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Comment by MPSimmons | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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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