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Comment by cosmic_cheese | Hacker News Reader

Switching off DDR3 manufacturing I can understand, but DDR4 machines are still quite relevant and usable… Ryzen 5000 series boxes for example don’t feel meaningfully weaker than they did when new. My 5950X tower certainly doesn’t, and it’d really be nice to be able to upgrade its RAM should I need to because it will continue to be useful for quite some time.

AMD just re-released their 5800X3D for AM4 board users who wish to upgrade which is further evidence that shutting off DDR4 production is premature.

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They're running a business not a charity. Their job is to manufacture what the market as a whole demands. If they can make more money making HBM than DDR4 then they have to make HBM. Why would a business go out of its way to make less money?

1. The AI bubble is an insane distortion and the gravy train isn’t going to last forever. Betting the farm on everlasting datacenter demand is myopic.

2. In a healthy, competitive market there would be smaller manufacturers that’d be happy to take up the big guys’ discarded business.

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Not sure I understand this statement. Apple is affected by DRAM price fixing the same as any other PC manufacturer.

Ahh you are right, not sure where I got that from…

That's incorrect. Apple purchases RAM from all of these providers to produce their unified memory. They also rely on TSMC fabs for all of the chips their memory relies on. If they haven't doubled the prices of their machines, that just goes to show how fat of a profit margin they take on everyone that buys from them...

I stand corrected, thank you!

You're most welcome! I'll admit I did search before answering because you said Apple produced their memories so confidently LOL

I guess they would love to produce it themselves, but for the average scenario the production reserves they have with Samsung already work well enough and prevent them from having to get into such a complicated industry.

Apple just increased their prices a few days ago, citing high memory costs.

I am an idiot, sorry for wasting your time with confident bullshit.

1. But it might last for at least few more years, see Nvidia 1 trillion backlog.

2. Semiconductor manufacturing is the most complex industrial process in the world. You need billions of capex and decades of experience. Even existing semi players like intel cannot switch production to memory.

China CXMT is gaing traction in DDR market. New fabs from all players wil come online in the next two years.

>the gravy train isn’t going to last forever.

Have you seen how the modern stock markets works lmao? It hasn't been based on reality in a long time.

Hell just look at Trump, should've run outta money from all his bad deals ages ago but the grift continues.

It's true that markets have no need to be rational, but everything has an end and it's usually sooner than anybody ever expects.

People have been saying AI is a bubble for at least a year now and, unfortunately, it still hasn't collapsed.

DDR4 machines are relevant and usable, but it's pretty unusual that new systems on older ram are still big sellers. The 5800x3d was originally released in 2022, AM5 processors were also originally released in 2022. We'll probably see Zen6 soon, the third generation on AM5... I don't think AMD released new AM3 processors after the introduction of AM4, certainly not when Zen3 was coming soon.

When making long term plans in 2022, I don't think anyone expected DDR4 to need significant production in 2026. Since ram makers can pretty much sell whatever they make in today's marketplace, it makes sense (for those fabs that can) to stop making DDR4 and repurpose those fabs to make newer generation ram.

> My 5950X tower certainly doesn’t

That's what I have in my gaming tower, and yeah I feel zero pressing need to upgrade. I did manage to put 64GB of DDR4 in it just before prices went totally bonkers, thankfully. Where I'm falling behind is my GPU I'm still on an nvidia 1660 super, but I just can't justify paying what they cost right now.

I would gain pretty much nothing moving to a newer board w/ DDR5.

Exactly what I'm feeling. The CPU is great for what I'm using it for and I have a killer motherboard. Have a nice GPU capable of current gen games, too. The equivalent current gen board and CPU cost a small fortune for marginal readily visible gain.

Unfortunately, I opted for only 32GB of RAM because at that point more felt like overkill, which as a decision has aged poorly. I should've gotten more while it was still cheap.

Not to be a bootlicker but AMD releasing a product doesn't mean another company should make more DDR4. That's not price fixing. In the embedded space it's sadly very common for a part to be compatible with a very low number of options (shout out to cellular/admux RAM on the STM32H745 nucleo). That's just the way the cookie crumbles.

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