Regardless of AI demand: as it currently stands, it seems like 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).

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.

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.

[1] https://post.m.smzdm.com/talk/p/am9d3zv4/

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...

I firmly believe this shortage is artificially produced and I really hope chinese manufacturers flood the market and make memory as cheap as toilet paper

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.

Heh well, forget DDR4, DDR3 rides again https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4c2FSSaCsw

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…)

This mentions DDR4, but I used to be in electronic recycling and I have still so much 1GB and 2GB DDR2 and DDR3 RAM. Happy to ship a couple of sticks if you guys could find a use. It’s going to scrap otherwise.

Update on the 1600 dollar laptop I bought 10 months ago. Now retails for 6,300. Fun times! Thanks!

Not even DDR4... Things are this bad:

It's quite preposterous to think that an old 256GB RAM DDR3-using dual xeon server (128GB per NUMA node) that I had sitting around on a shelf gathering dust significantly appreciated in value over the past 12 months. But it's factually correct, looking at what comparables sell for for on eBay.

It’s making ddr3 relevant again as well. Bought 256GB DDR3 ECC for ~200 usd a couple weeks ago for my ai server (wip).

These old workstation platforms seem to be perfectly fine for hosting GPUs for local llms.

The biggest advantage is that the older technology can also produced by Chinese manufacturers like CXMT. They're ramping up production to claim a sizeable portion of the market.

lol give it a year … now that the datacenter buildout is stalled out because of electricity and ddr6 is being rolled out in China, I bet this looks different in a year.

CXMT is planning expansion for the ram capacity, they’ll do that faster than the west, I beleive they said end of year ish? (Could be wrong).

once it comes online and they increase their yields, this whole thing changes.

Also new datacenters mean increased supply so cheaper tokens now that parameter size is a non-sequitor.

I’m legit curious how long China holds back… but I doubt it’ll be long.

Fact is that performance intensive code, games or whatever, has always optimised locality and so RAM speed shouldn't usually be a 1:1 impact on performance. Using older generations of slower RAM will be acceptable for many games and workloads.

I was eyeing a 96GB ddr5 so-dimm upgrade for my laptop last year, it was about 200-250 euro at the time. The only offerings I find for it now are in the range of 2000 euro. Regretting that I didn't max out ssd/ram at the time, but I'm optimistic the situation will get better in a year or so.

I'm posting from a machine with 8GiB of DDR3-1333. The modern web is slow, but I avoid the modern web as much as possible anyway. The software I actually enjoy using is mostly fast enough. Swap on zram (LZ4 compression, vm.page-cluster = 0, earlyoom userspace OOM killer, no disk swap) makes it feel like 9GiB with no perceptible downside.

Don’t call it a comeback, I’ve been here for years!

I think in upcoming days everything gonna be making comeback previously like one or two years ago I was thinking the mobile price are so dropped that mobile phones gonna be like as cheap as possible but now after the AI their price are going as high as possible and same with the computers and laptops and all.

I recently reactivated a 10 years old Kindle as an AI-Story-Generator (https://github.com/donmb1/ai-story-generator). Old hardware is valueable and with AI you can do great things with it.

Bring back DDR4? Journalists need to check their "I got new shit" privilege. I work in e-waste recycling. I've sold terabytes of RAM over the past year and a half. DDR4 never went away, and for that matter, neither has DDR3. (DDR2 and older isn't as common.)

Hmm. That might push me further towards just decomissioning this machine and using the laptop with a dock instead of rebuilding with Linux. The 64Gb of DDR4 in it might be worth a fair bit second-hand more than I assumed. I'll have to scan my box of old parts too, I'm sure there is some DDR4 in there (or maybe that is old enough to be DDR3…).

It was obvious AI would further stratify the haves and have-nots, but I was too naive to realize the tech of the have-nots could literally just regress. Has such a thing ever happened before in tech?

I have a Dell R740xd that is the core of my home lab, with 384 GB of DDR4 ECC. That was by far the most expensive part of the server. I get a lot of use out of it, but it certainly contributes to a higher-than-average power bill. I'm working on solar at some point next year.

I just bought a ~10 years old SuperMicro 1U server with 2x 24 cores of Intel's E5. For ... 250 Euros. Really cheap, hehe. Then I had to buy second-hand 128GB DDR4 ECC for 400 Euro and 4x 3,84 TB Datacenter SSDs for 2000 Euros, second-hand of course.

I mean it somehow still feels cheep, if I watch the prices for new hardware.

But it took me days to create this upper mentioned system from all the different sellers and different sources on eBay. There is no "cheap" one-click solution with included guarantee anymore.

Only a couple of my work machines use DDR4. Most of my own kit, both for work and for play, uses DDR3 which is cheap and plentiful.

I avoid dedicated GPUs which have always been a money-pit. I find modern video games dull and boring, and this is not offset by them being very very pretty. Gaming for me peaked with Quake II and there's been nothing of real interest since Portal and Untitled Goose Game.

I have a laptop with soldered RAM. The motherboard upgrade to a 16GB variant was 120 EUR. Same price as the RAM soldered on it. It came with a CPU upgrade as well. I'm happy.

I’m trying to find a use for DDR3 RAM which is like $50 or less for 64GB but I found out most things are incompatible

It is not just DDR4; I know of at least one supplier sampling units with DDR3 for their ONTs.

I hope optimization comes back into fashion

Love the link preview tagline. Thanks TheVerge

"Somehow, DDR4 has returned."

__

Besides that, wasn't DDR4 good enough for everything we did, anyway?

At least I did not notice all that much of a difference when migrating to my current DDR5 system other than the CPU being massively more performant. Though I am sure that the memory did play some role there.

Clanker claims that the felt absolute latency between decent DDR4 and DDR5 should be similar, while bandwidth might be lower, apparently? Something something CAS latency.

As an owner of a 1700 socket mainboard and 64GB of DDR4 (recently acquired a second 32GB kit on eBay), I am very pleased to see this.

I would like to see a Raspberry PI with DDR3 RAM. The price is insane right now.

DDR4 never left. DDR4 RAM pricing has also been spiking, just not quite as hard as DDR5.

If my DDR4 RAM go kaput I'm screwed just as I would be on DDR5.

I would be interested to see a comparison of the inflation caused by the AI rollout versus the actual value generated by the use of AI. I really wouldn’t be surprised if the later is dwarfed by the former (that’s assuming integrating AI in a company generates significant economic value in the first place, which is still speculative as far as I’m aware)

I just sold 4x8GB of DDR4 that I wasn't using for $200 on Ebay so this article is quite timely

This will drive linux adoption like nothing else.

>But at least it’s a good time to hang onto your DDR4 RAM.

A year and a half ago I bought 2 new 8G DDR4 for 47 USD. I was going to use it to upgrade my W541 from 16G to 32G. The W541 has 4 slots. But seems the one I have maxs out at 16.

Now I have another reason t hang on to the RAM :)

My idea was taking 20+ year old designs that are patent-free, implementing them on any modern nodes that work (esp MOSIS-supported), their performance per watt will probably be better, and just use those. Some of the old designs, like NonStop architecture or MPP clusters, still have amazing benefits.

My Home PC is from 2019, it has DDR4, it gets most things done, and I have never felt it was sluggish or anything. Maybe not the best gaming rig, but I get by.

row, row, row your hammer, gently down the bit flip stream...

The crazy thing is knowing so many of the produced GPUs are just sitting in storage collecting dust because they don't have anywhere to plug them in and even where they have space do not have the power to run them. So basically the whole RAM situation is driven by things that are sitting dark in storage.

I am still using the machine I built in 2017.. Prices for GPUs have been consistently insane since shortly after then, (NFT-idiots, crypto-bros, now AI-twats) and now ram.. My work setup uses 100% of my ram now though. I'd like to double my ram by getting 2 more of the same sticks I have in it.. But the exact same sticks of DDR4 now cost more than they did in 2017.

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The big companies owe us money here. I call it a heist.

Also, the article makes no sense. Why would I want to pay more for DDR4 now? They should tax those AI companies that are responsible for this.