ordered a Crucial RAM module yesterday for my laptop. It was quite expensive though...
Thank god I got my wife a new laptop this summer with 32gb ram upgrade, all my kids laptops for school are 16gb of ram and my desktop was built in 2023 fully kitted out. hopefully all of these will last us through this insanity. The oldest device in my house is actually my M2 MacBook Air but luckily I got that with 16gb of ram as well which is good enough for my usage. Memory pressure on that never goes out of the green zone
Try buying Mac Pro ram ECC DDR4 3200 (8x256GB for maximum 2.0TB) or DDR2933 LRDIMMs. Ridiculous prices now.
Sick of the AI nonsense.
DDR4 ram (non-ecc), hasn't increased as badly as DDR5. Might another reason to stick with older chipsets.
That Costco Lunar Lake 258V laptop is still on sale for $600 https://www.costco.com/p/-/acer-asp...qJQxFArFV8TW9qucw0RpVXpj25nyNlag29TZFzjhVUCM1
You get 32 GB of DDR5 at 8.533 MT/s. I looked up 32 GB of G-Skill DDR5 and it's $329 which is insane.
So for the Costco deal, you're getting 32 GB RAM ($329), 1 TB Gen 4 NVMe ($100), CPU, battery, display, keyboard, trackpad, power adapter ($30), Windows 11 ($100). It's as if the sum of the parts is way more than the price.
Someone is losing money on these. Might be Intel and/or Acer. Or there was a huge bulk order that got cancelled and Costco is the wholesaler.
You get 32 GB of DDR5 at 8.533 MT/s. I looked up 32 GB of G-Skill DDR5 and it's $329 which is insane.
So for the Costco deal, you're getting 32 GB RAM ($329), 1 TB Gen 4 NVMe ($100), CPU, battery, display, keyboard, trackpad, power adapter ($30), Windows 11 ($100). It's as if the sum of the parts is way more than the price.
Someone is losing money on these. Might be Intel and/or Acer. Or there was a huge bulk order that got cancelled and Costco is the wholesaler.
Nobody is losing actual money on this. At worst, they may be incurring an opportunity cost in not exploiting the current market madness. The components in this laptop were ordered and paid for long ago before the AI bubble overtook the market. There is still profit in it for all concerned even though margins in the IT industry were always wafer thin before now and probably still are except for the RAM NAND manufacturers.
Companies at this scale have procurement contracts that span multiple years with agreed pricing. Consumer facing divisions will also look to absorb as much as reasonably possible as price hikes tend to turn off customer loyalty. Spoke with a friend here in Asia and he said the same that his company will look to cushion the coming tidal wave of price increases as rapidly increasing prices does them no favours. They are already at the top of the price range so have greater exposure.
He thinks 2-3 years, however there's other HW & fabs in the pipeline that may disrupt the trend. While not broadcasted in big business screwing over your partner's never works out well for the instigator as there's always an alternative...
Q-6
Is the cure to RAM pricing a motherboard that supports multiple generations? That's what ASRock seems to be betting on with its latest release on the last-gen LGA1700 socket — a new Intel motherboard based on the H610 chipset that fulfils the company's original announcement from three years ago, at last. The "H160M Combo" features support for both DDR4 and DDR5, while being the first consumer offering to do so in dual-channel mode.
www.tomshardware.com
Intel 12th, 13th, and 14th gen can use DDR4 or DDR5 so I guess these motherboards allow you to take your DDR4 for your build until DDR5 prices come back down again.
ASRock releases new Intel motherboard with support for both DDR4 and DDR5 memory — The "H610 Combo" features both types of DIMM slots, but you can't mix generations
Based on the LGA1700 platform.
Intel 12th, 13th, and 14th gen can use DDR4 or DDR5 so I guess these motherboards allow you to take your DDR4 for your build until DDR5 prices come back down again.
the issue with that is the very low speeds supported for DDR4 and DDR5. No XMP support, too big of a compromise personally. Better off sticking with a DDR4 board if you have it and run the faster XMP speeds and hold onto it until the pricing calms down. What's the point of getting a board like that to run slower DDR4 and then move onto DDR5 in a few years that run at slow speeds and on a dead platform.Is the cure to RAM pricing a motherboard that supports multiple generations? That's what ASRock seems to be betting on with its latest release on the last-gen LGA1700 socket — a new Intel motherboard based on the H610 chipset that fulfils the company's original announcement from three years ago, at last. The "H160M Combo" features support for both DDR4 and DDR5, while being the first consumer offering to do so in dual-channel mode.
ASRock releases new Intel motherboard with support for both DDR4 and DDR5 memory — The "H610 Combo" features both types of DIMM slots, but you can't mix generations
Based on the LGA1700 platform.
Intel 12th, 13th, and 14th gen can use DDR4 or DDR5 so I guess these motherboards allow you to take your DDR4 for your build until DDR5 prices come back down again.
Even if an AI-bubble burst causes memory prices to crash, there are so few memory manufacturers that they are sure to be seen as too big to fail, in which case they'll be bailed out at taxpayer expense. They now have nothing to lose by abandoning consumers entirely.
The end result of this collusion between governments and the critical electronic component manufacturers is that everything is on the cloud and we own nothing, control nothing. We can't even switch to Linux, because we can't buy hardware.
The end result of this collusion between governments and the critical electronic component manufacturers is that everything is on the cloud and we own nothing, control nothing. We can't even switch to Linux, because we can't buy hardware.
I have to say this: We (that is, average folk) are setting ourselves up to compete against AI for electricity, electronic parts, and water. It is likely at some point AI will be able to out-think us, let alone AI companies outspend us. What could possibly go wrong?
And yet AI still hasn't been applied for basic tasks, such as checking writing, for spellcheckers still miss 'tot he' for 'to the'. I can't help but think that AI will create more problems for humanity than will solve them, because of the iniquitous way we determine how technology is used. So in the near future we'll be paying more for computer memory, but consumer AI will still be crap.
And yet AI still hasn't been applied for basic tasks, such as checking writing, for spellcheckers still miss 'tot he' for 'to the'. I can't help but think that AI will create more problems for humanity than will solve them, because of the iniquitous way we determine how technology is used. So in the near future we'll be paying more for computer memory, but consumer AI will still be crap.
The vast majority of the talk and investment surrounding AI is based on assumption, speculation and aspiration. And all of that is now predicated on the emergence of promised revolutionary near-term technological developments and staggering financial returns.
So unless that all pans out the way Jensen Huang thinks it will, there will be a 'correction' in the not-to-distant future, to use economic parlance.
As an aside, I've been fighting my own memory battle since building my first PC in quite a few years recently, an AM5 machine with a vanilla Ryzen 9 7900 for work tasks. I bought a DDR5 64GB memory kit not on my motherboard's QVL (my fault) and it never worked properly. I replaced it with another kit that IS on the QVL and that one isn't working properly either.
So, now I have two G.Skill Trident Z5 DDR5 64GB memory kits (with different timings) that don't work for me and I can't afford to buy more memory (I paid $200 for each kit months ago, now you could probably buy a house with what they cost). So yesterday I replaced the motherboard (ASUS ProArt CREATOR B650) with a new one (MSI MAG Tomahawk Wifi B650), that is on my memory modules' QVL list . Much cheaper than buying memory. I will be swapping all the components this week and hopefully it solves my problem.
In which case I won't be looking to buy any memory for at least another 3-5 years. Hopefully by then AI is dead and we're all awash in dirt-cheap DDR5 from bankrupt data centers. 🤣
So, now I have two G.Skill Trident Z5 DDR5 64GB memory kits (with different timings) that don't work for me and I can't afford to buy more memory (I paid $200 for each kit months ago, now you could probably buy a house with what they cost). So yesterday I replaced the motherboard (ASUS ProArt CREATOR B650) with a new one (MSI MAG Tomahawk Wifi B650), that is on my memory modules' QVL list . Much cheaper than buying memory. I will be swapping all the components this week and hopefully it solves my problem.
In which case I won't be looking to buy any memory for at least another 3-5 years. Hopefully by then AI is dead and we're all awash in dirt-cheap DDR5 from bankrupt data centers. 🤣