@GossiTheDog Apologies if the following was covered elsewhere in the thread...

In addition to OpenAI buying 40% of the global DRAM supply OpenAI’s competitors, OEMs, and cloud providers scrambled to secure whatever inventory remained out of self-defense. This locked down a significant about of the global supply. This is already lead to death of certain video card models and will likely lead to other products being killed or having restricted production runs. Unless something surprising happens the impacts will get worse and it is unlikely to improve much in the next 12 months.

https://infosec.exchange/@TomSellers/115684244670052936

@GossiTheDog

I'll just keep running DDR4 RAM until people have sorted out what they want to do.

@GossiTheDog My guess/hope is that people will move to linux and keep their old computers running longer and faster. Eventually the tech bros will blow themselves up and things will return, but to a new normal.

I think this (RAM prices) will end up having an impact on Mastodon btw, unless they come down, as it will push up server costs. Mastodon is RAM hungry.

@GossiTheDog so people cannot bij computers, so cannot use AI. makes perfect sense.

@GossiTheDog 😞

@GossiTheDog More virtualisation is clearly the answer.

If you can't get more physical RAM, then the solution is just create a virtual machine with whatever virtual RAM you need....

(Fairly certain I've heard a CIO un-jokingly state something very similar to this before)

@GossiTheDog When working for a wafer fab back in the 90s, the 16 MByte (Mega!) RAM packs were more expensive than their weight in gold. History repeating….

@GossiTheDog

32 GBytes of DDR5 6000 M/T DIMMs (2x16) is now ~£315 is what happened. I bought a set with fast timings for £125 not that long ago.

SSD and GPU pricing is also going up.

@GossiTheDog either the bubble will burst, and having ramped up HBM production, HBM prices will plummet. Or buying anything that needs memory is going to be expensive for a while.

@GossiTheDog Have you seen the price of Silver!!! Needed for all that hitec ev shit and pv panels. It’s a consumable metal.

@GossiTheDog NVidia seems to already be planning to only allow renting gaming on their GPUs through cloud…

@GossiTheDog Unfortunately we can guess what will happen next. "We are over our IT budget" "I'll cut back on the security team and replace everyone with AI"

@GossiTheDog Well, we are left with smaller frames... In other words, small ones are not that expensive (As I remember), i.e. 4GB to 8 GB (the prices above are astronomical)

@GossiTheDog Actually, OpenAI:

- signed just a non-binding Letter of Intent.

- the strong hint here is that details when, for how long and at which price are completely left open ("to be discussed").

- but it triggered panic buying by the big IT companies,

- which led to full order books and 10% higher stock prices for the RAM makers.

- so nobody is rushing out to point out that OpenAI has absolutely no use for unfinished RAM wafers.

@GossiTheDog I guess it will stop hardware upgrades for some time. I don't think there is a lot of software that 'needs' those upgrades, at least on end user devices. Games come to mind, but nobody really needs games, people just want them.

But I am out of IT field for some time, so I could be wrong.

@GossiTheDog Governments not (yet) beholden to organized crime should investigate what is likely an attempt to lock people & businesses in to proprietary corporate devices/operating systems.

@GossiTheDog congratulations. The software they want everyone to use so that they can (maybe) turn a profit cannot be used because the components to build a pc, even a prefabs are now astronomically expensive.

@GossiTheDog Who knows, it might make some companies start optimizing software to be less memory-intensive. Not sure if C-suite types would understand that's a possible solution.