Hacker News Reader

Comment by jonathantf2 | Hacker News Reader

DRAM pricing is killing the everything market.

We just had a vendor uplift our quote 50% per unit for some machines because of a mix of memory + supply chain issues.

At work we just got a quote to upgrade a couple servers, original price a few years ago was ~ $150k. Essentially the same hardware, just newer, is now quoted at ~ $450k.

We decided to just keep our current hardware for now and extend a support contract for ~ normal price.

I wonder how long these shortages have to last until software developers are required to be mindful of RAM usage like in the decades before,

Probably not. AI code generation will not allow to use memory efficiently.

Quite the opposite i'd wager. Now that AI can figure everything out we can have the AIs do the performance work. Performance work alot of the times also went against developer experience in terms of languages/patterns and such. AI doesn't need to care about DevEx which might also show a shift towards more memory efficient languages and patterns. Only time will tell though.

Is it not enough to add to your prompt “use memory efficiently”?

> a vendor uplift our quote 50% per unit

Try 200% (tho tbf our boss sit on that quote for like a year and a half because he thought it was too pricey. Bet he regretted it now).

And all the quotes are now only valid for a week due to insane price fluctuation.

We just had a vendor uplift our quote 50% per unit

Good thing they didn't increase it.

That’s strange, there aren’t wider market supply chain issues outside of DRAM. Maybe your vendor is just throwing excuses around.

SSDs and HDDs are being squeezed as well.

Don't forget SDCards

"Memory card prices have TRIPLED in the last few months: when will this madness stop?!" https://www.digitalcameraworld.com/cameras/memory-cards/memo...

Sony stopped making their cards entirely, which stinks because I'd settled on their pro cards for all my camera bodies.

We just had a vendor tell us none of the HDDs we were looking for were available unless we also committed to a full NAS offering.

They’re throwing something around.

DRAM is up more than that 50% though.

Fuel price rises = logistics price rises.

You're right that fuel prices have risen. But usually the impact of fuel prices is mostly felt on bulkier, lower cost items first.

After all, a truck can carry a 10kg sack of rice, or a 10kg nvidia gpu. If shipping costs for 10kg rise by $15 the sack of rice has doubled in price, but the GPU is only 0.5% more expensive.

For a truck yeah, but across the ocean, it isn't quite that simple because GPUs and grains are sent in different types of ships (or different modes entirely) that aren't interchangeable.

You're right - perishable goods have to be shipped fast. Your bananas, berries, fresh fish, and not-fron-concentrate juice can't be on some slow-steaming container ship with the furniture, clothes, building materials and vehicles.

The GPUs can though.

And the GPUs are such high margin that they all take an airplane anyway.

That is other “different mode entirely” that exists to go across an ocean :)

Rice is a nonperishable grain. Grain ships in neither of those. Grain is shipped in bulk carriers

Not all increases in prices are reactive. Some are anticipated. Inertial inflation is real.

This is driven by AI datacenter demand, not fuel prices. RAM prices have actually dropped significantly in the last couple days as the Iran war hit and the possibility that interest rates might go up and pop the AI bubble sunk in. (Though let’s see where they go after the last couple days of whipsawing.)

It's driven by a whole bunch of factors but I agree it's largely driven by AI data center demand

But still 30% of the worlds helium production is apparently shut down and ships can't get to where they need to be as efficiently as they have been so there is going to be knock on effects from this.

This isn't true: NAND flash prices are up too, though not nearly as dramatically. But the war means that fuel and shipping prices are way up as well.

Flash has supply (and price) problems too.

I assume this is sarcasm.

>That’s strange, there aren’t wider market supply chain issues outside of DRAM.

GPUs, ram, ssds, hdds, hell even CPUs are starting to climb in price. It's an everything shortage and it's only getting worse.

A workstation that two years ago cost $3,000 was $10,000 last month and $10,500 this month. There are parts which aren't available at any price.

Wait what? That's over 300%.

Between this revelation and that post recently on HN about the scanned receipts and egg prices, I find myself wondering if we're worrying about the wrong things.

We're seeing massive inflation in computing, but because the dollar is holding its value we call it increased prices. But the buying by the big buyers is the thing driving the inflation, its mechanism is scarcity.

But it's also localized. Only we experience this as a problem because compared to the hyperscalers we're poor.

The same idea applies to the price of groceries. As the prices increase, base increase being inflation, but logistic efficiency also plays a big role.

The effect is the same. The ones with more spendable income don't experience an issue yet in the projects nobody is eating fresh veggies.

The part that scares me is the creep, as I call it. Throughout the years I've always been able to carry price shocks and such but this time I'm out of the game. No more DRAM for me.

I then wonder if one day, without losing my job, I won't be able to pay for veggies.

DRAM and flash both seem to be up about 10x. HDDs are just impossible to buy.

At least with veggies you can stick seeds in the ground in the backyard.

My hard drive tree will take years to develop before it bears fruit!

Yeah. Not true. Or send me the name of your server vendor. I’m buying.

Having issues with both price and availability on NVMe, SATA flash, starting to see some CPUs, and for a personal project high density spinning rust (24TB+).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com