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Comment by Hamuko | Hacker News Reader

Has anyone noticed their employer actually cutting back on employee hardware purchases? Because if new laptops are still being handed over to developers on a 2–4 year cycle, then probably not.

Game developers might have to do something though if high-end GPUs are going to end up being $5000.

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At least so far the RTX 5090 seems to be available and at the same price it’s been at for the past six months (around $3000). I’m not sure when you’d see GPUs affected by the RAM price increases.

There's been rumblings.

https://www.techpowerup.com/344578/leaks-predict-usd-5000-rt...

I'm pretty sure GPUs have their own RAM installed that is usually higher spec than the motherboard RAM.

Higher in some respects (bandwidth), lower in others (latency, even though ordinary DDR5 is already no speed demon there and LPDDR5 is worse). At least from the spec sheet, these kinds of RAM are so different that I don’t really understand how demand for one can cause a shortage of the other, unless they are competing for the same manufacturing lines.

FWIW: GDDR is not higher latency than DDR. It just seems that way because the GDDR interface clock is much higher, so the number of clocks are higher too. But in terms of wall clock time, the latency is very similar.

Which makes sense: the latency is determined by the underlying storage technology and the way to access that storage, which the same for both.

They are competing for the same manufacturing lines.

RAM manufacturers are switching lines over from DDR to make HBM.

HBM works really great in GPUs too. In fact if I have to spend 5 grand on one it had better come with HBM lol.

Absolutely.

I've declined the refresh I've overdue for. My 2021 model MBP has 32gb and a 1TB SSD. They're currently giving out the base model Air: 16gb and 256gb. No thanks.

We used to get whatever was most appropriate for our role, now we get whatever is cheapest.

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