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- Hacker News
- Heh well, forget DDR4, DDR3 rides again https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4c2FSSaCswby _joel
- A friend and I bought RAM for our aging servers at eBay in 2024. That was 512GB (16x32GB -- we split it equally) of DDR4 ECC 2133MHz, registered. For… $536.86 plus shipping.
Somehow it feels like we got a pretty good deal, in retrospect. (My server has been since replaced, and I can tell you, 256GB of DDR5 ECC was more than that! There's been a further doubling or two of prices since I bought, though. I think I could maybe sell half the RAM and finance the entire server…)
by Sesse__ - I firmly believe this shortage is artificially produced and I really hope chinese manufacturers flood the market and make memory as cheap as toilet paperby Kuyawa
- Was expecting the article to go deep into DDR3 land by tone of the title...
Something like 3200mhz DDR4 is still perfectly fine for 90% of consumer use. You really don't need more to look at cat pictures on facebook.
by Havoc - How are all these related news regarding silicon shortages surprising at all? It was well predicted that while 2023 chip turmoil[1] was happening, big AI aimed to secure almost all of the demand[2] intended for consumer markets regarding RAM chips so as to win the AI race going forward from that date. They cannibalized almost the entirety of the supply chain, so that they could sell you the incredibly subsidized AIaaS[3] with still considerably higher inference and astronomically higher training process without as of late 2026, failing to achieve any meaningful productivity at all[4]. The serfs now will be happy to own their decade old DDR4 architecture.
[1]: https://www.electronicdesign.com/technologies/embedded/artic...
[2]: https://www.reuters.com/technology/nvidia-supplier-sk-hynix-...
[3]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.24616
[4]: https://www.apollo.com/insights-news/insights/daily-spark/No...
by gkcnlr - Regardless of AI demand: as it currently stands, it seems that DDR5 prices will drop substantially in ~24 months as additional wafer capacity comes online between SK Hynix's fabs M15X and Yongin Fab 1, Samsung's fabs Pyeongtaek P4 and P5 Fab 1, and Micron's fabs Boise ID1 and Tongluo (+ whatever CXMT do as well), and HBM production hits HBM packaging bottlenecks (HBM wafer capacity exceeds HBM packaging capacity) which means the wafer capacity will start getting dumped into DDR5 instead (unless the HBM packaging bottleneck is solved in the next 24 months).by nr378
- My AI model queried itself just this morning to verify cluster status, and it says although DDR5 has been available since 2020, that 2+2 is still equal to 4 for those of us still running DDR4. V
In all seriousness, anyone remember when every library, business, government agency, and institution, etc was buying $20,000 cisco routers to "get on the internet" during the dot com boom/bust in the late 90's ?
Only to see them all end up on the surplus market, unused, for a couple hundred ?
We're in the AI boom/bust cycle, and its my understanding DRAM fab is specialized enough, that the supply is getting squeezed.
As for "doing it on purpose" ? It's being milked for all its worth. That's what companies do. They milk the market for what it will pay.
Also, for everyone who is trying to do local AI, on Xeon or EPYC platforms, memory bandwidth scales with module count, making them that much more in demand in terms of processing capacity / wafer area.
by Kevin_Flynn - Adjadent to the article, there are some interesting builds with pulled parts from decommissioned servers in places where hardware is expensive or heavily taxed.
There's an entire parallel ecosystem around Chinese X79 and X99 boards [1](brands like Huananzhi and Machinist). They exist almost entirely to soak up scrap-tier Xeons and decommissioned server DDR3 and DDR4 ECC RAM that get pulled from datacenters for next to nothing. You see them online in Russian/Chinese/SE Asian online communities as budget builds, so nearly all the BIOS mods and documentation are in Russian or Chinese.
I think in NA we'd tend to write this hardware off as e-waste unless you're a homelabber (though I know Kimsufi still includes DDR3 builds in their catalogue). But in emerging markets, people have been squeezing real utility out of discarded enterprise silicon for a long time out of pure economic necessity. I've been tempted to do my own build but I already seek to have collected an overwhelmingly unnecessary amount of 2012-era workstations that I'm not sure my partner would appreciate an addition to.
by wmchen