Framework Raises Ddr5 Memory Prices by 50% for Diy Laptops
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The sudden 50% price hike in DDR5 memory for DIY laptops has sparked a heated debate, with commenters weighing in on the possible causes. While some jokesters blamed OpenAI for gobbling up 40% of the world's RAM production capacity overnight, others pointed to Korean companies scaling back DDR4 production due to China's cheaper manufacturing. The discussion took a detour into the toilet paper shortages during the pandemic, with some insisting it was a real issue, while others argued it was just a matter of brand switching. Amidst the banter, a more nuanced discussion emerged about the actual factors driving the price increase.
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> Budget brands normally buy older DRAM fabrication equipment from mega-producers like Samsung when Samsung upgrades their DRAM lines to the latest and greatest equipment. This allows the DRAM market to expand more than it would otherwise because it makes any upgrading of the fanciest production lines to still be additive change to the market. However, Korean memory firms have been terrified that reselling old equipment to China-adjacent OEMs might trigger U.S. retaliation…and so those machines have been sitting idle in warehouses since early spring. - https://www.mooreslawisdead.com/post/sam-altman-s-dirty-dram...
Every one seems so focused on that one company supposedly had "fake demand" just to ruin it for competitors, while the supply also seemingly is being suppressed, and no one seems to be talking about that. To me that seems like a much bigger deal, because then the market can't even restore the supply...
There was a real manufacturing shift that had to happen in the transition from commercial toilet paper to residential, which is made by totally different machines. The problem was real. It’s just that someone, seeing that real problem, triggered a panic buy that resulted in cleared shelves and a misallocation of the actual supply, making everything worse for everyone.
In the present case, OpenAI just took 40% of the world’s supply off the market. That is massive, and will have implications for RAM availability for many industries. As a result, every other company immediately bought up as much supply as they could.
Cars during Covid is probably the closer comparison, actually. A combined supply-drop followed by demand-shock resulting in skyrocketing prices and empty inventory.
And usually trade regulators would be the entity to start being concerned.
I assume you're on a quest to assert a "let a completely unregulated free market roar" position, but do recognize that global supply issues of critical components have negative market effects, especially when it'll have some impact on nearly every industry except perhaps lawn care.
No. I’m genuinely curious, because I agree with you about how critical these components are. I ask because it doesn’t seem to me like the answers are immediately straightforward and wanted to hear serious replies to those questions.
Basically one company (or a cabal of companies) shouldn’t be allowed to exert enough market-moving pressure on inventories as to disrupt other industries depending on this supply.
Sam Altman masterfully negotiated a guaranteed supply of chips for OpenAI, and there is nothing wrong with that, by itself. But there are now a dozen other industries getting rekked as collateral damage, and that shouldn’t be something one man or one company can do.
Though you're right that the prices didn't skyrocket, as that would have been considered price gouging during an emergency, which would have been PR suicide at a minimum if not actually illegal.
Yes, it did.
> [...] because there is so much shit people can produce at a time and the demand never increased if you scaled it to a 2 weeks period. There was enough stock in warehouses that 3 days later every store had a full stock again and the prices never increased.
No, there wasn't in lots of places, and demand for the kind of toilet paper that fits on home dispensers did increase (and demand for the kind of big rolls used exclusively in institutional settings decreased, and shifting between those two for manufacturing is not quick), and there were extended supply issues in many places. (This was certainly true where I lived, but I would expect it had lots of regional variance, because supply chains are regional, the share of workers that were moved home because of either the practicality of remote work or workplaces being shutdown varied regionally because of both policy and industry differences, and because the share of workplaces that use industrial style TP vs TP compatible with home style dispensers probably also varies considerably.)
It absolutely happened. I was there, I saw it happen. Maybe it didn't happen in your area, but others weren't so lucky.
Prices are not expected to recover until 2028.
... You don't seriously believe no one is using DDR4 today, right? Sure, they may no be developing new chipsets or whatever, but large swaths of the PC population will still be on DDR4 for the foreseeable future, especially now with these prices.
He's slightly wrong about the retribution thing. Korean manufacturers aren't afraid of US to restart DDR4 manufacturing. They don't want to restart it anyway. But I'm pretty sure I've recently read it somewhere credible that they'd normally sell their old machinery but now they can't because naturally China would be the eventual buyer (even if secretly / undirectly), thus US forbids them to do so and they just locked down their machinery somewhere to gather dust instead.
And about DDR4 not being relevant, even though DDR4 manufacturing stopped earlier this year and DDR4 prices have been steadily increasing long before this crisis, DDR4 prices have also tripled, even in the used market, so it's from a real demand or panic response, that's still a real effect for people wanting to upgrade their DDR4 systems wanting to brace impact and would help them delay their switch to DDR5 systems for a few years. had Chinese manufacturers continued to manufacture DDR4 at least this wouldn't be that bad for the existing system upgrades of DDR4 systems.
AI companies will continue to buy up all the RAM so you and I have to pay the cost for it.
They will also eat up all the energy so you and I have to pay more for energy.
They will also then try and put you and I out of a job.
And if they fail to do so, they will then get your and my tax dollars to bail them out.
There should be real AI research and technology development, but the way it’s being done right now is heads the AI hyperscalers win, tails, all of us lose.
It’s being run as a massive scam against the rest of us.
FOMO and Number goes up is the primary issue both with AI and most compute today.
There's so many made up numbers these days that does zero productive work, like FPS, refresh rates, 4k, 8k, 16k.
Bloat is everywhere.
If you would have asked me 5 years ago this wouldn't even become a bubble. I'm still amazed it did. It really taught me how much of the modern economy is just grift.
Well, that's the theory at least. In practice it's more accurate to say that Micron had cut down their consumer allocation that not even their factory brand can get enough chips to survive.
The RAM I bought last year has more than tripled. 2x32 DDR5 kits, $240/kit, now $820.
Except its caused by good old bubble capitalism.
Yes and no and yes.
AI is having a bad impact on electricity prices, but the actual graph of US electrical use was pretty flat for 20 years and is barely increasing even now. If the bubble keeps going strong we might see AI get up to 10% several years from now.
No hypocrisy there.
They were replying to a screenshot showing a ridiculous price per GB on Dell's site, but it looks like that screenshot was wrong? So a mistake on framework's part for not checking sources, but they've had a consistent and reasonable position on pricing.
It's the inevitable peak of the venture capital pipeline, just this time it isn't individual industries (e.g. taxis with Uber, hotels with AirBnB) getting squeezed out by unsustainable pricing - it's the economy at large that's suffering this time.
And it's high time for us as a society to put an end to this madness. End the AI VC economy before it ends our economy.
We need the corporate death penalty aka forced dissolution for egregious cases of misbehavior, we need easier ways to pierce the corporate veil (and I'm more and more inclined to actually support the death penalty here as well, despite the potential for abuse), we need corporate fines to all be measured % of gross income, at least double the profit margin.
And we need all of that fast.
There's a few historical examples here....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornering_the_market
I highly doubt that. Memory chip production takes years to scale up, which is partially a reason why the memory market (both RAM and solid-storage) is so susceptible to "pig cycles" - high prices incentivize new players to join the market (although less likely than decades ago, given just how much capital one needs and how complex the technology has gotten) and for established players to scale up their production, and then prices collapse due to oversupply.
For GPUs, the situation is even worse. During the GPU crypto mining craze, at least that was consumer GPUs so there indeed was an influx of cheap second hand gear once that market collapsed due to ASICs - but this time? These chips don't even have the hardware for rendering videos any more, so even if GPU OEMs would now get a ton of left over GPU chips they couldn't make general-purpose GPUs out of them any more.
Additionally, this assumption assumes that the large web of AI actors collapses in the next 6 months, which is even more unlikely - there's just too much actual cash floating around in the market.
Of course, if one is inclined, I'd take a wild guess and say you could try something like Steam Remote, but I wouldn't bet on that actually working out. And even if you could get it working - per an analysis of German newspaper Heise, the bloody thing has less shader compute capacity than the iGPU of AMD's Ryzen CPUs [2]. 30.000€ - and it'll probably struggle running GTA 5.
[1] https://www.nvidia.com/content/dam/en-zz/Solutions/Data-Cent...
[2] https://www.heise.de/news/Nvidias-H100-kommt-im-deutschen-Re...
Of course I'm joking, there are LLMs to check these things now.
This is a "the horse might sing" situation for the whole market that focused on breakthrough-level results (AGI, ASI, or even just "not going off the rails after the third response").
Maybe this won't last that long given the RAM shortage is apparently a corner attempt by Sam Altman.
Not taking into account that they all be busy handing money to openAI, at least someone somewhere has to notice that something is very wrong.
This memory situation has me pondering putting it all up on ebay
Or just cash out, that's always great.
I wonder what Apple's next move will be :-)
EDIT: Spelling
Apple is a fashionable brand that commands a price premium. They can charge much higher prices and will charge the amount that will maximize their profits.
BMW charges to enable heated seats. They know their customers have money and will pay. Apple is the same.
Framework has to competitively price. They're being forced to update pricing to reflect the reality of supply and demand.
There's also this:
> Due to [Framework's] memory pricing said to be more competitive below market rates, they also adjusted their return policy to prevent scalpers from purchasing DIY Edition laptops with memory while then returning just the laptops. The DDR5 must be returned now with DIY laptop order returns.
Operation handbook now dictates that you should have 3-4 years of all the ICs you'll need for production so you don't end up like the car manufacturers.
Who still thinks this?
What OpenAI is doing will drive up prices for years, shredding consumer welfare, limiting competition and forcing marginal products off the market, and they're not even going to use the RAM. They're wrecking supply chains simply because they no longer have any technical advantage now that Google and Anthropic have caught up and passed them, and have to resort to dirty tricks like this and digital heroin Sora to try and justify their valuation. No functioning society would or should allow you to get away with that.
Frankly, much worse things than jail should happen to Altman for this kind of torching of the cmmons, and jail is the watered-down compromise position.
Some days I think the devastating crash of the economy that will come if the bubble bursts is the least worst outcome. Do people not feel like the tensions around AI will not soon become internationally geopolitical?
(It's already nationally geopolitical in the USA: Trump is trying to assert federal control over the states' rights to set their own legislation)
For the sake of argument, what if Amazon decided tomorrow that they would secure exclusive contracts with all food suppliers and then hoard all the food to starve out the people they don't want to have it? Or at least, drive up the price of food so it becomes completely unaffordable? I know people can simply grow their own food so it's a bit different, but hopefully it gets the point across. It's anti-trust on an unprecedented level.
Small thing, but this is not simple or realistic at all. How does someone in an apartment grow enough food for their family?
That's certainly not a universal Legal Standard. If I'm harmed, but you didn't "intend" to harm me, does that nullify my Claim?
Hardly.
What we should really be asking is, why did we ever stop jailing wanton criminals like Scam Alt-Man?
Thus, they invest in retirement and pension funds, who in turn invest the money in businesses to earn a return. Since that return must increase constantly, and organic growth is no longer possible, you have to pull shenanigans as a businessman to meet the requirements of the shareholders, lest they kick you out of the plane with a golden parachute.
So we let them do those shenanigans and the politicians don't do anything about it.
you create money based on debt, and eternal growth, and devalue savings, and force people to bet in order to try to preserve savings value, then each ten or fifteen years you allow someones to harvest the rewards of the casino.
And when population start to decrease (on developed countries), you rise the alarm, "more population is needed due to the decline in the birth rate", promoting an eternal growth that would need the resources several planets if everyone had a decent standard of living.
This is the shitcoin-for-your-eyeball-scans guy; the guy who didn't tell the board of his own company that he controlled their startup fund through an alias.
In the USA, nobody need ever go to prison for market manipulation anymore; they simply have to be able to pay the price necessary for a pardon. No logical consistency applies to the process.
1. Said "consumer" is effectively hoarding Supply, and thus distorting the Market. 2. Said "consumer" has no effective means to either Deploy nor Utilize said products as neither the Data Centers nor the Energy required to power them are in existence. 3. Said "consumer" has articulated his belief that the Taxpayer should "backstop" his endeavors in some capacity, as well.
If you don't find this offensive in the least and possibly criminal at worst, then I don't understand your thought process.
This "crime" would be written down somewhere in what we called a "law", that would state penalties, with "maximum" sentences.
And, to forestall your comments, one of our other traditions was that you applied these rules even to lying sons of bitches (which Altman is).
Sorry to be old fashioned here.
And, tangentially, I really don't know what world you lived in. The US has arrested civil rights leaders and overthrown countries and went through an entire era of McCarthyism to get here: where the US president is having investigations into his political enemies for what amounts to "disloyalty". It's basically a national given that cops plant evidence on black folk regularly.
Since when has America been this bastion of lawfulness?
I’m not a lawyer or a forensic accountant, but given how remarkably stable the RAM market was until SCAMA disrupted it, I’m inclined to think the answer to your question is a resounding “no.”
This is big news, it's not like the folks who write about antitrust would just ignore it.
It’s wild how Bork’s fraudulent legal theories have been converted to into dogma within a generation.
It seems like the issue we're having is that we are buyers who are competing against OpenAI, who is another buyer. There isn't only 1 buyer or 1 seller of RAM.
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