I think SK Hynix’s projection is incredibly naive. I’d be surprised if by 2028 the Chinese haven’t captured this market yet, inevitably impacting prices.
You don’t have to be an oracle to expect this, it is a fact that CXMT is already scaling up consumer DDR5 production. Yes they are behind in technology, but home users won’t care much as long as they can put them into their DDR5 mobos & run them in dual channel…
Anyway my prediction is that 2 years from now the prices will be significantly down, but still high compared the business as usual & the moment the bubble pops -if it does & not before 2029- prices will go down to what’s normal or even below normal for the larger sticks.
On so sorry guys we have no idea how we could lower the prices that are making us rich. I mean we could increase the supply and work towards a new norm of what the market needs but that’ll take at least a decade of high prices.
It’s gonna be pretty funny when the bubble bursts and the memory and GPU companies that fucked over their bread-and-butter consumers, have to come groveling back to us in order to prop up their companies once again. I’m so goddamn sick of tech I might try to ride it out with my 2019 laptop for the foreseeable future. If a game doesn’t run on it, it will just become a game I don’t play.
You don’t think their main source of income was ever consumer-grade memory… do you?
It’s always been servers and business customers.
If that’s the case, we’re not going to see affordable GPUs ever again. I didn’t think consumers were their biggest income, but it wasn’t pennies either.
Implicit in this prediction, is the assumption that AI data-center demand will continue that long.
Even if the AI bubble burst today and we canceled all data center plans, it would take a while to pivot production back to something useable for consumers instead of highly specialized servers. Not four years but at least a couple of months.
A lot of startups are using at least partially consumer grade hardware, which will likely get offloaded to the used market when the bubble bursts as they try to recoup some of their losses. This will put some pressure on pricing especially for used parts.
I don’t think it’ll put pricing back at pre-AI levels immediately, but it will likely cause prices to start to drop pretty soon after the bubble bursts, even before manufacturing is able to change focus.
Somehow I doubt that a few thousand consumer grade machines used by startups will make much of a difference compared to millions of specialized servers ordered by the big players.
It alao assumes that each data center will have a hardware refresh every few years to sustain demand.
I can’t see demand surviving the necessary pricing to be profitable over time with the inital hardware, much less to pay for the inevitable refresh.
Of course. The predictions were that they’d remain high until 2030, not that they’d go down after that.
Inflation will take care of that. Memory never really dropped in dollar price.
You got more memory for the same price. Else we’d still pay 1000€ for 256MB sticks…
I got 4 RGB DIMMs to make a 32 GB kit a couple of years ago for the price I’d paid for a 2x8 kit years before. I don’t even dare look now, I’m good.
