Micron warns that the price of your PC DRAM memory will soon rise

But there is a slight unperceived movement towards SoC and M1 Apple will eventually spur everyone into the big paradigm shift.
No more up-gradable modular design, everything is on the chip or soldered onto motherboard.
Hello big, fat manufacturers incomes and good-bye to all hardware enthusiasts.

Hope that I am wrong.

 

We as hardware enthusiasts are definitely a dying breed, we're just very very slowly dying. Building a PC is child's play these days, and it's only getting simpler:

• Pretty much all motherboards are the same - a single chipset from 1 supplier, mostly the same features, same color scheme (or lack thereof), same overall capabilities. You're basically just paying for different layouts, sizes, and VRMs. Remember back when you had to consider both the northbridge and southbridge? Or having a color to choose from? Or whether you had enough expansion slots for everything you needed? Or what about jumper settings? Then you had to worry about driver compatibility with your preferred OS. Or how about prioritizing between the kind of slot you can use? There were transition periods between all the slot types: ISA, PCI, PCI-X, AGP, PCI-e, AMR, and the laptop variants. So maybe you wanted a wifi card, and you had to choose between PCI or PCIe. Well, that would depend on what slots were available, and whether or not you still needed them.
• Gone are the days of needing discrete cards for pretty much anything but graphics, high-speed storage, and high-speed networking (of which many home users don't need).
• Gone are the days of different ports for different purposes. The U in USB is taken pretty literally now.
• Overclocking has become stupidly simple, and many CPUs these days practically overclock themselves, so long as you have sufficient cooling.
• Storage is made so simple - get an SSD that fits your budget. Want something extra fast? Go NVMe. That's about all you can choose from. Nobody uses optical drives anymore. Nobody does RAID anymore. Floppies have been gone for a long while. Even USB storage isn't really much of a thing, thanks to cloud storage.
• The only thing that got more complex about RAM is XMP and the type of die used for early Ryzen. Otherwise, RAM just got simpler. Upgrading is easy - you don't even have to get matching specs since the system just picks the lowest common denominator.
• GPUs have practically become whole computers in themselves. No need for separate 2D and 3D units either.
• These days, it's hard to get a PSU without the proper safety features. There's hardly anything to plug in anymore either, and there's about to become less with the new upcoming PSU standard.
• So many things are self-diagnosing or even self-fixing. Gone are the days of breaking out a multimeter, oscilloscope, or one of the PCI diagnostic cards. The hardware itself is also built to be practically static-proof. I often cringe at the way people just grab PC hardware by the pins and solder joints, only to remember that you almost have to try to kill hardware these days.
• Liquid cooling is no longer a necessity to achieve high performance. It's just a way to make your PC fancier and quieter.

The list goes on and on. Being a PC enthusiast used to mean you had to know a lot about all the different pieces of hardware and what your priorities were, because you couldn't have it all, regardless of how much money you had. These days, it's really just "what's your budget?" and if it's small "where are you willing to lose performance?".
I'm not saying the way things have been are worse, because it's actually kinda nice being able to not have to think about anything and just buy whatever is in your budget. But, there's just not much to be... enthusiastic about, other than benchmarks.

Having said all that, my enthusiasm for hardware has shifted toward robotics and operating systems. The evolution of those brings me back to the feeling I had in the 90s and 00s of PC building.

 

I am at max on everything... the sad thing is that with the same money i could buy only half of the mem now, and that it will rise even more.

What is more preocupating is the industry that stop due to lack of component (cars, boat, phone,...), it's the snake that eat itself, with crypto on top...
I hope i am wrong but i think it will hurt this time.

 

I discussed with a soon retired colleague that was selling computer in the 80s 90s and he told me that this has happened in cycles since the beginning of the computer market
memory prices go down too much "oh no there's a problem" prices double or triple back
at one point he told me retailers had to sell memory less "pre-built" because the prices of memory became so high it cost more than the rest of the computer so they let customers find their own memory

but that was before the pandemic and the crypto crisis so this time it'll be way worse

 

Haha yeah, and back then, RAM was still pricey even when it was at its cheapest. In the late 80s, 2MB would be as much as $60, not accounting for inflation.

 

@schmidtbag hehe well i sure do not miss atapi connectors or jumpers! Although my entrance to pc world came at 2000 ! Where a lot of the things you describe where already gone ! Also i have to say i used to be excited to do even the slightest overclock i could get with what i had ! Noise ? Who cares maxpayne now plays with 51 fps instead of 49! Now i literally do not care to oc .... Actually if anything i prefer to undervolt 1, 3 even 5 fps will come with a lot of heat noise and consumption and reduction to the life span of my hardware..... And let's face it no matter how much i can oc a 1060 ....if the card run like crap a game at stock it will run like crap oced as well. While oc is almost gone ...gone are the days of the i7 920 , i think even if i had a cpu that can do what the 920 did i would still undervolt it excites me much more ! I guess i am getting old

 

Way too much doom and gloom. Even at today's crazy prices CPUs and GPUs cost about the same they did 20 years ago (when accounting for inflation). Before these recent price hikes parts were significantly cheaper than they ever used to be.

 

Do you watch The 8-bit Guy? Because he said almost the exactly same thing.

 

@anticupidon No, but I've been building my own PCs since 1996, so I'm acutely aware of how much things used to cost

 

Right on, bro.
Some will never experience the longest months of work and savings just to afford that Vodoo Banshee GPU or sometimes alike.

 

Oh great.....i can sell 16 gig of my 32 gig that i dont need and make back what i paid for the whole lot..... thanks for the headsup microcron

 

yay!, more prices hikes and inflation and price of living increases, but salary incomes stays the same

 

Is that micron warning people who would need to have a new pc build to grab some vaseline to have at hand ?

 

Two years ago I built an i7-8700 machine on a z390 mobo with 32Ghz of ram with an rtx 2060 paired with a 32" 4k monitor. I don't need a new card, ram, or anything else, so they can raise the prices of everything they wish, I'm good. And, I don't even game! FYI, "strong demand in the consumer market and data centers and the cloud", is a euphemism for greed.

 

Two years ago I built an i7-8700 machine on a z390 mobo with 32Ghz of ram with an rtx 2060 paired with a 32" 4k monitor. I don't need a new card, ram, or anything else, so they can raise the prices of everything they wish, I'm good. And, I don't even game! FYI, "strong demand in the consumer market and data centers and the cloud", is a euphemism for greed.

 

Imagine if people could reply with "alright we'll be charging 40% more per hour of labor by Q3"

 

"Even at today's crazy prices CPUs and GPUs cost about the same they did 20 years ago (when accounting for inflation)"

Great, so 20 years of deflation caused by innovation and optimization vanished in 1 year.

 

According to Heise, TSMC claims that the whole "shortage" situation is artificial and there is no actual shortage:

https://www.heise.de/news/Chipmangel-Laut-TSMC-Vorsitzendem-kuenstlich-herbeigefuehrt-6004029.html

So this is just a way to make more money while at the same time sell less product?

 

But I have 1Mbps internet :cry:

 

Bla bla, my dog puked on the floor....... price hike! While I'm still on my aging system, I got my 32GB DDR3 back in 2011 for like 80 euro's. Unimaginable now.

I'm glad I'm building my rig in PC Building Simulator, prices are (still) normal there.