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Comment by fullstop | Hacker News Reader

If everyone went for DDR4 and DDR3, surely the cost would go up. There is no additional supply there, as they are no longer being made.

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Currently trying to source a large amount of DDR4 to upgrade a 3 year old fleet of servers at a very unfortunate time.

It's very difficult to source in quantity, and is going up in price more or less daily at this point. Vendor quotes are good for hours, not days when you can find it.

We're looking to buy 1TB of DDR5 for a large database server. I'm pretty sure that we're just going to pay the premium and move on.

And that’s why everybody’s B2B these days. The decision-making people at companies are not spending their own money

I think it's not about own versus someone else's money.

Hardware is usually a small piece of the financial puzzle (unless you're building a billion dollar AI datacenter I guess) and even when the hardware price quadruples, it's still a small piece and delivery time is much more important than optimizing hardware costs.

The price of the hardware, even with inflated prices, is probably equal or less than the combined price of all the software licenses that go on that machine.

Have you considered dropping by in person to your nearest computer recycler/refurbisher? As a teen I worked at one, and the boxes and boxes of RAM sticks pulled from scrapped machines (usually scrapped due to bad main boards) made a strong impression. They tend to not even put the highest-spec stuff they pull into anything, as refurbished machines are mostly sold/donated in quantity (to schools and the like) and big customers want standardized SKUs with interchangeable specs for repairability more than they want performance. Workers at these places are often invited to build personal machines to take home out of these “too good” parts — and yet there’s so much that they can’t possibly use it all up that way. If someone showed up asking if they could have some DDR3, they might literally just let you dig through the box and then sell it to you by weight!

> at these places are often invited to build personal machines to take home out of these “too good” parts — and yet there’s so much that they can’t possibly use it all up that way.

I work in the refurb division of an e-waste recycling company. Those days are over for now. We're listing RAM that will sell for more than scrap value (about $2 per stick), which is at least 4 GB DDR3. And we got a list of people who will buy all we got.

We are at a state, where used DDR4 gets bought large scale reballed and resold as refurb chips, because they are so rare.

At some point that’s true, but don’t they run the n-1 or 2 generation production lines for years after the next generation launches? There’s a significant capital investment there and my understanding is that the cost goes down significantly over the lifetime as they dial in the process so even though the price is lower it’s still profitable.

Unless plans have changed, the foundries making DDR4 are winding down, with the last shipments going out as we speak.

The specialty DRAM vendors (Nanya notably) will keep making DDR4 and earlier

Isn’t that mostly because Chinese manufacturers are flooding the market with cheaper products?

This is only true as long as there's enough of a market left. You tend to end up with oversupply and excessive inventory during the transition, and that pushes profit margins negative and removes all the supply pretty quickly.

Undoubtably the cost would go up, but nobody is building out datacenters full of DDR4, either, so I don't figure it would go up nearly as much as DDR5 is right now.

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

You can see the cost rise of DDR4 here.

Awesome charts, thanks! I think it bears out that the multiplier for older hardware isn't as extreme as the newer hardware, right?

~2.8x for DDR4, ~3.6x for DDR5. DDR5 is still being made, though, so it will be interesting to see how it changes in the future.

Either way, it's going to be a long few years at the least.

Unless the AI bubble pops.

One possible outcome is the remaining memory manufacturers have dedicated all their capacity for AI and when the bubble pops, they lose their customer and they go out of business too.

I wouldn't be too surprised to find at least some of the big ram foundries are deeply bought into the fake money circles where everybody is "paying" each other with unrealised equity in OpenAI/Anthropic/whoever, resulting in a few trillion dollars worth of on-paper "money" vanishing overnight, at which stage a whole bunch of actual-money loans will get called in and billion dollar companies get gutted by asset strippers.

Maybe larger makerspaces and companies like Adafruit, RasPi, and Pine should start stockpiling (real) money, and pick themselves up an entire fab full of gear at firesale prices so they can start making their own ram...

And then the RAM factories... get sold to another business, if that's more profitable than dismantling them.

That's the Avarage price for new DDR4 which has dwindling supply. Meanwhile used DDR4 is being retired in both desktops and data centers.

DDR4 production is winding down or done. Only "new old stock" will remain, or used DDR4 modules. Good luck buying that in quantity.

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