Posted by geox 13 hours ago
A 16 GiB M4 Mac Mini is $400 right now. That covers any essential use-case which means this is mostly hitting hobbyists or niche users.
Where do you live? In Poland it's 740usd.
However, 16gb is very little for a Mac where the OS itself uses 7GB
next stage is paving everything with solar panels.
Presumably the boom times are the main reason why investment goes into it so that years later, consumers can buy for cheap.
E.g. IDEs could continue to demand lots of CPU/RAM, and cloud providers are able to deliver that cheaper than a mostly idle desktop.
If that happens, more and more of its functionality will come to rely on having low datacenter latencies, making use on desktops less viable.
Who will realistically be optimising build times for usecases that don't have sub-ms access to build caches, and when those build caches are available, what will stop the median program from having even larger dependency graphs.
This will only serve to increase the power of big players who can afford higher component prices (and who, thanks to their oligopoly status, can effectively set the market price for everyone else), while individuals and smaller institutions are forced to either spend more or work with less computing resources.
The optimistic take is that this will force software vendors into shipping more efficient software, but I also agree with this pessimistic take, that companies that can afford inflated prices will take advantage of the situation to pull ahead of competitors who can’t afford tech at inflated prices.
I don’t know what we can do as normal people other than making do with the hardware we have and boycotting Big Tech, though I don’t know how effective the latter is.
A dad comes home and tells his kid, “Hey, vodka’s more expensive now.” “So you’re gonna drink less?” “Nope. You’re gonna eat less.”
Prices are already through the roof...
https://www.tomsguide.com/news/live/ram-price-crisis-updates
2028 is another story depending on whether this frenzy continues / fabs being built (don’t know whether they are as hard as cpu)
So lets see if they might "save us"
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/dram/no-asus-isnt...
My bad
And a couple of smaller ones: CXMT (if you’re not afraid of the sanctions), Nanya, and a few others with older technology
If I recall correctly, RAM is even more niche and specialized than the (already quite specialized) general chip manufacturing. The structure is super-duper regular, just a big grid of cells, so it is super-duper optimized.
You’re correct that DRAM is a very specialized process. The bit cell capacitors are a trench type that is uncommon in the general industry, so the major logic fabs would have a fairly uphill battle to become competitive (they also have no desire to enter the DRAM market in general).
Governments need to intervene here. This is a mafia scheme now.
I purchased about three semi-cheap computers in the last ~5 years or so. Looking at the RAM prices, the very same units I bought (!) now cost 2.5x as much as before (here I refer to my latest computer model, from 2 years ago). This is a mafia now. I also think these AI companies should be extra taxed because they cause us economic harm here.