Discussion
DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market
jokoon: it's probably time to call those old retired programmers to ask them how to reduce software memory footprintor to teach that again
rat9988: The art is not lost, just not funded. Feel free to fund the programmers for your own software projects.
jonathantf2: 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.
dangus: “Killing” is strong phrasing.Yes, a $250 mini PC I bought last year is now $350.Is this pricing bad? Yeah, compared to what it was.Is this the end of the world? Not really, and we’ve seen price spikes for all kinds of PC components in the past. It’s rarely permanent.
SSchick: Not everyone earns tech bro salaries and can sustain a thousand cuts. Many hobbiests are scraping and saving money to acquire hardware. For some it very well msy be the end of their world.
dangus: We are talking about brand new latest gen hardware here. People with low budgets are always scraping and saving for deals and don’t need to buy something brand new from a pricey brand name like raspberry pi.You can still jump on eBay and buy all kinds of dirt cheap used pieces of hardware.My buddy just bought a used ThinkPad T14 with 32GB of RAM and 1TB of storage for about $500. You can get by with a whole lot less.In this context, I will also present the idea that Rasperry Pi has represented quite poor cost value for many years now.
ciupicri: That cheap stuff from eBay that people talk about all the time seems to be available only in North America, or in the best case Western Europe.ThinkPad T14 which generation?
elwebmaster: It's terrible. Fake money is fueling the exhaustion of real resources in search of questionable outcomes ("AGI"). Imagine if all of these money were invested in curing cancer.
mhb: Imagine if AI cures cancer.
CTDOCodebases: Fuel price rises = logistics price rises.
dangus: That’s strange, there aren’t wider market supply chain issues outside of DRAM. Maybe your vendor is just throwing excuses around.
OJFord: DRAM is up more than that 50% though.
celsius1414: They’re throwing something around.
cyanydeez: uh, prthspd you've heard of the third world war started in Iran?
ls612: SSDs and HDDs are being squeezed as well.
tempest_: We just had a vendor tell us none of the HDDs we were looking for were available unless we also committed to a full NAS offering.
Analemma_: This isn't true: NAND flash prices are up too, though not nearly as dramatically. But the war means that fuel and shipping prices are way up as well.
Venn1: Is there anything (technically) preventing SBC manufacturers adding SODIMM slots?I was expecting the Milk V Titan to avoid this memory nonsense since it has two unpopulated DDR4 slots, but it has fallen off the radar like several other SBCs.
CTDOCodebases: Fuel price rises = logistics price rises.
homebrewer: Yes, 90%+ of sellers refuse to ship here (and we're not even under any sanctions and/or political pressure of any sort). I hear about these magical 100$ Thinkpads all the time; I'm yet to see anything cheaper than 300$ (add another 100$+ for shipping).
zie: 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.
mhitza: 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...
JollySharp0: There are ups and downs in the prices of components. Often people forget that during COVID prices were high for SBCs because of supply chain issues. Video cards just were not available in the UK and afterwards (every supplier had long lead times) and are still relatively expensive (at least there are now lower priced options). Raspberry Pis you couldn't get hold of and many people (Jeff Included) was using a website checking for availability which was non-existent for anything other than low end models.I remember 15-20 years ago when hard drive prices went up through the roof because there was a flood in Thailand and it too years for prices to come down.There is going to be supply chain issues due to the current Geopolitical situation (Helium comes out of the Gulf and that is need in chip manufacture) is also going to affect the price of components.Eventually in a few years (as the article states) the situation will change. It just sucks at the moment.TBH I am more worried about my ability to fill up the tank on my car as both Petrol and Diesel is unavailable locally. I can make do with whatever computer equipment I have.
zozbot234: > People are quick to forget that during COVID prices were high for SBCs because of supply chain issues.inb4 AI has the same supply chain effects as a worldwide pandemic. I guess those AI doomers that talked about it being the end of the world had it right!
squidsoup: You can imagine all you want, but my understanding is there is no credible evidence that scaling LLMs will result in true AGI.
homebrewer: Have you looked at how expensive international shipping is? eBay covers just a few countries, the rest of us can't buy there because we'll be paying 10 times the cost of hardware to get it over here.I already moaned about this recently, but to briefly reiterate: the only hardware that's becoming available for most people in my region are Frankenstein desktops built from heavily used 10+ year old Xeons running on suspicious motherboards made by obscure Chinese manufacturers you've never heard of. This is pushing ever more people towards smartphones and away from actual computers.But at least we got the bullshit machine in return, that's something, I guess.
SkyeCA: > Have you looked at how expensive international shipping is?It really shocks me how bad shipping has gotten. It's nearly unaffordable to buy things on eBay from the US as a Canadian due to shipping costs, so I can only imagine just how bad it is for people from other countries.
tempest_: DDR4 is also crazy expensive right now so this just depends on you having some around from a previous build
doubled112: That sounds pretty nice. The same mini PC I paid $195 for in 2023 is now $450. Seems to be life in Canada sometimes.It had caused me to look around though. I have found the Pi Zero 2W to be surprisingly capable for Pi sized jobs.
zozbot234: Just rewrite your biggest memory hogs in Rust, it routinely slashes RAM footprint and demand for RAM throughput. The effect is even bigger than on CPU use. You can even ask AI to help you with the task, it will use a lot less RAM for it than the rewrite will save down the road.
Lwrless: Got my RPi 5 16GB quite a while ago for around $160 and already thought that was expensive... It’s still powerful enough for almost everything I throw at it, honestly a bit overkill in most scenarios.With prices steadily going up, for me it's starting to feel more sensible to repurpose the RAM sticks I've collected from old PC builds / laptops and just throw together small amd64 boxes instead of buying more RPis.
IncreasePosts: Why would we need rust, if the AI can just write really good code in C that doesn't exhibit any of the issues that rust protects you from?
pessimizer: Because it can't?
maplethorpe: Have you tried asking Claude 4.6 Opus?
jorvi: I wonder if there are low power Intel or AMD boards that accept DDR3. So many sticks of 2 / 4 / 8GB DDR3 inside laptops going into recycling or landfills which would do perfectly fine for low power purposes. Hell, performance for standard workloads scales with access times, not bandwidth, and DDR3 sits nicely at CAS8 1600MHz and CAS10 2133MHz..
w-ll: [delayed]
Aurornis: The extreme DRAM market has had an unexpected side effect of triggering a lot of panic buying. I know several people who delayed PC upgrades for years but then panic bought new systems in this market. The trigger was seeing all of the "It's only going to get worse" and "This is the end of personal computing" headlines.They're already regretting spending so much now that prices have started to tick downward.I keep telling everyone: If you don't have a pressing need to buy right now, please wait 6 months and check again.
esskay: The SBC markets been on life support for a long time. Youtubers making videos about them don't seem to grasp that and keep pumping out reviews and projects like its still 2019. The pi specifically has plummeted in popularity and for most use cases they just aren't a cost effective option when second hand micro pcs are dirt cheap and vastly more capable.
msgilligan: I don't think comparing new Pis to used micro pcs is fair. Compare a _used_ Pi with a used micro pc. If you have any geek friends, it's probably not hard to find a used Pi for free.
rtpg: am I crazy for thinking that the 16GB Pi 5 is just there to absorb money from people who purchase the most expensive version of things? Like really nobody needs that much RAM on a Pi?
contextfree: what are the barriers to new DRAM supply coming online?
bombcar: Huge capital outlays and no guarantee the prices stay high.
AlotOfReading: Let's also imagine an alternative reality where some reasonable percentage of the $2.5T in current year AI spending was instead invested in the "general intelligence" researchers we already have for the same purpose. I think it's a pretty reasonable expectation that 1) they'd probably make more progress and 2) that money would help a lot more people in the process (through jobs and economic activity).
JollySharp0: Doomers IMO are just click baiting.There is a saying that is often trotted out my economists "That the cure for high prices, is high prices".There is a consumer market and business need for DRAM outside of AI. Someone will fulfil the need as there is a high incentive to. It just going to take a bit of time for this to happen. My equipment is going to be fine for another few years. So I am going to just hang tight and make do with what I got for now.
dwattttt: > Someone will fulfil the need as there is a high incentive toAnd those uses which fall short of the new threshold, e.g. hobbyist SBCs, slowly fall away.
post-it: It can't, because there is no really good code to train off of.
mhb: Obviously there's no "evidence". Why would you even think we need AGI? But I'm happy to hear your reasoning if you were one of the few/only? people who imagined that software that could predict the next word could do what it now is doing.
Aurornis: Rust's compile-time checks are actually a nice set of guardrails for LLMs.Nobody who works with LLM generated code believes that LLMs produce fault-free code.
Havoc: Bought a couple of 32gb SBCs before this all hit the fan. And also built a SSD NAS before the wave hit.So timed that all pretty great. What worries me is my desktop is up for a full new buy somewhere around early '28. That could be a train wreck depending on how taiwan situation goes
geerlingguy: Sony stopped making their cards entirely, which stinks because I'd settled on their pro cards for all my camera bodies.
ttul: This time is different. https://ca.pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/#ram.ddr5.60...The price for a couple of 32GB sticks is now over $1200 after being stable at about $200 for several years until last September. That's not a blip; that's 6-fold hike and there is no sign it is slowing down any time soon.
nostrademons: This is happening, sort of. All the big tech companies have major initiatives going to reduce RAM usage.The old graybeards who know how to optimize efficiency may not work for them anymore, though.
bashtoni: Helium supply issues are only going to make this worse.I feel like for the first time in our lives we might have seen peak technology for the next few years. Everyone is going to have to make do instead of depending on ever increasing performance.
elwebmaster: You don't have to imagine, it will hallucinate you a slop with full confidence every time.
duskwuff: I've already seen at least one person who was pretty sure that the preprint paper they co-authored with AI (read: AI wrote for them) was going to cure cancer and make them billions of dollars.There was only one problem. The paper jumped straight from "this paper will show how our new treatment could cures cancer forever" to "as you can see, these results clearly show that our treatment cures cancer" - with neither any actual results nor any specifics on the treatment. And I don't just mean that the paper didn't go into details; writing the paper was the full extent of their "research".
mhb: So QED then, I guess.
whynotmaybe: I can save everyone a few Mb of memory now :1. Check that you really need a SaaS SPA to solve the communication issues between your team members.2. HTML and css should be enough for 99% of corporate websites.3. Resize the images on your websites, they're too big.4. Use teams in the browser, not as stand-alone app.
roughly: We're somehow in a race between LLMs curing cancer, destroying the planet by "You're right to be mad, I shouldn't have issued those launch codes, it's even in my Claude.md file, I'm sorry," and rendering modern technological civilization uneconomical. I know this is statistically the best time in history to live, but lord, I could use a vacation.
einpoklum: The title should say: "Collusion of large corporations promoting LLMs with RAM manufacturers is killing the hobbyist SBC market (and bankrupting anybody trying to get a PC or laptop)".Because we all know that DRAM prices have spiked since production is going to those infernal chatbot training data centers. Same as a lot of the electricity in some parts of the world, BTW.
Permit: Can you elaborate on the collusion aspect? Is the implication that OpenAI and Anthropic are coordinating their purchases in such a way that they target the hobbyist market? What’s the collusion angle here?
throwaway85825: OpenAI signed letters of intent for 40% of the DRAM supply because they have no moat and want to starve their competition.
SideQuark: AI was used fundamentally for COVID vaccine development. AI is used for research in all modern drugs. It’s a certainty if cancer gets cured AI will have played a fundamental role since it’s already fundamental to precursors.
nostrademons: 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.)
zozbot234: That's actually a reasonable response to market volatility and illiquidity. It's not just high prices, but prices that still fail to be representative of the actual market stance despite the rises.
zozbot234: Except that it doesn't work like that. If you buy DRAM and don't do anything genuinely worthwhile with it, you'll ultimately dump it all right back onto the market, and everyone knows that. The biggest worry is that it's actually OpenAI and their direct competition starving the rest of the market because they predict AI research and the like to be a highly valued use for the stuff, compared to building gaming PC battlestations or whatever the highest-valued use was before. Many observers think that this will also happen with GPUs and cutting-edge digital logic more generally.
ticulatedspline: wasn't "panic" buy but I built a new comp early 2025, cuz at worst case would be complete supply crash and at best case it was going to be more expensive.Def don't regret doing that, though I regret not springing for the extra RAM.
Chyzwar: Main producers actually reduced dram output in 2026. When you have few players with very high capital cost you will end up with cartels like light bulb cartel.
walrus01: Unless you're really using the GPIO pins or other weird I/O, I really fail to see the purpose in having an 8GB or 16GB RAM Raspberry Pi (at a much higher price than it used to be) as a desktop workstation with a GUI on it.The idea of putting sixteen gigs of RAM in a raspberry pi is nuts. The legit thing you want to use a raspberry pi (or a competitor) for as an embedded headless thing with no KB/mouse/display attached should run fine in 2GB of RAM or less, assuming an ordinary debian-based OS environment.I would much rather have a used, ex-corporate/ex-lease, small form factor or ultra small form factor x86-64 desktop PC (Dell, HP, Lenovo, whatever) with 16GB of RAM in it and an SSD on a SATA3 or NVME interface. Whatever is the "best" SFF that you can buy via huge eBay used equipment dealers on any given month.Despite being many years old, whatever you can buy on ebay for 200 bucks (at least before the recent RAM fiasco) with some recent-ish quad core core i5/i7 or Ryzen in it will run circles around a raspberry pi 5.
msy: 'rewrite in C, make sure there are no memory leaks'. You first.
IncreasePosts: Why is that less realistic than saying 'rewrite in rust, make sure there are no memory leaks'?My point, which I should have been clearer with, is that we aren't at a state where you can just one shot a rewrite of a complex application into another language and expect some sort of free savings. Once we are at that state, and it's good enough to pull it off, why wouldn't the AI be able to pull it off in C as well?
throwaway173738: There are classes of bug that are easy to write in C that are impossible to express in Rust.
jl6: Time to break out the Small Web protocols and start living within our means!
observationist: Apple and Sama didn't do the consumers any favors this year.
andrewstuart2: Finally, good efficient code is going to get its moment to shine! Which will totally happen because it's not like 80% of the industry is vibe coding everything, right?
JollySharp0: Did you not read what I said? I couldn't even get a replacement video card at any price during the height of COVID and believe you I had the money to pay for one. I couldn't even get a Raspberry PI (any model) for about a year. They were constantly out of stock.> That's not a blip; that's 6-fold hike and there is no sign it is slowing down any time soon.How does that invalidate anything I said? As states in the article this will change, it will take years but it isn't forever.I find it hard to believe that people here cannot make do with whatever hardware they already have.I also don't believe those small SBCs would have survived long term anyway. Most people just use a Raspberry PI. It is either a MiniPC or a Raspberry PI.
megous: SBCs are not just RPis. Other brands can still be bought cheaper.
matt-p: Flash has supply (and price) problems too.
lm411: Yep. I just bought a Pi CM5 for my son, for his ClockworkPi uConsole. CAD $200 for the 8GB module. I bought a whole Pi5 16GB not long ago for under CAD $200.I will not be buying any more SBC's at this price point. I wonder if Raspberry PI will survive.
pixl97: I expect my 5 year old desktop will last a lot longer, but start worrying about the bathtub curve.
pixl97: Only works so long as you eventually pay up... well unless the manufacturers make too much this way. That said are there some Chinese manufacturers that aren't part of the cabal and could undercut them?
josephg: Taking a big, complex, already well optimised program like Chrome or the linux kernel and optimising the memory footprint is hard. But 90% of programs are just crappy web apps (sometimes wrapped up in electron or something) that nobody has even bothered to optimise at all.If you go look, you often discover that 90% of the requests are useless, or at least could be combined. That 60% of bandwidth is used up by 3 high res images which get displayed at 30x30 pixels. That CPU performance is dominated by some rubbish code that populates an array of a million items every call, then looks up 1 element then throws the whole thing away, only to regenerate the exact same list again a few milliseconds later.We have plenty of RAM. In absolute terms, 8gb of ram in the macbook neo is 8 billion bytes. 64 billion ones and zeros. You don't need rocket science to make a CRUD app that runs well with that much ram.
throwaway85825: The Rust ecosystem and build tools are much easier to use than C. The value of a language isn't just syntax.
megous: LLMs are great at C, probably because C is historically the most popular language in the world, by far. It only declined slightly very recently. But there's insane amount of code written in it.
culi: Does anyone mind explaining why the 2GB model only increased by 20% in price while the 16GB model nearly tripled in price?
icedchai: I assume this is sarcasm.
BizarroLand: Same. I got 64gb for my new build the day this whole thing started but I kind of wish I had gotten 128 just for bragging rights.
tempest_: It isnt lost but it also isnt a common skill set in programmers any more.Most programmers are JS web devs writing client side code or server side CRUD.I would guess < 10% of programmers writing code today get perf / valgrind out on the regular. I know I dont.
Quothling: You don't have to go that deep. 99% of the time our analytics or risk management teams have some really memory inefficient Python and they want me to write them one of our "magic C things" it turns out to be fixable by replacing their in-memory iterations with a generator.
noosphr: >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.
Aurornis: It's not a reasonable response. If you don't need a PC right now, buying in the middle of a demand spike is the worst time to do it.
michaelt: 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.
kube-system: 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.
Dylan16807: Ultra clean rooms with massive air handling systems can't recapture all their helium?Or is this just a temporary thing based on where processing is located?
AngryData: Helium is almost all captured from gas wells by cryogenically liquefying the nitrogen out of it. I guess you could do technically do that with the fab's air but it is a LOT of volume of air to liquefy and likely costs more than even inflated helium prices.Most helium from most wells is simply vented because it is expensive to separate even with its relatively high concentration, and I imagine even the best case scenario for capturing it from a fab has abysmal concentration of helium. But because most of it is vented it also means if the capital is put down to build more helium separators on gas wells it wouldn't take long to increase supply. Short term for a year or two it can be a problem, but beyond that it is simply a cost versus demand issue. There is neither a technological nor source limitation, it is a pure capital investment limitation.
manicennui: Why not ask your LLM?
3abiton: What did Apple do?
fortran77: My PDP-11 runs fine on 512K
BizarroLand: I bet the power draw is at least 50x though
wpferrell: Totally agree. Just like graphics card prices. Is it worth building a pc now?
knicholes: After discovering Dell Alienware clearance and graphics card availability in those Alienware computers, I haven't felt the need to build a computer for the last five years.
SV_BubbleTime: I looked on their site. I don’t see any section for clearance.
qmr: Does this mean the Atom 8GB boxes I have laying about are now more valuable?
SV_BubbleTime: Sorry, best I can do is coal powered datacenter vibe coding.
The price increases bring the 16GB Pi 5 up to $299.99.
michaelt: > The price increases bring the 16GB Pi 5 up to $299.99.Meanwhile, a refurbished corporate laptop with 16GB RAM and a 512GB SSD can be yours for $199 [1]I'm sure there will still be people who want the Pi 5 but at these prices, I ain't one of them.[1] https://www.ebay.com/itm/327079631563
tempest_: Those will dry up soon enough. Corporate laptop refreshes will be drawn out as they try and cost save on the increased price.You also better hope the aliexpress dont figure out a way to get the RAM out of those things because they will start harvesting it for sure if there is money to made.
tredre3: > Those will dry up soon enough.We're talking about a pi replacement. The Pi 5 is slower than a 10yo laptop. That's gives us a very vast pool of used laptops.> You also better hope the aliexpress dont figure out a way to get the RAMThat is a real worry and I can see used machines being gutted because selling DDR3/4/5 sticks is way easier and profitable than the whole machine. Adapters for SODIMM to regular DIMM are readily available and cheap, too.
