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Comment by doom2 | Hacker News Reader

I'm also very skeptical of "everything eventually passes" as it pertains to hardware prices. Right now, prices are high because supply can't keep up with demand. But if/when supply increases to meet demand or demand decreases, there's no reason for companies to drop prices now that consumers have become accustomed to them.

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> there's no reason for companies to drop prices

Competition.

Exactly. Production of RAM, SSDs, etc is spread out enough that no one company/country/fab has a stranglehold on the market. Right now anyone with a memory fab has a money printer. More people will build fabs, just like they did last time. It takes a bit but they'll get built.

How many companies have a memory fab? How many companies can build a memory fab?

In both cases, more than 1!

Hm, are you sure? I was under the impression that only ASML could build SOTA fabs.

> I was under the impression that only ASML could build SOTA fabs.

You're correct that this is true, but wrong in that it is not relevant.

SOTA fabs are used for cutting edge CPU/GPU chips. You do not need a SOTA fab to create DDR5 memory or SSD memory. There are a number of companies able to create the lithography machines to do so, and dozens of actual operators of those machines.

A good joke.

Then why did they drop prices the last few times prices spiked like this?

RAM was this price some years back, and yet last summer/fall it was at an all-time low.

My primary concern is for next generation hardware.

Will we continue to see steady improvement in top quality CPU/GPUs? Would they even bother releasing consumer versions of ram faster than DDR5?

Why would that concern you unless you are working on the cutting edge and the very limits of that hardware?

The current generation is insanely fast. I am planning to get a gaming PC for my wife and a mix of gaming + workstation PC for me (or maybe just base it off of the Ryzen 9950x3D and call it a day). We plan to hold on to them for 10 years.

I don't care if anything 6x faster comes out. For what I need the current generation is even an overkill.

I'd even go as far as to say that it would be quite OK if that's the very last generation and no further hardware development ever happens.

I am on the edge of current available hardware and do feel the desire to upgrade. As stated before, I am unhappy with the current maximum when combing frame generation, resolution, and graphics quality.

My dream spec is UE5 at 120hz on an 8k oled. I think that sounds like a super sick experience I would buy tens of thousands of dollars of hardware for.

One local store drops prices to clear stock and/or gain mindshare. Within a week, everybody else does.

Happened before, will happen again.

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