According to Duann, PC makers have to buy from SSD module makers because NAND vendors reduced allocation to the client/consumer PC market and redirected most NAND supply to data center products.
As a result, PC OEMs like Acer, Asus, Dell, and HP cannot get enough NAND or SSD supply directly from NAND manufacturers and have to turn to module makers for solid-state drives. The latter traditionally served end-users and had plenty of aftermarket products with enhanced performance and cooling, but now they increasingly serve PC makers instead.
Everyday I realize that I don’t hate capitalism enough.
I want to go back to November
Yeah, that’s what happens when you triple the price of everything.
2TB drives were about £100 a few years ago and now they’re close to £400. That’s a fuckin’ no from me dog.
Yep. I bought a 2TB for my laptop right before prices started rising.
Hoping everything I have lasts for a few years now.
It’s a gold rush which will have consequences a few years down the line. The data centre market will get saturated, and with a probable collapse in the AI market thats driving this (particularly given the “winner takes all” approach all the players are following) and associated massive duplication of data centres running different AI models for different companies, it’s likely to be a collapse, not a soft landing.
Hardware companies investing in expanding their output to service the data centres demand will be over producing once the market swings the other way. Expect prices to collapse and some of these memory producing companies to go bankrupt. This is another classic sign of a bubble: everyone thinks this will keep going and going, so they invest hard in having a chunk of it. But it will inevitably hit a wall - some AI companies will fail and their data centres become redundant, and the market overall will eventually swing away from endless expansion to consolidation. And thats best case scenario; more likely it a catastrophic collapse in which case the market is getting flooded with unneeded 2nd had product from data centres sold off during bankruptcy proceedings.
It’s not a question of if the party will end, it’s just a question of when. Even if people don’t think the AI market will pop, the economics of building more and more data centres by unprofitable competitors in this market is unsustainable and has to end at some point. And the evidence is we’re already well beyond the point of diminishing returns with current AI models in terms of scaling up.
So while times are hard right now for home PC users, I’d expect there to be period in the near future of oversupply and cheap components. This year? Next year? Hard to say exactly when but the writing is on the wall for the AI bubble imo.
So while times are hard right now for home PC users, I’d expect there to be period in the near future of oversupply and cheap components.
From where? Data center equipment isn’t really suitable for the home. A used SXM module on an adapter might give you reasonably affordable compute but is completely useless for graphics. Data center memory is often HBM, which you can’t just transplant into your home PC. Getting an EDSFF SSD into your PC might work with an adapter but it’s also going to take up a lot of space.
Plus, there have been cases in the past of companies buying up and destroying the inventory of closing data centers specifically so it doesn’t end up on the market to compete with current products. That might very well repeat.
When the bubble bursts I expect to see a semi-decent supply of high-end hardware for specific use cases. If you have a space for a rack with noisy fans and a 3000 W power draw you’ll be able to build a kick-ass AI inference rig for like 2000 bucks. Or a really fast file server. But I don’t think there’s going to be much in it for people who just want 60 FPS in current games and an SSD those games fit onto. That’ll take another couple years.
I think it’ll be 2030 at the earliest until we see actually interesting consumer hardware from the usual companies. Maybe China will swoop in and deliver something worthwhile in the meantime but I’m not holding my breath.
I think a lot of people know it will end. But they also think, “I’m gonna get mine while I can, fuck everything else”
Look on the bright side: plenty of cheap compute and hardware will be available to research centers at that point.
Can’t buy an HDD, Can’t buy an SSD, can’t buy a Blu-ray drive, can’t get head. Can’t have shit.
Welcome to Detroit.
Here, you should at least have shit
If I needed to shit that bad I’d just eat a whole bag of sugar free oreo’s.
Can’t wait for the LLM bubble to pop and have RAM and SSDs become dirt cheap for at least a short time. I believe that other AI-related applications (machine learning, visual recognition, OCR etc. for robots/drones) are more practical and have good use cases but LLM companies themselves are certainly overvalued.
It hasn’t ‘dissapeared’, the demand is still there but we’ve been priced out.
One good thing about it is we’re more inclined to recycle and buy secondhand. Or just make-do if its not essential.
Not even a good thing globally because we’re not replacing production by recycling and secondhand buying. Production is going stronger and more wasteful than ever, it’s just all absorbed in the AI war.
I’ve replaced a decent sized SSD with gigabit internet. Don’t need to store a bunch of huge games locally if it only takes 10 minutes to download them.
Future seems to be probably similar to concept as chromeos
You get 32gb internal storage and rest is cloud storage.
AI is going to kill the enthusiast PC hardware community even more than it was before. Great. Love it. Super fantastic. 😑
Thanks, AI.
You sure about that, bud? Because I’d hazard a guess that it’s almost exactly the same as before, were there options. In fact, I’m moving components around and would love to do a spend on some memory. I need low-profile sticks but if necessary I’ll just de-shield my current RAM. What a shame.
And now that data centers are financially collapsing left and right I’m sure they will be regretting thay decision.
I’m a bit out of the loop, are they collapsing right now?
