It is also a term use in general trading anywhere traders open and close their positions quickly to make profit off an upswing which might be in part caused by traders doing this. If done with inside knowledge it is illegal, in this case more commonly referred to as “front running” (which is what many suspect happened with numerous ahemfortuitous/serendipitous position changes around announcements of changes in the state of the US vs Iran situation).

> Also, these companies supposedly intend to actually use the RAM they ordered, not reselling at some inflated price.

As well as the companies ordering for the purpose of DC roll-outs and upgrades, there will definitely be some buying purely to sell at a higher price a short time later.

> It's all fair game IMHO, except the elephant in the room which is that the AI company bubble might pop.

[and with reference to the sibling reply to this: “Then we'll have a lot of cheap RAM.”]

I don't think it will pop with a sudden bang, and even if it is it won't affect these memory sales or probably those for 2028. The first real effect will be those using the AI tools suddenly finding themselves needing to pay a lot more for them as companies offering those services deal with reduced access to “new” credit from the circling investment pool shore up their fanciful accounting that way instead. The DC builds/upgrades that are currently planned will happen but more funded by end users and less by the investment cycle. New plans might not be actioned at the same scale, but it will take a while for that to affect component prices as there is a lot of lead time involved.

https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/

Moore's law is alive and well.

1. Make extra greasy pizza. Nauseating-level of grease.

2. Put pizza through De-Greasinator 5000.

Sounds efficient.

Since that peak in 2014 until today, the prices were lower than now. The peak in 2017 was more than 10% lower than today.

To reach permanently higher prices than today, we must go backwards until 2011.

So we have already regressed at least 12 years into the past, but more likely 15 years, and it is unknown how much more we will regress.

What we got in 2008 was central banks (eg Fed and ECB) willfully collapsing nominal GDP in their economies. Have a look at the dot-com bust or Black Monday for comparison.

The words after this point make you less convincing, not more, as they only serve to confirm the egregious slippery slope of your reasoning.

"The original retail price of the computer with 4 KiB of RAM was US$1,298 (equivalent to $6,900 in 2025)[21] and with the maximum 48 KiB of RAM, it was US$2,638 (equivalent to $14,020 in 2025)"

To me it seems like they’re just riding the AI hype out, expecting a crash after, and not willing to risk a lot of capital on someone else’s bubble.

https://www.guru3d.com/story/cxmt-dram-capacity-reportedly-s...

I would expect that old DDR4 machinery to end up somewhere else, still chugging along. Maybe someone buys the old production and keeps chugging low quality DDR4 or something.

To me, it sounds like that didn't happened. Fabs that were producing legacy DDR4 are still producing it, just selling it higher and surfing on the consumer price increase of DDR5. As DDR5 became more expensive, people looked to build old AM4 PCs with the older memory, and the market just raised the price so that option would also cost more. IMHO DDR4 price increase has nothing to do with production.

>Most adults I know now use their phone for everything

You mean the cloud for everything. A lot of phone tasks share their computational and storage workloads off in the invisible ether that has actual computers with real costs behind them. Amazon has no problem with bumping up their costs in order to pay for their fleet of servers. I mean, what business doesn't use the cloud these days.

https://www.datacentermap.com/usa/michigan/ann-arbor/related...

Who cares about those people? I would argue even they themselves hardly do. And sure, they'll be even more okay with even worse stuff, and that even worse stuff will be even more hated by even more people, whatever the people who are "okay with" (that can mean ignorance, obedience, or evil intent, but it's not justification). If they can be okay with mass surveillance they can be okay with other things, so they're basically a wash, they're just okay with stuff.

> At least one third of the country is still okay with them

Then they can be okay with the majority saying you know what, we're sick of you, you can either stop having your toys or you will be segregated from us and live under your own surveillance. "Being okay with something" isn't some magical wand or a fortress, it's just a limp shrug. It means "pass".

> In sum, we don't have as much control over these things as you seem to believe.

I don't see the connection with the sentence before that, which is a minority being "okay with" something and a majority willing to fight and out there doing it. It's not about controlling what a minority of people are okay with, it's about changing what is done. The people who are okay with stuff can go read a comic book until it's over, how does that not solve anything you raised about them? Or are you saying their being okay with stuff should be respected or even heeded? Couldn't they just make that claim themselves, if they wanted to?

Imagine a raging house fire, people stumbling over each other trying to help, and some guy steps up and goes "WAIT!" they all look at him, sure he has a major contribution for interrupting something like this, a good idea, a plan perhaps; and he goes "... I'm actually okay with this."

I wouldn't do that unless you want your airspace filled with birdshot

HP, Acer and Asus are now using them

https://asia.nikkei.com/business/china-tech/hp-asus-and-acer...

I'll second this. The combination of Whisper + LLM makes speech recognition fantastic. I occasionally have arm pain from typing, and this is a Godsend.

I don't use it to write code - but in my experience stuff like emails + docs was the greater source of pain (one generally types slower while coding).

This shift is probably inevitable, but it will vary significantly by region depending on prices for electricity. Look at, for example, the difference in fundamental homelab build recommendations between Germans and just about anyone else. Electricity prices in Germany are so high that even a now expensive Raspberry Pi or other ARM board is often preferred over Intel/AMD builds due to low power draw (especially low idle power draw), an effect that adds up for a machine running all the time over years.

With local LLMs and the GPUs to run it, especially if you want a model available to you all the time and can remote into your local network to use it whenever you want, there's no escaping much higher power draws, even at idle. Wherever electricity is expensive, the electric bill can be a prohibitive barrier.

LLM serving is most efficient when you batch a lot of parallel requests together. Data center solutions also have the advantage of collecting queries from around the globe, so the hardware can be utilized around the clock.

Having everyone serve their own local LLMs would produce a lot more memory demand. Not less. The same memory would be idle most of the time, and when it was used it would be used for 1 person instead of a batch of requests.

There are other reasons to run local LLMs, but solving hardware demand problems is not one of them.

In order to get high bandwidth, you want memory as close as possible to the GPU. The more trace lane length = signal loss, bandwidth loss.. HBM is compact, and so you can stack 24GB modules, 8 around a GPU die.

If you tried to do that with normal memory, you need like 64 modules. So a a TON of traces more that all need to be equal length, and because so many = far away from the GPU = less bandwidth.

The issue is like stated above, its a process that waste a ton of wafers. Wafers that can make easily 3x more normal memory.

Intel with "Crescent Island" is trying to make a 160GB card using LPDDR5x memory but the bandwidth is only ~700GB/s.

https://www.amazon.com/GLOTRENDS-Adapter-Aluminum-Heatsink-P...

Okay, let's assume it's a USB-C cable and not just something USB-C shaped that pretends to be one.

> Does it support power delivery?

Yes.

> If so, how many watts?

Always at least 60W (3A). Up to 240W if it's e-marked.

> What is the data rate

Depends whether it's a USB 2.0-only cable (480Mbps) or a complete cable (20Gbps). Possibly more in Thunderbolt or USB4 modes - cables that handle those will be marked (both visually and with an e-mark). In any case, pretty easy to check just by plugging things in.

CPUs have L1, L2, L3+ caches too after all.

GPU is mostly fine and can probably reuse that but it’s Vega so not the greatest I was due for an upgrade but the prices of everything is ridiculous.

The thought of pc-of-Theseus’ing my busted ass PC is just sad.

Thank god I bought a PS5 Pro before Sony started jacking up the prices.

I remember when buying a $300 GPU was extravagant and gave you state of the art graphics.