I'm sad. I'm a software guy, not much of a hardware expert, so please bear with me if I"m too pessimistic. However, I feel that if trends like this continue, it might be the end of enthusiast-level personal computing as we know it. No more being able to head down to the electronics store and purchase RAM, motherboards, processors, GPUs, storage, and other components. We're going to be limited to locked-down terminals connected to cloud services, both of which provided by a small number of multinational corporations. If we're lucky, we might still have USB peripherals.
The sad thing is that we enthusiasts are a small market compared to the overwhelming majority of computer users who don't mind locked-down devices, or at least until they've been bitten by the restrictions, but if there are no alternatives other than retrocomputing, then it's too late. For decades we enthusiasts have been able to benefit from other markets with overlapping needs such as gaming, workstations, and corporate servers. However, many on-premise servers have been replaced by cloud services, the workstation market has been subsumed by the broader PC market, and PC gaming has faced challenges, from a push toward locked-down consoles to challenges in the GPU market due to competition with cryptocurrency mining and now AI.
One of the things I'm increasingly disappointed with is the dominance of large corporations in computing. It seems harder for small players to survive in this ecosystem. Software has to deal with network effects and large companies owning major platforms, and building your own hardware requires tons of capital.
I wonder if it's possible even for a company to make even 1980s-era electronics without massive capital expenditures? How feasible is it for a small company to manufacture the equivalent of a Motorola 68000 or Intel 386?
I'd like to see a market for hobbyist computing by hobbyist computer shops, but I'm not sure it's economically feasible.
I've seen things going the opposite way. It's only recently that an average person could jump on eBay and get assembled low-level electronic module/boards for cheap, and assemble into their project.
Yes, you'll probably have difficulty walking into a STORE to buy PC components, but only because online shopping has been killing local shops for decades now. You'll find it easy to get that stuff online, for better prices.
PCs, since the very start, have been going through a process of being ever more integrated each generation. Not too many people install sound cards, IDE controllers, etc., anymore. CPUs, GPUs, and RAM are about the only holdouts not integrated on the motherboard these days. It's possible that could change, if CPUs and GPUs becomes fast enough for 99% of people, and RAM gets cheap enough that manufacturers can put more on-board than 99% of people will need. And while you might not be happy about that kind of integration, it comes with big price reductions that help everyone. But we're not there yet, and I can't say how long down the road that might be.
Not my experience. I've been able to go to a local store to buy PC components for more than 35 years now and last did to upgrade the RAM in the laptop to be eligible for Win11. Online only was not cheaper and local store had it available same day. Local store does have online presence and is a chain tho.
Mouse replacement on a weekend coz old one broke same story (button smashed in and not usable at all any longer). Online not cheaper, no same day available at any price, Amazon delivery without Prime no next day either. Local chain store had it for immediate pickup and I was gaming again in 30 minutes.
In many cities in the US, there's Microcenter, where you can walk out with every part you need. We also still have smaller stores that can build clones for you/hand you the boxes, but they don't quite have the same variety of parts.
Microcenter is one of the very few local DIY stores remaining. Best Buy has some stuff like hard drives but, even in the Boston area, I can't think of many other examples at this point.
Of course, you have Newegg and other online stores.
In some cities.
I happen to be from one of them.
Now I live in a far bigger city (Los Angeles) and the closest Microcenter is 2 hours away. Worse with traffic on a Tuesday afternoon. They’re only in a handful of states, sadly.
There are not many places that offer a reasonable selection of boards that are close. Fry’s was the last bastion for many folks. Best Buy sometimes has a few options. But today is a far cry from the days of Circuit City, Computer City, CompUSA, RadioShack… not to mention dozens of mom & pop stores. Online is the main way nowadays.
> I'm curious where you live. Anecdotally, this is the opposite to the experience of everyone I know.
Actually, his experience is the standard PC enthusiast experience for the vast majority of DIY'ers in many nations. And is now subject to threat if businesses catering to consumers shut-down.
> Actually, his experience is the standard PC enthusiast experience for the vast majority of DIY'ers in many nations.
I have to genuinely question this. I haven't heard of anyone I know buying PC components at a physical store in like 20 years, and I know people from various nations.
There are still physical stores in most cities so I guess they are still selling if they aren't out of business. They cater for a more enthusiast/gaming oriented population than in the past but still.
You have to take into account that same day delivery from amazon and the likes is only a real thing in the USA. Most other markets do not have the same service, even with accounts such as Amazon Prime. There is only one online store I know that is providing same day delivery in my area in Spain and it is a physical (and rather expensive) chain, El Corte Inglés.
I am guessing you purely stick to the mobile-phone/corpo-laptop crowd then ? Finding PC enthusiasts should not be that difficult. They are legions of them all over the world - not just in the developed nations.
Even normal folks upgrade RAM. My aunt did so last year for her old desktop PC. PC components are available in the local computer hardware market of any nation. (Though admittedly, most people buy parts online nowadays and local hardware markets are shutting down)
> I am guessing you purely stick to the mobile-phone/corpo-laptop crowd then ? Finding PC enthusiasts should not be that difficult. They are legions of them all over the world - not just in the developed nations.
No. I'm a PC enthusiast myself, as are most of those people I know. I run an online (PC) gaming community.
> (Though admittedly most people nowadays just buy online and local hardware markets are shutting down)
Then I misunderstood what you were saying. PC community has actually increased over last few years as people have become dissatisfied with the big-2 consoles.
I'm in Melbourne, I can ride my bike a few kilometers and buy standard PC parts. Not everyone here lives that close to a store, but there are multiple established chains with stores all over the metropolitan area. Even so these stores probably do the bulk of business in online sales.
I usually buy my cables there since the price difference for brand cables is negligible and I like to have my cable actually do the rated specs. Full pc parts no, but then again I usually buy niche parts not widely available. I usually go to the small repair shop first, and if they don't have any to the big brand. Small shop is a bit more expensive but the guy can order specialized small parts (printer memory module comes to mind) if you ask nicely and even directed you to other shops. Medium sized 100k+ city in NW Europe.
A couple of years ago, one rainy Saturday morning, I woke up with a devastating hangover and nothing else to do - so I decided to build myself a PC, like in good old days. Turned out it wasn't at all difficult to find a local store; only two-three hours later I was already driving home with all these sexy looking boxes filled with hardware. That was in Sweden.
Last local walking distance shop closed earlier this year (city in Germany). Used to go there for parts needed on short notice: mouse, cables etc. Not sure if there are many left now in this city that stock components like motherboards, gfx cards or RAM.
> Used to go there for parts needed on short notice
Which is why they shut down - the addressable market of people having an emergency need for an item from a limited selection of electronics isn't that big, and that's becoming the only market.
It's not your fault that you don't want to pay over the odds for everything when you're not in a rush, and it's not their fault they need to pay commercial rent, utilities, payroll, insurance and all the other overheads.
But the outcome is simply that staffed local physical shops have a lower efficiency ceiling in terms of getting items to customers.
Aren't mediamarkt still selling computer parts in Germany? Maybe not ram and mother boards but in my city in Spain Mediamarkt still sell all the peripherals, some internal drives and cabling at the very least.
Microcenter has a total of 29 stores across the US. Yankee Candle has almost 10x as many locations (240).
Yes, Microcenter "exists", but primarily through selective cultivation of their locations. From a pure market footprint perspective, they are outclassed by a candle company, and many other niche businesses.
At no point was I entirely denying that some people go to physical stores to buy components. I was just countering the idea that a majority of people do so, as opposed to ordering online.
30 years ago you would buy what was available locally, possibly you could obtain from the shop owner that he orders a part from his distributor's catalog and that was it. And we weren't giving it much second thought.
Now when we know we can obtain any brand or any model online we are much more picky about our component choices. I know for me it is the same in other areas I am knowledgeable like bicycle parts. Regardless of the price more often than not the local bike shop doesn't have the exact tire model I want so if I am not in a hurry I order online. I wasn't unhappy buying whatever was available back in the days as it was just not a possibility and I had less knowledge about what was available, even when receiving magazines every month. Ignorance is bliss sometimes.
I'm not the parent poster, but in my experience it depends on the location. I live in the Bay Area. We had Fry's Electronics before it closed, and when Fry's closed I shifted to Central Computers. We finally have a Micro Center in Santa Clara now! I find Central Computers and Micro Center to have reasonable prices that are competitive with online stores. However, it can sometimes be a difficult drive through traffic getting to these stores, and so it's often more convenient for me to order something online. I've had nothing but good experiences shopping from Newegg.
When I was an undergrad at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo 20 years ago, I relied heavily on Newegg, since there were no large electronics stores in San Luis Obispo back then for computer enthusiasts. Best Buy today has come a long way and is now a great place for PC enthusiasts, but this wasn't the case 20 years ago; it had much more of a consumer electronics focus back then. Four years ago I was visiting Cal Poly friends in Santa Maria; we were building my PC together. I bought the wrong power supply online, and so we ended up going to Best Buy in Santa Maria, where I was able to find the correct power supply for a good price!
Even with Best Buy's improved selection, nothing beats Micro Center in either Silicon Valley or Irvine, but if you're in neither location and Best Buy doesn't stock what you need, then you have to order online.
As much as I love Micro Center, though, nothing beats Yodobashi Camera in Akihabara, Tokyo. That store is electronics heaven, at least for new components. For used components, I peruse Akihabara's alleys, which are filled with small shops specializing in used and retro gear.
In the small-town bits of Ohio I've lived in for most of my life, computer stores come and go from time to time. There used to be more of them but they still exist.
The one that my first PC came from (in 1988) was open for something like 20 years. Another that still remains has been there for 33 years.
Plus, I mean: Best Buy stocks some PC parts. So does Wal-Mart. They're not "local," but they're nearby and they have stuff.
I have complete confidence that I could leave the house in the morning with nothing but some cash, and come home with enough parts to build a performant and modern PC from ~scratch in about an hour or two -- including travel.
And that's Ohio -- it's flyover country, full of corn fields and cowpies.
Microcenter is headquartered here in Ohio. Arguably the best PC focused "brick and mortar" store still in existence. I feel like I stepped back into my childhood every time I go into one of their stores
Yes. Microcenter was founded in Columbus, Ohio -- IIRC as a shop on High Street most of a lifetime ago. The present headquarters are, IIRC, just up the road in Hilliard. They maintain an excellent and enormous retail store in the area. There is an amazing (and not at all cheap) Greek restaurant across the street.
But after I drive to Microcenter and shop there and drive back, I'm fuckin' tired. I won't want to build a PC when I get home. I'll want to think about either getting a pizza or going to bed, and the bed will probably win.
So usually, I don't shop at Microcenter at all. I adore that place (and yeah, I'm impressionable: Keeping Raspberry Pi Zero W's in stock at every checkout register and selling them for $5 made an impression on me), but it's just too far away from where I live.
What usually happens instead, despite still having much more local alternatives, is this: I order the stuff. It shows up on my porch a day or two later. I build it at my leisure.
I love Microcenter. Built my current gaming rig with all parts purchased there. It's been about 8 years, so not sure if they still operate this way... but when I built my PC, I:
- Went online, ordered everything for pickup (didn't pay yet)
- Drove there, they had it all bagged and ready
- I showed them online prices for some of the parts
- For the ones they could verify (I think it was all of them) by going to the website and checking, they matched the prices
- Then I paid and took my stuff home
I also got my M1 MBP there (it was 25% off when the M2 models came out).
Please, if you have a Microcenter near you, give them your business. I don't want them to go away. Once all this memory madness dies down, I'm going to go there to build a new gaming rig.
I'm not the same person, but I live in Denver and I go to a store to buy my components. We have a Micro Center here and I enjoy having a physical location I can go to, so I make sure to give them my patronage when I purchase stuff.
In Canada, BC's lower mainland (and parts of Ontario, Alberta, and a few others I can't speak of first-hand) have both Memory Express and Canada Computers. We used to have NCIX as well, though they've left (at least) BC
Unfortunately, the aggregator website is basically no longer updated. So now you have to go door-to-door to check their prices. Also, with all the talk of counterfeits flooding Amazon and whatnot, I'm no longer that comfortable buying expensive stuff from random stores.
But, I guess, if you need a mouse right now and don't insist on the absolute best price, they're still there, yeah.
In practice, I live two streets away from there and yet I do all my shopping online (not that I buy that many parts anymore).
You're lucky then. Hardware availability has increased by orders of magnitude for me — not an exaggeration. Even 10-15 years ago I'd be happy to have access to two motherboards, three CPUs, three video cards — all of them at least a generation old, and Intel + nvidia, nothing else — and cheap noname RAM/SSDs. Over the past 5-8 years I've mostly been able to get access to the same hardware y'all are buying, thanks only to increased pervasiveness of online shopping.
Brick and mortar stores are as useless as they've always been. Even now they're selling old hardware (couple of generations old or older) for more than it was ever worth. For example, one such store not far from me has been trying to offload a 12-year old LCD monitor for several years now, for two times of its original price. I wonder why.
Online shopping is almost 30 years old itself. Before that there was mail order; I have a couple of mid 80s PC mags which are almost entirely adverts for parts.
> It's only recently that an average person could jump on eBay and get assembled low-level electronic module/boards for cheap, and assemble into their project.
People have been tinkering with electronic/electric modules for decades:
> Yes, you'll probably have difficulty walking into a STORE to buy PC components, but only because online shopping has been killing local shops for decades now.
Rather: very commonly the local shops don't stock the parts that I would like to buy, and it is often hard to find out beforehand which kind of very specialized parts the local shop does or doesn't stock.
True story concerning electronic components: I went to some electronic store and wanted to buy a very specialized IC, which they didn't stock. But since the sales clerk could see my passion for tinkering with electronica, he covertly wrote down an address of a different, very small electronics store including instructions which tram line to take to get there (I was rather new to the city), which stocks a lock more stuff that tinkerers love. I guess the sales clerk was as disappointed with the range of goods that his employer has decided to concentrate on as I was. :-)
On the other hand, lots of former stores for PC component now have whole lots of shelf rows with mobile phone cases instead. I get that these have high sales margins, but no thanks ...
Thus, in my opinion it is not online shopping that killed local shops, but the fact that local shops simply don't offer and stock the products that I want to buy.
I feel this vibe. It's part of the reason I invested in a monster home workstation - threadripper 9995wx, 768gb ecc ram, 96gb Blackwell pro. I expect it may easily be the last proper home PC I buy that is scaled in line with the scaling that I grew up with in the 80s and 90s.
Increasingly, what we have are mobile terminals - possibly with a dock for monitor connections - for remote big iron. And the continuous push from governments for more control - seemingly synchronous demands for age gating (i.e. requiring IDs) and chat snooping - males me think this remote hardware won't really be yours before long.
Windows, caught up in the LLM mania, is to be left by the wayside too.
The Terry Davis tinfoil-hat version of me has a theory that this wider industry trend of pushing away consumers from general purpose home computers towards only using remote datacenters from locked down mobile/thin edge devices, is supported by both industries and governments because:
Number one, you become a recurring subscription instead of a one and done deal, making it incredibly profitable for industry
And number two, the government can more easily snoop on your data when it's all in the cloud versus a HDD box in your closet.
Granted, I think we're far away from that future, but I do feel that's the future the powers that be desire and they can use various mechanism to force that behavior, like convenience, and pricing, like for example making PC parts too expensive for consumers and subsidizing cloud and mobile devices to accelerate the move, and once enough consumers only know how to use Apple or Google devices they'll be less inclined to spend more money to build a PC and learn what a Linux is.
I'm cynical enough to not argue against your number two theory.
But the first one? I'm less convinced. I think the underlying assumption is that companies look to make the most money off consumers. I can get behind that.
But just the other day I was looking at a new GPU and considered running a local LLM. I was looking at spending no more than 1000 €. That would get a me 5070 TI 16 GB. Not enough to reasonably run anything interesting. I'm not looking to "tinker with things", I want to actually use them, mostly for coding. A JetBrains subscription would run less than 10 € per month [0], and keep me up to date with the evolution of things. My 5070 would be stuck at its mostly useless level forever, since I don't see requirements going down any time soon. If prices didn't change, I'd need more than 100 months, or 8 years, to break even. And during these 8 years, I'd never have a decent LLM experience by buying it outright.
Sure, this would be a capable GPU for other uses. But in my case, it would just sit around under my desk heating up my room.
---
[0] You'd get a 20 € discount if paying for a whole year upfront (10/month, 100/year). I'm also excluding VAT, since I'd buy this for work and have a VAT registered company.
My suspicion is it’s mostly a result of the slowing pace of computing growth.
When computers go obsolete in 2 years nobody wants them on their balance sheets, when they last 6 sales go down and you get more years of profit from owning them. This hasn’t been an instantaneous transition, but a low shift in how the industry operates.
Whoa that definitely sounds like a monster rig! Out of curiosity, how much did that cost? Blackwell alone can be $10k+! It's definitely an investment, especially since it may soon become a relic, not in terms of specs, but in terms what manufacturers will actually end up making.
A little over 20k CHF. I delegated building (and ensuring the parts work together and testing) to Dalco, a Swiss company that specializes in academic compute clusters and the like. The price was competitive with building it myself.
The CPU is more expensive than the workstation blackwell card. 8x 96GB DIMMs - 96GB was at a corner in the price per GB, 128GB was more expensive per GB - is also more expensive now than the GPU. In fact the prices for that kind of package on ebay seem to be approaching the price of the entire box.
It's not just market forces. Computers are actually too subversive for the powers that be to allow mere citizens to have them.
Give citizens computers and they have encryption. This alone gives them a fighting chance against police, judges, three letter agencies, militaries.
Give citizens computers and they can wipe out entire sectors of the economy via the sheer power of unrestricted copying.
The future is bleak. Computer freedom is dying. Everything then word "hacker" ever stood for is dying. Soon we will no longer have our own systems, we will have no control, we will be mere users of corporation and government systems. Hacking will go extinct, like phreaking.
This fact brings me a profound sadness, like something beautiful is about to perish from this earth. We used to be free...
Alright this might be taking things a little too far… the free software movement is stronger than it’s ever been and hardware is also more accessible than it’s ever been. Losing this one company is simply not a death bell of the entire enthusiast computing market.
I too am very sad. This has been my brand of ram for a long time. I’m also more of a software guy than hardware, but I appreciate being able to have high-performance gaming class systems for my work. It runs circles around much of the stuff my colleagues run, including in deployment in various cloud environments.
This isn't "we are only going to sell products to big companies" nor is it "we are only going to make products that are locked down appliances"... the "consumer" versions of these products are just cheaper unreliable parts that lack the error correction or power loss protection of the enterprise parts, and in a world where we routinely have disks with tens of terabytes of storage in computers with a terabyte of memory, the argument for why "consumer" grade parts can even make sense to exist is pretty weak. It maybe sucks that, in the very short term, there will be a quick uptick in prices, but focusing on the better parts will also help bring their prices down... and, fwiw, they really aren't that bad to begin with: you can build a micro-ATX machine with a Xeon or an EPYC in it for what feels like a pretty reasonable price.
Apple CPUs come with their own GPUs on die and RAM in the chip package now. How much more is going to be put on the chip and assembled in increasingly fine grained processes?
Apple puts the RAM in the chip package because they integrate the GPU, and then they want to be able to have multiple channels to feed the GPU without having that many slots. (Their entry level models also don't have any more memory bandwidth than normal PC laptops and there is no real reason they couldn't use a pair of SODIMMs.)
But low end iGPUs don't need a lot of memory bandwidth (again witness Apple's entry level CPUs) and integrating high end GPUs makes you thermally limited. There is a reason that Apple's fastest (integrated) GPUs are slower than Nvidia and AMD's fastest consumer discrete GPUs.
And even if you are going to integrate all the memory, as might be more justifiable if you're using HBM or GDDR, that only makes it easier to not integrate the CPU itself. Because now your socket needs fewer pins since you're not running memory channels through it.
Alternatively, there is some value in doing both. Suppose you have a consumer CPU socket with the usual pair of memory channels through it. Now the entry level CPU uses that for its memory. The midrange CPU has 8GB of HBM on the package and the high end one has 32GB, which it can use as the system's only RAM or as an L4 cache while the memory slots let you add more (less expensive, ordinary) RAM on top of that, all while using the same socket as the entry level CPU.
And let's apply some business logic to this: Who wants soldered RAM? Only the device OEMs, who want to save eleven cents worth of slots and, more importantly, overcharge for RAM and force you to buy a new device when all you want is a RAM upgrade. The consumer and, more than that, the memory manufacturers prefer slots, because they want you to be able to upgrade (i.e. to give them your money). So the only time you get soldered RAM is when either the device manufacturer has you by the short hairs (i.e. Apple if you want a Mac) or the consumers who aren't paying attention and accidentally buy a laptop with soldered RAM when their competitors are offering similar ones for similar prices but with upgradable slots.
So as usual, the thing preventing you from getting screwed is competition and that's what you need to preserve if you don't want to get screwed.
A high end CPU (e.g. Threadripper) is 350W. A high end GPU (e.g. RTX 5090) is 575W. That's over 900W. You're past the point of die area and now you're trying to get enough airflow in a finite amount of space without needing five pounds of copper or 10000RPM fans.
Separate packages get you more space, separate fans, separate power connectors, etc.
In theory you could do the split in a different way, i.e. do SMP with APUs like the MI300X, and then you have multiple sockets with multiple heatsinks but they're all APUs. But you can see the size of the heatsink on that thing, and it's really a GPU they integrated some CPU cores into rather than the other way around. The power budget is heavily disproportionately the GPU. And it's Enterprise Priced so they get to take the "nobody here cares about copper or decibels" trade offs that aren't available to mortals.
Yes, for sure. But it’s they’ve made it the norm, I don’t think I’m going to buy a more traditional computer again (unified RAM judt works so well for local AI), and the computer markers are going to adopt it completely eventually.
Hard disagree on it working well for local AI - all the memory bandwidth in the world doesn’t matter when the GPU it’s connected to is middling in performance compared to dedicated options. Give me one (or several) 3090/4090/5090 any day of the week over a Mac.
I’ve got an M3 Max with 64G, and can run larger models well than a single 5090. Yes, the GPU isn’t as fast, but I have a lot more memory and my GPUs still don’t suck that badly.
You illustrated my point exactly: yes, a single 32GB 5090 has half the memory of your Mac. But two of them (or three 3090/4090s) have the same total memory as your Mac, are in the same ballpark in price, and would be several times faster at running the same model as your Mac.
And before you bring up the “efficiency” of the Mac: I’ve done the math, and between the Mac being much slower (thus needing more time to run) and the fact that you can throttle the discrete GPUs to use 200-250W each and only lose a few percent in LLM performance, it’s the same price or cheaper to operate the discrete GPUs for the same workload.
I don't know. Can you bring your GPUs on an inter-continental plane trip and play with LLMs on the plane? It isn't really that slow for 70B 4-q models. These are very good CPU/GPUs, and they are only getting better.
Sure, the GPUs sit in my basement and I can connect to them from anywhere in the world.
My point was not that “it isn’t really that slow,” my point is that Macs are slower than dedicated GPUs, while being just as expensive (or more expensive, given the specific scenario) to purchase and operate.
And I did my analysis using the Mac Studio, which is faster than the equivalent MBP at load (and is also not portable). So if you’re using a MacBook, my guess is that your performance/watt numbers are worse than what I was looking at.
The whole point of having it local is not to use the network, or not need it, or not needing to jump the GFW when you are in China.
Ultra is about 2X of the power of a Max, but the Max itself is pretty beefy, and it has more than enough GPU power for the models that you can fit into ~48GB of RAM (what you have available if you are running with 64GB of memory).
If you travel to China, sure, what I’m talking about probably won’t work for you.
In pretty much any other situation, using dedicated GPUs is 1) definitely faster, like 2x the speed or more depending on your use case, and 2) the same cost or possibly cheaper. That’s all I’m saying.
I think this is an incorrect zero-sum mindset. Yes in the short term there is a fixed amount of GPUs, ram etc. But in the long run the money from ai and crypto is invested in building factories, researching new nodes etc. These investments will lead to better and cheaper products trickling down to everyone.
> I wonder if it's possible even for a company to make even 1980s-era electronics without massive capital expenditures? How feasible is it for a small company to manufacture the equivalent of a Motorola 68000 or Intel 386?
Very feasible but it would have to be redesigned around the cell libraries used in newer nodes since the i386 was manufactured on >1um size nodes.
Prototypes would cost around $1-2k per sq mm at 130nm and $10k per sq mm at 28nm (min order usually around 9 sq mm). Legacy nodes are surprisingly cheap, so non-recurring engineering will generally be the bulk of the cost. The i386 was originally >104 sq mm but at 1um, so you could probably fit the entirety of a i386 clone in 1-2 sq mm of a 130nm chip. Packaging it in the original footprint and the lead times on prototypes would probably be more annoying than anything.
At this point it's getting ridiculously easy to justify the acquisition of such manufactory - I wonder if there are existing players in other categories (be it hardware or even software) that are considering about trying to get into this field. I mean - I get it that someone like OVH may not have the caps yet to handle something like this - but I wouldn't be surprised if they could find a good company to partner with - same is for pretty much everywhere.
I'm really wondering about hardware as well but today's tech is surprising in it's scale and requirements - I wouldn't be surprised if we could do mid 70's tech as hobbyist today - but further than that...
This is a classic slippery slope fallacy. Micron's reversible exit from one of its businesses is clearly does not signify the end of the PC era. As long as the demand for DIY PCs persists, there will be suppliers providing the products needed. If you follow the industrial memory market, you probably know that it is currently experiencing a severe supply shortage. I think Micron's decision simply reflects the current market situation.
I think you should split the problem into hardware and software parts:
- Hardware
We won't have any hardware without secure boot and we won't have the signing keys. Signed firmware is required for everything x86, everything Apple, everything mobile, probably everything ARM too. Rockchip ARM could still boot without signed firmware last time I checked a few years ago, but I'm not sure about the newer CPUs.
[ Short story: I have an Asus Tinkerboard S. It came with an unprovisioned emmc onboard. Just empty. A few years ago I made the mistake of trying the official OS from Asus. It automatically set up the CPU to boot from emmc first and provisioned the emmc with boot0, boot1 and rpmb. These partitions can't be written and can't be removed. Their creation is a one-way operation according to emmc standards. Now I have to keep the emmc masked because it won't boot otherwise. So beware of any devices with emmc. ]
You can, of course, use MCUs for general computing today. ESP32 is pretty powerful - it's probably 4 times faster than a 486, certainly more powerful than an i386 or a 68000 you suggested. The big problem here is memory, graphics and software. No MMU requires a completely new OS. Linux (uclinux) could boot at some point without a MMU, but it won't fit in 540KB memory. MCUs can access external memory (PSRAM), but via slow buses and it's paged. Also there are no hi-speed buses for graphics.
There is some hope coming from the chinese CPUs. AFAIK, they don't support secure boot at all. I'm planning on getting one as soon as their proprietary firmware/UEFI/ACPI and be replaced by uboot.
- Software
It's useless to make a i386 or 68000 today. There's nothing but old software for them. Not even linux has i386 support anymore. This is an even bigger problem than hardware. Much, much bigger. To have any hope of a minimally useful computing platform, we need a working browser on that platform. This is an absolute requirement. There's no way around this. I had to abandon Win98, then WinXP, and soon Win7 because of no working browser.
Linux is generally usable today, but as soon as Linus retires, it's going to fall into the same user-lockdown like all others. The basic infrastructure is all in place: secure boot, root login basically deprecated, access rights and security settings administered by the distro and package manager, not the user, no per-program firewall rules, automatic updates as standard, surveillance infrastructure via udev (hardware events), dbus (software events) and gtk accessibility (input events), etc. Linus fought hard to keep them outside the kernel, but he won't live forever.
To have any hope of privacy and/or freedom our personal computers we need to turn the security paradigm completely on it's head: users are not the threat - programs are. The user should login as root (or system account in Windows) and every program, including services, should run under their own limited accounts with no access to the rest of the system, especially user's files.
Of all OSs today, Gentoo portage is probably the easiest package manager to tweak into creating accounts and groups for programs instead of users and Gobo Linux has the best separation of programs in it's filesystem. I'd love to see a merger of these two.
Hobbyist computing? Ha! First get a browser working.
I'm more optimistic as I think about SBC manufacturers, plenty of other manufacturers wanting to service this market, and companies like Framework (warts and all - I don't think they're perfect) didn't really exist a couple of decades ago.
I'm actually a big fan of Apple hardware (when you crunch the numbers for base spec machine and when you're able to get discounts, the price/performance for the half-life you get is incredible), but I'm also planning to get back into home-brew builds a bit more over the next year: I need to build a NAS, a home lab, I might look at a gaming rig... and I'm far from alone.
So yes, it's a niche market, but a profitable one for a lot of players, and one that Micron will be glad is still available to them when the data centre bubble bursts.
I don't think any SBCs will be a replacement for quite some time. At what point will there be a raspberry pi with 128 GB of RAM and a 16/32 core? That's what I'm running right now, and I really hope I don't have to downgrade in the future.
Yes I guess we've reached a point where it's harder for individuals to grow their hardware or even maintain it. I'm not sure the huge investment in servers for AI is going to be good for companies either. We're honestly in a science-fiction novel right now, I have no idea what's going to happen politicaly with AI.
I don't really believe in AGI if that's what they're going for, but hey they'll get something close to that.
It’s never been easier to be a hobbyist or a small electronics company. Honestly I don’t know what you’re talking about.
Micron is exiting this business because it’s a commodity. It’s everywhere. There are numerous companies producing parts in this space. Their investments are better spent on other things.
> I wonder if it's possible even for a company to make even 1980s-era electronics without massive capital expenditures? How feasible is it for a small company to manufacture the equivalent of a Motorola 68000 or Intel 386?
I don’t know what your threshold is for massive capital expenditure, but you could get a tapeout for a 68000 clone easier than at any point in history. There are now even takeout services that will let you get a little piece of a shared wafer for experimenting with making your own chips for very low prices. There are even accessible tools available now.
The hobby and small scale situation is better now than at any point in history. I don’t know how anyone can be sad about it unless they’re ignoring reality and only speculating based on the most cynical online takes about how the future is going to do a complete 180.
> Micron is exiting this business because it’s a commodity. It’s everywhere. There are numerous companies producing parts in this space. Their investments are better spent on other things.
Numerous as in plenty? Or basically three? Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron make up over 90% of the market share of DRAM. Micron saying goodbye to the consumer market basically leaves us with yet another duopoly.
Crucial winding down doesn't mean that there's less flash fabs in the world, just like there are plenty of DRAM companies that sell to the consumer market that don't have their own flash fabs (Corsair, Gskill, Geil, etc). Those consumer oriented brands bought flash from Micron (not crucial), SK (also doesn't have a consumer facing DRAM brand), and Samsung. That's just as true today as it will be post Feb 2026 when Crucial closes it's doors because Micron selling components to say, Corsair, is an Enterprise transaction from Micron's perspective (B2B), even if the ultimate end product is a consumer oriented one.
Technically you're right, they do. They don't really serve the US Consumer market (anymore) though. There's no (or comparatively very few) established sales channels with consumer retail vendors by SKHynix themselves in the USDM. It's all reseller stuff, often plucked from OEM devices (prebuilts, workstations, etc).
What you linked is OEM RAM. The enterprise market still uses lots of UDIMM's, even though it certainly favors RDIMMs. Yes, it's DDR UDIMM's that are compatible with consumer PC's. But it's not sold like Samsung or Crucial consumer-oriented memory is, at least in the US market. Check the availability of it compared to say Crucial or Samsung. It's virtually non-existant. Check the comments on that very site as well, note how many people are talking about getting them from pre-builts (aka OEM/SI). Note, SK selling UDIMMs to SI/OEM's for consumer products is not a "consumer transaction" to SK, that's a B2B enterprise sale to another company from SK's perspective.
So technically yes, but practically no, not in the US they don't. Elsewhere I'm unsure, but SK has been deprioritizing consumer DRAM sales for a while now, just like Micron.
Micron cuts off the business because there is a much more profitable place to deploy their capacity. The real reason Micron has a resource crunch that forces them to exit a steady business is that enterprise now places a huge premium on things didn't use to be that important.
This massive tide floats all boats and there will be smaller players filling the gap. With slightly worse chips at first yes, but historically DRAM had been a cyclical businesss where new manufacturing capabilities were brought online en masse after a boom.
Here is a video of Sam Aloof who now runs Atomic Semi with Jim Keller. It likely took thousands of dollars to make his own custom Z2 chip that only has 1200 transistors and its nowhere near the likes of the 68k or Intel 386. They might have more advanced stuff now at Atomic Semi but they haven't announced anything
You should look into what’s happening with DIY robotics because it looks eerily similar to what I experienced in the early to mid 90s with PC hardware and software
And you can do way more than just host a bbs with robots
It is interesting that your comment made no mention of single board computers (SBC) like Raspberry Pi. These are the more likely future of hobbyist computing as the price to develop custom PCBs is lower than ever. Yes, you need to buy the components, but it will come a day where you shop by parts then some LLM arranges the parts on an SBC. Finally, you review the the PCB layout, and click a button to place an order with PCBWay or a competitor. X days later a tiny board appears at your house exactly built to spec and runs Linux. The coolest part: The cost is so low that millions and millions of more (young) people can join the hobbyist computing party.
Wow. They're not selling off the business, they're totally exiting it.
This is a big loss. Crucial offered a supply chain direct from Micron. Most other consumer DRAM sources pass through middlemen, where fake parts and re-labeled rejects can be inserted.
> They're not selling off the business, they're totally exiting it.
From what I understand, OpenAI just bought out a significant proportion of the capacity of Samsung and Hynix, which is the big reason prices just spiked. They're two of the three DRAM manufacturers, Micron being the third.
That gives us a good idea as to what Micron is doing here: They have contracts with their other customers to supply DRAM at whatever price they previously negotiated, but now prices are higher, and they don't have to honor supply contracts with Crucial because they own it. So they're taking all the supply that would have gone to Crucial and selling it to the high bidder instead.
Spinning off the brand in that context doesn't work, because then "Crucial" would need to come with supply contracts or they'd have no access to supply and have nothing to sell. Moreover, the supply constraint isn't likely to be permanent, and whenever prices come back down then Micron would still own the brand and could start selling under it again, which they couldn't if they sold it.
> Moreover, the supply constraint isn't likely to be permanent, and whenever prices come back down then Micron would still own the brand and could start selling under it again, which they couldn't if they sold it.
Why not just announce limited supply, then, instead of exiting?
This seems like a "automaker invests more in financing arm, because it's the most profitable" concentration mistake, towards an industry with wide concerns over intermediate term financial sustainability.
> Why not just announce limited supply, then, instead of exiting?
Because it would be a lie. The amount of supply they're planning to allocate to Crucial in the near future is zero. Keeping the website up as a place you can go and order nothing would only mislead people into thinking they should come back in a few days when they're restocked, when that isn't going to happen anytime soon.
> This seems like a "automaker invests more in financing arm, because it's the most profitable" concentration mistake, towards an industry with wide concerns over intermediate term financial sustainability.
Their business is manufacturing DRAM. Also selling it at retail makes sense most of the time because they get the retailer's margin too, but it doesn't right now, and that's the side business.
The announcement doesn’t say that they’re selling the Crucial brand. And it’s a valuable brand. So, I agree, they will wait for the bubble to pop and then start it back up. I assume the higher prices let them keep the operation around in mothballs and the employees working elsewhere in the company.
They are rerouting RAMs for consumers to enterprise for server build up - for higher margins I’m sure. MAG7 will happily pay more but poor consumers like us can’t - this is more bad news for us.
Wondering if we're going to have a situation in the future where we end up having to buy the hand-me-downs from industry after they're done with them (and thus kind of outdated tech)? Kind of seems like the days of building your own PC are numbered.
I prefer to just not think about it and blame charging my car. Also in Cali.
I don't know if I'd buy any of the servers or older computers but the internal components are pretty dang good. Stuff like hard drives, network cards, hbas, that's the real money saver right there.
Even the hand-me-down situation has been changing. I remember in the 2010s being able to shop at Weird Stuff in Sunnyvale, which was a treasure trove of old enterprise equipment, a heavenly place for a retrocomputing enthusiast like me. I even bought accessories for my NeXTstation there! The shop kept the good retro stuff in the back away from the general public for people who asked kindly about retro gear :). I saw some 1980s and 1990s classic Macs, too, in the restricted area.
Unfortunately Weird Stuff is a thing of the past, though this had less to do with a reduced supply of surplus and more to do with Silicon Valley’s high real estate prices. Thankfully there are still good stuff to be found at e-waste recyclers, but if more companies are relying on the cloud, and if more devices are integrated boards with everything soldered on (such as most modern Apple hardware), the hand-me-downs of the future are going to be harder to work on than today’s hand-me-downs. I’m just an average software guy whose hardware experience is limited to a graduate-level computer architecture course and building PCs. I can talk about caching and branch prediction, but I’ve never picked up a soldering iron in my life; I’m no Louis Rossmann.
Hyperscalers and even "smaller" shops by comparison, such as CoreWeave, TerraWulf, Lambda.ai.
So yes, enterprise customers doing AI data centre buildouts. They are going all out for them at the expense of their consumer business due to supply constraints.
I don't see this situation changing for many years to come. Would indirectly affect the cost of any electronics that has storage or memory on it. Would be interesting to see how Samsung plays this one out with their limited inventory - they make RAM + SSDs, use it themselves on their phones, laptops, etc. Also supply to consumer and business customers. Interesting times.
Have you ever confused BlackRock with Blackstone? Despite their similar
sounding names, these two financial powerhouses represent distinct approaches
to investment management.
Major news organizations and sector researchers describe the claim as
unfounded and often rooted in confusion between BlackRock Inc. and the
private-equity firm Blackstone Inc.
Thanks boss, they were the same company for a while and then got spun off. There is so much confusion that AI even has a hard time keeping them straight if you aren’t careful.
Anyway it doesn’t matter the name for the purpose of my argument. And lol at “unfounded conspiracy theory” it’s only a “conspiracy” that Blackrock is buying homes (crucially, no one is actually suggesting that, except the people who are confused between Blackrock and Blackstone), because Blackstone definitely is buying homes.
Should countries have a upper limit on the ratio of server:client memory supply chain capacity? If no one can buy client hardware to access the cloud, how would cloud providers survive after driving their customers to extinction?
It shouldn't be possible for one holding company (OpenAI) to silently buy all available memory wafer capacity from Samsung and SK Hynix, before the rest of civilization even has the opportunity to make a counteroffer.
What if we realize that 8 GB of memory is actually a tremendous amount, and experience a resurgence in desktop operating systems as people begin to prioritize memory for productive computation again instead of using up a gigabyte for a chat client?
> Should countries have an upper limit on the ratio of server:client memory supply chain capacity? If no one can buy client hardware to access the cloud, how would cloud providers survive after driving their customers to extinction?
You mean a central planning, command and control economy? There is a lot of history of countries trying these things and they don’t have the outcome you want.
DRAM manufacturing is a global business. If one country starts imposing purchase limits for whatever reason, the DRAM consumers are going to laugh as they move their data centers and operations to another country that doesn’t try to impose their laws on a global market.
> It shouldn't be possible for one holding company (OpenAI) to silently buy all available memory wafer capacity from Samsung and SK Hynix, before the rest of civilization even has the opportunity to make a counteroffer.
Good news: That’s not how markets work. DRAM manufacturers don’t list a price and then let OpenAI buy it all up. Contracts are negotiated. Market prices fluctuate.
No supplier of anything is going to let all of their inventory disappear to one buyer without letting the market have a chance to bid the price higher.
Had Samsung known SK Hynix was about to commit a similar chunk of supply — or vice-versa — the pricing and terms would have likely been different. It’s entirely conceivable they wouldn’t have both agreed to supply such a substantial part of global supply if they had known more...but at the end of the day - OpenAI did succeed in keeping the circles tight, locking down the NDAs, and leveraging the fact that these companies assumed the other wasn’t giving up this much wafer volume simultaneously…in order to make a surgical strike on the global RAM supply chain..
The Chinese government directed CXMT to convert production from DDR4 to DDR5 as soon as the company was able. The order was said to have been given in the 4th quarter of 2024, and the price transition changed from a decrease to an increase in the middle of March 2025.. A wholesale conversion from DDR4 to DDR5 would probably be very expensive to perform, and would thus be unusual for a company that was focused on profitability. As a government-owned company, CXMT does not need to consistently turn a profit, and this was a factor in the government’s decision to suddenly switch from DDR4 to DDR5.
Any market where the prices are negotiated is a bad market.
That means that it is a market where there is an asymmetry of power between vendors and buyers, caused by the fact that the vendors know more than the buyers, i.e. only the vendors know the right price for their products.
Therefore in such a market there are winners and losers among the buyers. Those buyers who buy quantities great enough to have negotiating power and who have knowledge about the right prices can buy at those prices, while the other buyers are fooled by the vendors into paying excessive prices.
The fact that the big-volume buyers deserve discounts has nothing to do with price negotiation. In a good market, where there is enough competition, the volume discounts can be public and available for anyone.
Also, a public auction for a product where the demand exceeds the offer has nothing to do with a secret price negotiation.
Any vendor who promotes price negotiation is a vendor who desires to steal money from its customers, instead of performing a mutually advantageous exchange.
Antitrust laws don't work because they're subjective and are enforced by political appointees.
The simpler solution is a tax on scale -- a graduated corporate revenue tax, aggregated across any group of entities which meet the common control [1] criteria. Then it's just a tax, and you simply have to collect it. Very little wiggle room.
If splitting your company in half wouldn't impair any of its lines of business, the CEO has a powerful financial incentive (lower tax rates on the two halves) to do so.
I don't think that works in the situation of fabs. They are big and expensive pieces of tech with the latest fabs being the most expensive to construct.
You can't exactly break up a chip manufacturer when they have just 1 or 2 plants tooled for the latest memory.
IMO, recognizing chip fabrication as a national security asset and turning it into a public corporation would be the better way to go. Let the likes of intel/amd/or micron continue developing chips. But also, take control of the most expensive and risky part of chip manufacturing to make sure we don't fall behind due to corporate budget cuts. You also keep and continue to build expertise in a vital part of modern society.
Is that a joke? Socializing important industries has always been a disaster. Government run organizations have never been able to innovate on a sustained basis.
Lots have even in America. 2 famous ones are the NIH and the National Laboratories.
In fact, the largest, most advanced, and best known semiconductor manufacturer is primarily government owned: TSMC.
The only thing that gets in the way of their ability to sustain innovation is administrations hostile to publicly funded research.
Outside of innovative industries, there are plenty of examples of important government ran organizations aren't "disasters". Some of which can only be effectively ran via government. For example, healthcare.
What's been a disaster is relying on privatization and capitalism to solve all problems. That's the system of government we had in the dark ages.
Not only that, there was government-led chip research in Taiwan before TSMC (ITRI). And it was going nowhere. If Morris had stayed in ITRI, Taiwan would probably look like a developing country whose primary value is to host the US military bases today.
TSMC's largest shareholder remains the Taiwanese government. And it would not have been a thing without the direct intervention of the government through ITRI.
It would not exist without the government's direct intervention.
I mean, to take that one step further, if the underlying process-node technology (e.g. EUV) were nationalized, then you an entire nation-state's budget (and ability to get cheap loans) could be thrown at the problem of rapid horizontal buildout of fab capacity. Economics similar to nuclear power generation.
Exactly. And even if it ultimately doesn't turn a profit (which, who knows, it probably will turn a profit) you've still created a pretty favorable circumstance for chip manufacturers.
There's a reason why basically only Intel does inhouse fabrication and even they have had to rely out outsourcing it.
What do you think antitrust laws are going to do? Force Micron to continue producing consumer DIMMs in a heavily commoditized market? Stop server builders from building servers? Stop companies from building data centers around the globe?
Monopolies never last in the tech industry. IBM had a monopoly on mainframes. And they even kind of still do, but now no one cares because disruptive innovations in other computing platforms have made mainframes nearly irrelevant. Now startups like OpenAI and Perplexity are using disruptive innovations to rapidly make Google's traditional web search business irrelevant.
OpenAI is having to pull insane amounts of funding to even stay alive.
Google is about to lay waste to everyone.
Google is using their nation state wealth to once again dominate a new sector. Wealth gained from unfair monopolization of search and web and mobile.
Google changed the notion of the URL bar to search. They control every ingress. Now, if you want to access a name brand registered trademark, it flows through Google search. Brands have to pay extortion money to Google to keep others from sniping their rightful name brand.
Google gets even more money because there's a bidding war.
Google pays to put themselves as middle men in front of nearly every web access.
Google doesn't just have a monopoly on this, it's downright unethical and should be tried in court or have laws written to make this illegal.
I have no love for OpenAI, but how do they even compete with the hundreds of billions of dollars this nets?
> Monopolies never last in the tech industry
Google is an invasive species in the ecosystem. They're killing viable competition by engorging themselves and taxing non-productively.
Capitalism should be hard. It should be live or die regardless of size or scale. Google is barely breaking a sweat.
These suggestions seem to me part of an absurd struggle against basic market economics.
This isn’t antitrust because the companies aren’t reselling it to you at a much higher price after cornering the market (cough cough Ticketmaster & scalpers).
> These suggestions seem to me part of an absurd struggle against basic market economics
Perhaps the limited competition caused by 25+ memory manufacturers consolidating down to a 3-member cartel is a sign of market failure. I use "cartel" deservedly, as the RAM manufacturers were found guilty of price-fixing in multiple times in the past.
And they're effectively saying they've had enough of running call centers, tracing lost parcels, weirdo customers who show up at the factory, running marketing campaigns etc.
A consumer facing business is a lot of overhead, and since more and more hardware now has soldered ram, it is a shrinking business too.
Shrinking businesses are super hard to run - it's far easier to grow a business than shrink it whilst maintaining the same margins.
> And they're effectively saying they've had enough of running call centers, tracing lost parcels, weirdo customers who show up at the factory, running marketing campaigns etc.
When this is a company's core complaint, then the usual strategy for getting out of the D2C business (without losing D2C revenue) is finding a channel partner willing to absorb the dealflow. I.e. turning your B2C channel into a single B2B(2C) enterprise customer.
> Most other consumer DRAM sources pass through middlemen, where fake parts and re-labeled rejects can be inserted.
Large DIMM vendors are definitely not buying through middlemen.
Any vendor consuming a lot of RAM chips over a threshold will be negotiating contracts with RAM chip manufacturers. It’s not that hard even at medium scale.
and when the AI boom pops, Micron is going to lose out on the consumer market. This is a horrible business decision. All they had to do was increase the price.
I think others will pick up the slack. The Chinese seem to be pretty good at producing competent Flash/DRAM products (I don't think they are behind that much). They also don't seem to be all in on the AI craze, so maybe we will buy their stuff if nothing else?
Elpida was purchased by Micron after the financial crisis (they bought it out of bankdruptcy for a swan song in 2013). Much of the Micron DRAM you might buy is made at the former Elipida fab in Hiroshima.
With ram, you can verify pretty quick what you are getting.
I really wouldn't want to buy any NAND vendor until a bunch of years after they build a reputation. It's too scary to get a decent bargain SSD drive that actually oh secretly dies really early, doesn't actually have anywhere near the endurance it claims.
Yep. I've followed Micron since before Y2k. I've seen the ups and downs of their stock. Seen a CEO literally crash and burn (RIP).
This is a mistake. The consumer business is a bet , which they excel at. Yes, its not printing money right now, but it is an option. Exiting the consumer business will mean they may miss insights into the next hot consumer trend.
The game for large companies like this should be to keep small bets going and literally, just survive. That's what Micron was doing, that's what NVIDIA did for a better part of a decade. Now that both are printing money.
Yet, Micron has decided its retiring from placing more bets. Mistake.
What is there to sell? The brand itself has value I guess, but that "Direct Access" goes out the door the second they sell it, so there's no value specifically in that to anyone else.
Crucial is primarily a Marketing and Support company, they didn't really make anything although there was a small engineering team that did DIMM/Module binning, but mostly contracted out heatsinks to glue to Micron DIMMs. On the SSD side of things, they used Phison controllers with Micron flash, just like pretty much any other consumer SSD that isn't Samsung or SK/Solidigm.
Corsair, Gskill, Geil, etc don't buy components from Crucial, they get them Micron. Crucial closing their doors has no bearing on that as far as we can tell.
They probably considered dumping it on some Private Equity firm or something, but likely decided to keep the IP in case they decide to resurrect it in the future should the market landscape change.
It sucks that they're winding down crucial, but it makes sense. Frankly I'm surprised they didn't pull the trigger sooner, and by sooner I mean years sooner.
I guess no Chinese interest wanted to buy it, to jumpstart a favored brand that's a step above random-name when people are picking which to buy on Amazon. Or wasn't willing to pay enough for it.
Maybe they keep the brand to resurrect it some years in the future when the surge of data centers has faded away and they'll have to find custumers between consumers.
I feel like the "democratization of technology" is on the back slide. For the longest time, we had more and more access to high end technology at very reasonable price points.
Now it feels like if you're not Facebook, Google, OpenAI, etc. etc. computation isn't for you.
I hope this is just a blip, but I think there is a trend over the past few years.
I also hope its just a blip, but I don't actually think it is.
The democratization of technology was something that had the power to break down class barriers. Anyone could go get cheap, off the shelf hardware, a book, and write useful software & sell it. It became a way to take back the means of production.
Computing being accessible and affordable for everyone = working class power.
That is why its backsliding. Those in power want the opposite, they want to keep control. So we don't get to have open devices, we get pushed to thin clients & locked boot loaders, and we lose access to hardware as it increasingly only gets sold B2B (or if they do still sell to consumers, they just raise prices until most are priced out).
When the wealthy want something, that something becomes unavailable to everyone else.
Yes, and that's a part of the appeal to companies like Google. They've climbed the ladder, and now they're pulling it up behind them so others can't climb up to catch them.
Definitely. And there's a tendency for individuals and particularly corporations to pull up the ladder behind them. They know that leaving things accessible means they could face major competition 5 years down the road. So they do what they can to prevent that.
Exactly! Apple wouldn't have existed without access to the MOS 6502 and other electronics, which allowed Woz to carry out his dream of building a personal computer. Microsoft might not have existed without the Altair 8800. Many 1990s and 2000s web startups got off the ground with affordable, available hardware, whether it's hand-me-down RISC workstations or commodity x86 PCs.
Granted, to be fair, many of today's startups and small businesses are made possible by AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and other cloud services. It is sometimes cheaper to rent a server than to own one, and there are fewer system administration chores. However, there's something to be said about owning your own infrastructure rather than renting it out, and I think a major risk of compute power being concentrated by just a few major players is the terms of computation being increasingly dictated by those players.
> Those in power want the opposite, they want to keep control. So we don't get to have open devices, we get pushed to thin clients & locked boot loaders
While it's undeniable that MAFIAA et al have been heavily lobbying for that crap... the problem is, there are lots of bad actors out there as well.
I 'member the 00s/10s, I made good money cleaning up people's computers after they fell for the wrong porn or warez site. Driver signatures and Secure Boot killed entire classes of malware persistence.
Is this not just "with freedom comes responsibility" applied to technology? Often the freedom to do something means that, when given that sovereignty and missing the requisite experience, that means you also end up with the freedom to harm yourself (whether through a misunderstanding of a danger or just simple error.)
Do we want to accept that as a potential consequence, or have someone else choose for us what consequences we are allowed to accept?
> Do we want to accept that as a potential consequence, or have someone else choose for us what consequences we are allowed to accept?
Unfortunately, I think the old guard here is dying out and the majority want someone else choosing for them, which is why all the age verification & chat control-like bills have broad bipartisan support.
I'm in the "with freedom comes responsibility" camp. Obviously we should build secure systems, but our devices shouldn't be impenetrable by their own user. The "security" we are getting now is just security against the user having the freedom to do as they wish with their devices and software.
The cultural zeitgeist surrounding internet and computing freedom has changed to be in favor of more control and censorship. Not sure how we can stop it.
I don't see how it can be a blip if AI actually turns out to be successful. They'll likely gobble up any lose hardware for their datacenters until only scraps are left or the AI bubble pops if AGI isn't achieved in the next few years and stock values fall off a cliff
It's likely that all the mega cloud and AI companies want regular people forced to go to them for solutions and buying up any companies that might pose a potential for allowing that. In response they will use a small percentage of the trillions being thrown at them to eliminate those companies that allow for self hosting or mid tier providers to thrive.
Software has been moving in the right direction. Tons of open source projects for every application imaginable. But hardware has gotten more closed. You can't replace batteries in phones, they get pre-loaded with state level spyware, laptops today have about the same hard drive space as 10 years ago to drive cloud usage, and GPUs and now memory seem to be becoming increasingly cost prohibitive for consumers.
I'm not a fan of ultra big tech, but I don't get the concern here exactly.
What high end technology do you want that you can't get?
In the 90s, I paid nearly $10k for a high-end PC. Today, I can get something like an Nvidia RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell for ~$8k, with 24,064 CUDA cores and 96 GB RAM, that's capable of doing LLM inference at thousands of tokens per second.
I realize the prices from this example are a bit steep for many people, but it's not out of line historically with high-end hardware - in fact the $10k from the 90s would be something like $25k today.
My point is I don't see how "if you're not Facebook, Google, OpenAI, etc. etc. computation isn't for you." I'd love an example if I'm missing something.
A little foil hat conspiracy i supposed, but the big companies saw nobodies become incredibly wealthy over the last decade, and this is the new companies protecting their position by limiting technology.
Crucial was always a brand that I associated with quality, and I used their memory to upgrade several MacBooks back when it was still possible to upgrade the memory on MacBooks.
That being said, the only SSD I’ve ever had fail on me was from Crucial.
In recent builds I have been using less expensive memory from other companies with varying degrees of brand recognizability, and never had a problem. And the days of being able to easily swap memory modules seem numbered, anyway.
I've long (very, very long) been a storage snob. Originally via the IBM UltraStar drives, and continued with the Intel SSDs. Even with good backups, a drive failure is often a pain in the ass. Slightly less so with RAID.
IBM really locked me in on the Ultrastar back in the mid '90s. Sure, it has proven itself to be a great product. But some of the first ones I bought, one of the drives arrived failed. I called the vendor I bought it from and they said they wouldn't replace it, I'd have to get a refurb from IBM. So I called IBM, when I told them I had just bought it they said I needed to call the place I bought it from because otherwise I'd get a refurb. I explained I had already called them. "Oh, who did you buy it from?" I told them. "Can you hold on a minute?" ... "Hi, I've got [NAME] on the line from [VENDOR] and they'll be happy to send you a replacement."
That's because the SSD business was little more than a carbon copy of most other consumer non Samsung or SK/Solidigm brands. They've been phison controller with some cheap NAND flash with a different coat of paint for generations now, or in the case of the portable/external ones, that plus a 3rd party enclosure and IO module that they'd contracted out. In terms of hardware, this sub-business-unit was no more "Micron" than Corsair is (Support may be a different story). Enterprise SSD's and Consumer ones diverged years ago, and today are about as different from one another as GPU's are from CPU's.
The only real difference between Crucial RAM and Micron's unbuffered RAM was which brand's sticker they put on it, with some binning and QA on the higher-end enthusiast SKU's and a heatsink. This sub-business-unit was almost entirely redundant to Micron.
> And the days of being able to easily swap memory modules seem numbered, anyway.
I keep seeing people say this in threads across platforms discussing this news, and it baffles me. Why?
All the higher margin non consumer markets are moving away from socketed ram for integrated ram for performance and manufacturing cost reasons. It’s hard to see what the motivation for spending some of their limited foundry time on products that are only of interest to lower margin direct consumers if this keeps up
> All the higher margin non consumer markets are moving away from socketed ram for integrated ram
Absolutely, positively, wildly untrue. Just because there is a boom in memory-on-package designs doesn't mean the market is moving away from expandable/socketable memory. The opposite is true. It's supplementing it because we're trying to cram as much ram as possible into things, not because we're trying to reduce it.
There has never been more demand for RAM. Many of the memory-on-compute/memory-on-package designs are going into systems with socketable ram. Those systems btw have never had more memory channels/slots available. Intel just cancelled their 8 Channel SKU's for their upcoming Xeon parts because their partners pretty much all universally told them they'd be buying the 16 channel variants instead, because demand is so high, and that's not unique to Intel. AMD and Ampere are seeing and responding to similar demands, by continuing to increase their supported memory channels/memory capacities.
> and manufacturing cost reasons.
This generally increases price, even when using things like LPDDR, especially as the capacity of the packaged RAM goes up (the fact that this can't be replaced makes yield issues a big concern whereas in socketable RAM it's effectively a non-issue). There are ways that it can be used for cost effectiveness, but those applications are generally not "high margin" nor are cost-sensitive applications of this deploying a lot of SKU's to cater the wide variety of demand in type/speed/capacity (eg (LP)DDR vs GDDR vs HBM and all the variations therein, not to mention buffered vs unbuffered, Load reduced, computational, storage class etc), because even with the chiplet/modular production of CPU's, that is not a linear scale up of cost-to-manufacture (or engineer) as complexity goes up. This isn't like Cores on a CPU where you can just disable some if there's a manufacturing defect, you need to swap memory controllers and scale qty of those controllers and use different kinds of DMA interlinks depending on the ram type (can't just swap HBM for DDR and expect everything to work)
For most performance oriented products, the memory-on-package thing is a new layer of RAM that sits between the cache of the compute unit (CPU/DPU/Whatever) and traditional socketable DRAM, not as a replacement for it. There are very real thermal and packaging limits though. For example, how are you going to install 2TB of DDR directly onto a CPU package? How are you going to cool it when teh available surface area is a fraction of what it is with socketable RAM and you're theoretically hitting it even harder by leveraging the lower latency while placing it so close to the compute that's using it, that even if the RAM is idle it's still subject to far more heatsoak than equivalent socketable RAM is?
This is further substantiated by the demand for things like CXL which allows you to further expand RAM by installing it to the PCIe bus (and thus, through things like RDMA/RoCE, through the network fabric) like you would any other PCIe add in card, which is leading to an explosion in something called Storage Class Memory (SCM), so that we can deploy more socketable/expandable/replacable RAM to systems/clusters/fabrics than ever before.
I could go on and on actually, but I'm not trying to attack you, and this post is long enough. If interested, I could continue to expand on this. But the point is, memory-on-package designs aren't replacing socketable memory in high margin markets they're supplementing it, as a direct result of demand for RAM being so astronomical and there being multiple hard limits on how much RAM you can cram into a single package effectively. The last thing people want is less RAM or less choice in RAM. The RAM itself may evolve (eg SOCAMM, Computational Memory, MCR, SCM etc), but socketable/replaceable/expandable memory is not going away.
EDIT:
> It’s hard to see what the motivation for spending some of their limited foundry time on products that are only of interest to lower margin direct consumers if this keeps up
This is a fair concern, but entirely independent of the first part of your comment. Worth noting that just because Samsung is the only game in town left selling consumer DIMMs (at least in the US), doesn't mean that the consumer market isn't getting supplied. Micron, Samsung and SK are all still selling DRAM components to consumer facing brands (like Corsair, Gskill, Geil). It's entirely possible they may reconsider that, but consumers aren't the only ones with volume demand for DDR4/DDR5 DRAM UDIMM's. OEM's like DEll, HP, etc and various SI's all have considerable volume demand for them as well, and combined with consumer demand, does place considerable pressure on those companies not to fully exit supplying the market - even if they chose to only do it indirectly going forward.
My most memorable RAM upgrade was adding 512KB to an Atari ST in 1988. Had to suck the solder out of 16x(16+2) factory flow-soldered through-holes, then solder in the 16 individual RAM chips and their decoupling capacitors. I was a teenager and hadn’t soldered before. I had no one to show me how, so I got a book from the library with pictures.
Was a huge relief that the machine come up successfully. But then it would lock up when it got warm, until I found the dodgy joint.
Was a very stressful afternoon, but a confidence builder!
I bet there are many people whose sole experience inside a computer is popping in some DIMMs. I’ll be kinda sad if those days are also gone. On the other hand, super integrated packages like Apple’s M-series make for really well-performing computers.
And before that I duct-taped the insanely large 16KB RAM extension (from 1KB), so it doesn't reset with the slightest movement, on my Sinclair ZX81, which I've also assembled and soldered from a kit :)
I also had a Crucial SSD fail. I believe it was either 256GB or 512GB SATA, around 2013-2014. Right around the same time OCZ released a batch of SSDs that were so bad they went out of business, despite being a leader in performance. It was a fairly large story about defective silicon. Good lesson in not being too loyal to brand names.
What a disaster for Micron. Having a consumer facing brand is 'crucial' for brand awareness. Micron is the smallest of the big 3 in DRAM and the only one in America. They're going to be swallowed up and replaced by CXMT.
The brand aware "consumers" are really just DIY PC builders, which is relatively a small number. Enterprise DRAM business is doing so great that Micron just doesn't see the consumer market is worth chasing.
This is bad for consumers though since DRAM prices are skyrocketing and now we have one less company making consumer DRAM.
The people who occupy the b2b ram buying kind of jobs are not aliens from another planet. Brand awareness in consumer markets, especially ones that are so closely tied to people's jobs (nerds gonna nerd) is going to have a knock on effect. It's not like a clothing brand or something.
Sometimes reputation and suchlike in the consumer market can directly boost your B2B business. Consumers and professionals alike will look at backblaze drive reliability figures.
Other times professionals will sneer at a consumer product, or a consumer product can diminish your brand. Nobody's wiring a data centre with Monster Cables, and nobody's buying Cisco because they were impressed by Linksys.
Yes, but the consumer brand has to have a good reputation for that to pan out positively in B2B. Crucial has a decent reputation, but the problem is that there hasn't been any innovation in the consumer DRAM market for 2 decades that wasn't driven by/copied from the enterprise sector. The difference between a Crucial DIMM and a Micron Unbuffered dimm is which brands sticker they put on it, and maybe a heatsink and tighter binning/QA. That's not unique to Micron/Crucial. Aside from "Moar RGB", what innovation has happened in this space in the consumer side of things that isn't just a mirror of the enterprise side (eg DDR4 to DDR5)? XPO/XMP? That's Intel/AMD dictating things to DRAM companies. So what impression really are people meant to carry over from Crucial to Micron in this instance? How is Micron meant to leverage the Crucial brand in this space to stand out above others?
Similar story on the SSD side of things regarding reputation/innovation, especially when you consider that Crucial SSD's are no more "micron" in a hardware sense than a Corsair one built using Micron flash (support is a different matter), as the controllers were contracted out to 3rd parties (Phison) and the flash used was entry level/previous gen surplus compared to what's put in enterprise. The demands and usecase for consumers and even prosumers/enthusiasts are very different and in general substantially less than on the enterprise side of things with SSDs, and that gulf is only growing wider. So again, what is meant to carry over? How can Micron leverage Crucial to stand out when the consumer market just doesn't have the demands to support them making strong investment to stand out?
Frankly, taking what you say farther, I think if this is what they want to do (having consumer brand recognition that can carry over in some meaningful way to B2B), then sundowning crucial now (given the current supply issues) and then eventually re-entering the market when things return to some sense of "normal" as Micron so that both consumer and enterprise brands are the same brand, "Micron", makes much more sense.
Considering how many people don't realize Crucial is a Micron brand, or that Micron components are in a lot of non-crucial consumer brand products, I'd argue it wasn't that crucial.
Especially considering that there's little innovation in the consumer DRAM and SSD spaces vs their enterprise counterparts that Micron can flex their talent in.
Micron had infinite brand awareness in the electronics industry long before they made SSDs. Heck they don't even use their own name for those products. They've been a memory vendor for more than 40 years and they're the only vendor with US domestic memory fabs. Something tells me their future will be just fine. Disclosure: Micron stock holder.
Every low end IoT box made in china will be 'encouraged' to use CXMT aided by state subsidies. This will shrink the market for market price DRAM. When the AI bubble pops DRAM makers will discover the importance of diversification.
Almost certainly this is because of a windfall for Micron, at least in the short term. Datacenter memory demand is going through the roof, and that was where margins were highest already. It makes no sense to continue to try to milk a consumer brand that can be sold at, what, a 20% markup over generics?
Most likely Micron was planning this forever, and the current market conditions are such that it's time to pull the trigger and retool everything for GPU memory.
Micron is chasing AI glory. Their stock valuation has no room for consumer business, which is a distraction.
You can’t think about companies like it’s 2024. We’re in a gilded age with unlimited corruption… Anything can happen. They can sign a trillion dollar deal with OpenAI, get acquired by NVidia, merge with Intel, get nationalized by Trump, etc.
You’re exactly wrong. In the race to supply AI data center, there is no “consumer” (in the sense I think you mean) making or influencing a buying decision. Without a clear path to increase supply, why take $1 when you can have $6 or $7?
That's planned, not a disaster. They've deprioritized brand awareness. Siemens for instance doesn't need brand awareness, if they did, they'd pick an english name.
I don't know their breakdown for consumer vs enterprise, but the Crucial brand is consumer focussed. Obviously enterprise at this point is incredibly lucrative.
I am a huge believer in AI, but the build-out right now, justified or not, will definitely hit a slowdown at some point. Not being diverse in their customer base could really hurt them later on. Sometimes you keep something going for tomorrow's business even if it is costing you something today.
I hear the cries of a thousand people in marketing right now. Building a brand takes time. I could see this if they were thinking they needed to re-invent the brand and to help with that they were strategically taking a break but that seems like a stretch.
It's kind of the opposite. Crucial is a throwaway brand so that the premium brand (Micron) can sell cheaper shit without tarnishing their enterprise branding.
my expectation is that they would either sell crucial RAM at such a low volume and/or such a high price that it would do more damage to the brand than sunsetting it and returning to it when the slowdown occurs.
AI being a useful component in our futures (depending on how much as a society we'll shun slop) and the current scale of AI investment being a line-go-up bubble are complementary, not exclusive.
There's a huge difference between "AI" and "tech bros and finance guys getting amazed by an LLM that talks back to them without realising it's just a language model and not intelligence, so they started chucking the massive piles of cash they had lying around the world to evade taxes to them in a pyramid scheme of colossal scale". We currently are heading more and more towards the latter, and when it crashes it will sow so much distrust and curse the "AI" name so much that we'll probably get a decades-long AI winter after that. In the end none of this nonsense will help the world towards getting better AI any time soon.
Already most "AI researchers" outside of the big corps have basically turned in the last 3 years from "people training their models and doing research" to "webdev plugging into other people's APIs to use LLMs they don't know crap about". When, not if, the big AI bubble bursts, the damage done to the sector will be immense
Sad. I've been buying Crucial as an attempt to avoid counterfeits, both buying direct and on eBay. Every DIMM and SSD from them has been perfect so far.
(ProTip: When you see 'Crucial'-labeled DIMMs with chips that don't have the Micron 'M' logo, I wouldn't buy that, or I would send it back.)
I'm half joking but if this AI boom continues we're going to see Nvidia exit from consumer GPU business. But Jensen Huang will never do that to us... (I hope)
on the contrary. this is the place they can try out new tech, new cores, new drivers, new everything with very little risk. driver crash? the gamer will just restart their game. the AI workload will stall and cost a lot of money.
basically, the gaming segment is the beta-test ground for the datacenter segment. and you have beta testers eager to pay high prices!
we see the same in CPUs by the way, where the datacenter lineup of both intel and amd lags behind the consumer lineup. gives time to iron out bios, microcode and optimizations.
Why would anyone sell a handful of GPUs to nobodies like us when they could sell a million GPUs for thousands apiece to a handful of big companies? We're speedrunning the absolute worst corpo cyberpunk timeline.
Might almost be a good thing, if it means abandoning overhyped/underperforming high-end game rendering tech, and taking things in a different direction.
The push for 4K with raytracing hasn't been a good thing, as it's pushed hardware costs way up and led to the attempts to fake it with AI upscaling and 'fake frames'. And even before that, the increased reliance on temporal antialiasing was becoming problematic.
The last decade or so of hardware/tech advances haven't really improved the games.
DLSS Transformer models are pretty good. Framegen can be useful but has niche applications dure to latency increase and artifacts. Global illumination can be amazing but also pretty niche as it's very expensive and comes with artifacts.
Biggest flop is UE5 and it's lumen/nanite. Reallly everything would be fine if not that crap.
And yeah, our hardware is not capable of proper raytracing at the moment.
The push for ray tracing comes from the fact that they've reached the practical limits of scaling more conventional rendering. RT performance is where we are seeing the most gen-on-gen performance improvement, across GPU vendors.
Poor RT performance is more a developer skill issue than a problem with the tech. We've had games like Doom The Dark Ages that flat out require RT, but the RT lighting pass only accounts for ~13% of frame times while pushing much better results than any raster GI solution would do with the same budget.
The literal multi-million dollar question that executives have never bothered asking: When is it enough?
Do I, as a player, appreciate the extra visual detail in new games? Sure, most of the time.
But, if you asked me what I enjoy playing more 80% of the time? I'd pull out a list of 10+ year old titles that I keep coming back to, and more that I would rather play than what's on the market today if they only had an active playerbase (for multiplayer titles).
Honestly, I know I'm not alone in saying this: I'd rather we had more games focused on good mechanics and story, instead of visually impressive works that pile on MTX to recoup insane production costs. Maybe this is just the catalyst we need to get studios to redirect budgets to making games fun instead of spending a bunch of budget on visual quality.
Well in the case of Doom: The Dark ages, it's not just about about fidelity but about scale and production. To make TDA's levels with the baked GI used in the previous game would have taken their artists considerably more time and resulted in a 2-3x growth in install size, all while providing lighting that is less dynamic. The only benefit would have been the ability to support a handful of GPUs slightly older than the listed minimum spec.
Ray tracing has real implications not just for the production pipeline, but the kind of environments designers can make for their games. You really only notice the benefits in games that are built from the ground up for it though. So far, most games with ray tracing have just tacked it on top of a game built for raster lighting, which means they are still built around those limitations.
I'm not even talking about RT, specifically, but overall production quality. Increased texture detail, higher-poly models, more shader effects, general environmental detail, the list goes on.
These massive production budgets for huge, visually detailed games, are causing publishers to take fewer creative risks, and when products inevitably fail in the market the studios get shuttered. I'd much rather go back to smaller teams, and more reasonable production values from 10+ years ago than keep getting the drivel we have, and that's without even factoring in how expensive current hardware is.
I can definitely agree with that. AAA game production has become bloated with out of control budgets and protracted development cycles, a lot of that due to needing to fill massive overbuilt game worlds with an endless supply of unique high quality assets.
Ray tracing is a hardware feature that can help cut down on a chunk of that bloat, but only when developers can rely on it as a baseline.
They are already making moves that might suggest that future. They are going to stop packaging VRAM with their GPUs shipped to third-party graphics card makers, who will have to source their own, probably at higher cost.
They will constrain supply before exiting. It's just not smart exiting, you can stop developing and it will be a trickle, also will work as insurance in case AI flops.
Honestly, I'd prefer it. It might get AMD and Intel more off their ass for GPU development. I already stopped buying Nvidia gpus ages ago before they saw value in the Linux/Unix market, and I'm tired of them sucking up all the air in the room.
They did get burned when crypto switched to dedicated hardware and nvida were left with for them huge surpluses of 10xx series hardware. But what they’re selling to AI companies now is a lot more different from their consumer gear
This seems a bit foolish? Even just limiting stock to paper launches and massively raising the price would let you say "oh, it's just the market" but here it makes them look like they're putting all their eggs in one basket.
I have a home server with one of their X11 boards, it is almost 8 years old. It is a bad time to upgrade but once I do it will have to be one from ASrock Rack I guess.
Their MX500 series SSDs were just king of price, performance and reliability. I even installed them in industrial PCs with intense vibrations and large temperature cycles, they're still chugging along like it's nothing.
Agreed, the first gen MX500 with M3CR023 fw proved IMHO to be the second most reliable SATA SSD 2.5" form factor with the Samsung 860 range SSDs (860 Evo / Pro).
Sadly, the MX500 is now difficult to find in western europe. Only lower grade BX500, still quite reliable but not as fast as the MX500 with cache + DRAM.
Had quite a lot of controller issues (become sluggish for periods of time) with the sandisk/WD ones like green/blue and SSD plus.
Huh, I've had the opposite experience with the BX500. Hit a bit hard on them and the SSD drops off the bus. Or fill them up to 80% and witness them crawl to a stop. Dirt cheap drives, but don't ask too much of them.
Oh I never said you wrote it's better, your message is quite clear :)
Just that I would not really compare the two. The BX500 is the only Crucial SSD I've ever had troubles with and kinda eroded my trust in the brand. My >10 years old M4 is still working like a champ, so does my MX200.
DRAM-less SSDs are a plague that is very hard to avoid, as it's never mentioned in the spec sheets.
I have also bought Crucial for decades. Great quality and reliability for a fair price. Anybody doing anything semi-professional will be impacted by this questionable decision.
If you are going to sell shovels for a gold rush its pretty silly to keep rational market compatibility on things like prices, defect rate, packaging, correct contents.. Probably better to spare the brand (for a reboot?) and also not compete as much with all that junk when it shows up again on eBay.
Probably inevitable since they got banned from their largest market[1] in the fallout of the semi/chip bans , with the addded disadvantage that their only play to recoup profits would be through narrowing market ang hiking prices.
And here we are - im pretty certain the other DRAM cartel members are willing to play along , as long as their profits spike.
Bummer. Crucial had a lifetime warranty on memory. So when my 2012 Macbook pro cooked the aftermarket memory I had put in it, they replaced it for free. A few years later same system cooked the new memory chip. Again they replaced it no charge. Got six years out of it before keyboard failed, would have bricked itself far earlier if not for crucial.
Such a defeatist take. Human nature is to come up with culture to check human nature. Human nature is to feel community expulsion as badly as physical pain, because human nature is to punish anti-social behavior. We are equally capable of love, empathy, anger and violence. What isn't human nature, is watching everything taken from you, while you tell yourself that's just the way things are. That's pathology.
No. I refuse to just sit back and accept being abused by the elite just because "well, that's just the way it is", "that's human nature". Holy war is also human nature. Revolution is human nature.
In May this year, the 2x48GB Crucial SODIMM kit sold for £180. Today, the same kit is £275 in the Crucial Amazon store, and sales are limited to one unit per customer. The free market price seems to be over £500. Not a good time to be building a Mini PC or DIY laptop.
This sucks! I know more about software than hardware. Crucial is the only ram I have bought for decades now. As a practical matter does this mean one needs to buy DDR5 ram now from MicroCenter for a build planned for next year? I just put 128gb into my latest Linux workstation. I had been planning to build a new NAS to replace my aging TrueNas (nee FreeNAS). I was just thinking about possibly building another dev box after being very happy with this AMD 9950x performance.
It was 2017 that I decided to go all in ensuring that my main work computers were built from parts sourced via the local Micro Center. The real eye-opening situation is even if I have a top line most expensive MacBook Pro or most expensive Dell laptop with full warranty, the truth is anytime there was a hardware issue which happened every 2 to 3 years it would destroy a day or more of work. you cannot have it fixed and returned to you the same day being able to have more redundancy in the ability to source individual parts locally is a gigantic financial benefit when you’re livelihood depends on a working high-performance systems as a high-end consultant. I also ensure that I have two laptops capable of running my work though neither perform as highly as my high-end gaming class workstation.
Nearly every pc in my current collection has Crucial ram. My main desktop has a Crucial NVME drive, and I've got 2.5in SATA SSDs from Crucial in family computers.
I don't want to have to start buying obscure keysmash chinese brands for normal looking affordable hardware.
When it eventually does, they'll just come up with something else. Nvidia got a taste of inflated prices from the Crypto and then AI, and they're not going to just let that go. If nothing exists they'll make something and hype it endlessly to try to keep this going.
Unlikely. Unless some new technology comes around that completely invalidates existing GPUs and Nvidia cannot pivot to it quickly enough, there's just no way. They're too big, too rich, too powerful. They basically own the dedicated GPU market, with AMD holding maybe a piddly 10% at best.
Once the bubble pops, there will be a recession, lots of regular people will lose their jobs and won't be able to afford anything even IF prices come down.
Despite not really needing it yet, I took the opportunity to go straight to Amazon and pick up a 2tb 2230 for my Steam Deck. I’m also going to upgrade the homelab to an M4 Mini now, despite having decided earlier this month that the current N100 was fine for a few more years. Genuinely feels like whatever is happening is going to fundamentally change the way these products are marketed and sold in a permanent way.
Seems foolish, I've been a long-term shareholder in Micron but this seems aimed at short-term profit maximization. So I guess I'll be a short-term shareholder now.
Disagree. has very little to do with it. Though it finally clicked why I keep seeing people repeat this, it's Apple users. (Not a dig btw, I can totally see why it'd feel that way from their POV).
For starters, in the past, Crucial RAM wasn't really compatible with the Apple devices that did have socketable/upgradeable RAM. Technically some of their laptops/imacs did, but Apple really didn't want you servicing/upgrading those on your own, Crucial DIMMs weren't QVL approved by Apple (even though it'd generally work), and those were all SO-DIMMs not standard desktop DIMMs. The Mac Pros and what not that had upgradeable ram were all (L)RDIMM, not UDIMM. Crucial didn't make (L)RDIMM, that was Micron's market. Point being, this change in dynamic from Apple had virtually no impact on Crucial, as it was a market they never really served, or at least certainly not in the past decade.
The consumer market isn't shifting to non-upgradeable devices. There are more and more of them, but they're largely either not a market Crucial served to begin with (Apple), or supplementing the consumer devices that do have upgradeable RAM (Steam Deck, very compact HTPC's/Thin Clients, things that aren't really desktop replacements).
But the Market has shifted, Mac is increasing in marketshare and that shift is even higher on expensive laptops, where people get expensive upgrades.
Two or three years ago, I bought an XPS 15 with minimum memory specs and immediately maxed the RAM to 64gb and threw in a 2tb nvme drive. Last year I purchased a M3 Macbook Pro and made no upgrades. I don’t expect to go back to PC, because the Mac performance is so great and the power managment actually works.
When I threw my XPS 15 in my bag, it often comes out of my bag with no battery. The Mac not only gets awesome battery life, but it doesn’t randomly discharge when closed and sleeps properly.
Indeed. The market is changing. The overall personal electronic (computational) device market (Desktop, Laptop, Mobile/Tablet) is growing year over year, and because of that, mac shares going up doesn't mean Desktop PC ownership/sales are being cannabilized. Desktop Market (in terms of yearly sales) is relatively stable, and in terms of ownership continues to grow, while laptop/mobile/tablet (regardless of Mac/Android/Windows/Arm/etc) is growing healthily.
Crucial didn't leave because no one was buying RAM, or even that less people were buying RAM. Or at least that was the situation prior to shit going sideways with pricing/availability in the past 2 months, but that's independent of Apple/Crucial/Micron. They left because there's been little margin in unbuffered DIMMs (aka consumer RAM) for years, and there's virtually no demand or opportunity for innovation in the space for Micron to leverage the brand to make their B2B/Enterprise sales look better, and what Does make them stand out (largely cosmetics these days) is not a core competency of crucial or Micron. There's even less demand for anything interesting/innovative/worth having a whole separate company/BU for in the markets that are growing (Apple, Mobile, Laptops).
Also, now is a prime opportunity to exit the market, but it's also clear this has been in the works for a while though. Look at their limited and frankly half-assed product offerings for DDR5, then compare to what they offered on DDR4. Substantially less SKU's, with very little offerings for the enthusiast market. This wind down started circa 2020.
As far as Crucial is concerned, Apple has never been relevant or a danger to their bottom line. And if Micron wanted in on that money, they're better served doing it as Micron, as opposed to Crucial, which was tantamount to operational overhead in that context.
Will this impact B2B or just dramatically increase cost to business customers? Some industries require US-based supply chains, in my organization all our RAM and SSDs are Micron.
Very sad news.
Crucial Micron is (soon "was") an great brand for computer assembly and upgrade. It is sad to see the brand rushing to the "easy money" stream. This won't be forgotten when the current bubble will evenually pop and they might meet the same fate as the now forgotten Elpida (who bought Qimonda wich also failed).
The MX500 1st gen (fw M3CR023) was the second best SATA SSD range with the kings the Samsung 860 Evo and Pro. P3 and P3+ were very good drives with great princing for some time, not comparable to the Samsung 970 Evo and Evo+ though.
Never had a failure on about 500 units of crucial MX300/500/P1/P3/P3+/P5. Always updated their firmwares, though.
Comparatively, had lot of sluggish controllers on Sandisk/WD green/blue SATA SSD, and some BX500. But a lot better than any entry level generic Phison S3111 based SSD.
Also very few failures with DDR3/4 DIMMs and SODIMMs. Less than with Kinston and Corsair modules. About the same as Samsung OEM modules from HP/Dell.
Now let's just hope Samsung will not follow in their tracks. I don't see WD-Sandisk going corporate only since they do not make DRAMs modules.
Like Pascal's wager that absurdity is an appeal to stupidity. I expect the people running these companies are more interested in a different type of wager. One where they risk the future of the company to pump shares and make a quick profit.
Even less consumer supply means higher prices. What’s fascinating is the very thing that enabled AI — gaming - may be one of the early casualties as it gains in priority.
> “The AI-driven growth in the data center has led to a surge in demand for memory and storage. Micron has made the difficult decision to exit the Crucial consumer business in order to improve supply and support for our larger, strategic customers in faster-growing segments,” said Sumit Sadana, EVP and Chief Business Officer at Micron Technology.
"AI"-driven collapse will go down as the stupidest crisis in human history. The idiotic waste of gigantic amounts of civilizatory resources, for something that hasn't remotely proven useful yet, while simultaneously neglecting existentially mandated reforms and investments, in an outrageously obvious critical moment in time ... well that's gonna dwarf even historic missteps of organized religion and island cultures.
I am calling it now:
* Cancelled: Cyberpunk.
* New lore timeline: Hypepunk > Crash-Core > Silicon Gothic
The term is up for grabs again. Also, future historians may not categorize medieval times as we do. By then, libraries may have been converted to data centers and historic artifacts burned to fuel GPUs, or destroyed through hallucinated restoration advice. Remaining digital traces may have been exhaustively overwritten by verbose AI prose, or simply lost when AWS introduced generative DNS. In a 1000 years, the only preserved evidence of medieval times may be an LLM's summary of "A Knight's Tale".
Dude, that's like someone's opinion. Also neural nets doing pattern recognition on x-ray images is not the reason Micron abandoned their consumer shovel business.
> This decision reflects Micron’s commitment to its ongoing portfolio transformation and the resulting alignment of its business to secular, profitable growth vectors in memory and storage. By concentrating on core enterprise and commercial segments, Micron aims to improve long-term business performance and create value for strategic customers as well as stakeholders.
What the fuck does "secular" even mean in this context? Is there religious DRAM?
What a short-sighted, boneheaded move. I'm so tired of the MBA-ificiation of every single part of my life.
Yes, the MBAs and private equity firms are about 80% of the way through ruining everything that was ever good in the world. They've been accelerating exponentially. Probably won't be long now. I like to think it can't get much worse but I thought that several times before and I've been proven wrong each time. Optimism is getting much harder to hold on it.
Try buying GTA San Andreas on Steam - if you didn't buy it before some cutoff date a few years ago, all you can get is the shit AI textures "remaster".
Steam is a powerful force, and I applaud them for staying private and not IPO'ing - but their founders won't be around forever (hell Gabe, please transfer Steam into some sort of public-good trust or whatever, or have provisions in your will making it impossible for whomever inherits the company to enshittify), and sadly even they can't beat down on the studios too hard lest they end up like Netflix.
secular is the opposite of cyclical in business. ie a long-term trend.
And same. Though blowing significant fractions of a trillion dollars into (imo) investments that are never gonna return anything near to making that a good plan (ex a government bailout) will inevitably redirect huge portions of stuff we care about. The world's gdp is about 90T iirc; that is basically taking 1/90th of the stuff the world does in a year and putting it into ai.
I consulted my paper dictionary, which doesn't use as much electricity as Belgium or thousands of gallons of water, and it reads: "of or relating to a long term of indefinite duration: <secular inflation>, <A secular increase in the quantity of money is required in a growing economy... – Milton Friedman>".
consumers getting told 'get fucked' in 2025 is the motto of the day while companies chase those juicy a.i profits
well hopefully we see more proliferation of system of chips / unified architectures such as the one offered by apple being offered by amd, intel etc for consumer stuff.
The US put YMTC in a black list just so that they wouldn't outcompete Micron... and now Micron just gave up by itself, and YMTC was set back so now it can't supply the RAM market either, great job guys!
Or maybe, consumer volume is dropping precipitously as more and more people rely on non-upgradable mobile devices, while competition is ramping up, and monopolistic sales channels, (i.e. Amazon), take a larger share of revenue?
“The AI-driven growth in the data center has led to a surge in demand for memory and storage. Micron has made the difficult decision to exit the Crucial consumer business in order to improve supply and support for our larger, strategic customers in faster-growing segments,” said Sumit Sadana, EVP and Chief Business Officer at Micron
AI is destroying so much. God knows how bad things will get once the bubble bursts.
If this AI bubble bursts and the anticipated demand evaporates, this will be one of the biggest debacles in the history of American business, akin to New Coke.
I'm sad. I'm a software guy, not much of a hardware expert, so please bear with me if I"m too pessimistic. However, I feel that if trends like this continue, it might be the end of enthusiast-level personal computing as we know it. No more being able to head down to the electronics store and purchase RAM, motherboards, processors, GPUs, storage, and other components. We're going to be limited to locked-down terminals connected to cloud services, both of which provided by a small number of multinational corporations. If we're lucky, we might still have USB peripherals.
The sad thing is that we enthusiasts are a small market compared to the overwhelming majority of computer users who don't mind locked-down devices, or at least until they've been bitten by the restrictions, but if there are no alternatives other than retrocomputing, then it's too late. For decades we enthusiasts have been able to benefit from other markets with overlapping needs such as gaming, workstations, and corporate servers. However, many on-premise servers have been replaced by cloud services, the workstation market has been subsumed by the broader PC market, and PC gaming has faced challenges, from a push toward locked-down consoles to challenges in the GPU market due to competition with cryptocurrency mining and now AI.
One of the things I'm increasingly disappointed with is the dominance of large corporations in computing. It seems harder for small players to survive in this ecosystem. Software has to deal with network effects and large companies owning major platforms, and building your own hardware requires tons of capital.
I wonder if it's possible even for a company to make even 1980s-era electronics without massive capital expenditures? How feasible is it for a small company to manufacture the equivalent of a Motorola 68000 or Intel 386?
I'd like to see a market for hobbyist computing by hobbyist computer shops, but I'm not sure it's economically feasible.
I've seen things going the opposite way. It's only recently that an average person could jump on eBay and get assembled low-level electronic module/boards for cheap, and assemble into their project.
Yes, you'll probably have difficulty walking into a STORE to buy PC components, but only because online shopping has been killing local shops for decades now. You'll find it easy to get that stuff online, for better prices.
PCs, since the very start, have been going through a process of being ever more integrated each generation. Not too many people install sound cards, IDE controllers, etc., anymore. CPUs, GPUs, and RAM are about the only holdouts not integrated on the motherboard these days. It's possible that could change, if CPUs and GPUs becomes fast enough for 99% of people, and RAM gets cheap enough that manufacturers can put more on-board than 99% of people will need. And while you might not be happy about that kind of integration, it comes with big price reductions that help everyone. But we're not there yet, and I can't say how long down the road that might be.
Not my experience. I've been able to go to a local store to buy PC components for more than 35 years now and last did to upgrade the RAM in the laptop to be eligible for Win11. Online only was not cheaper and local store had it available same day. Local store does have online presence and is a chain tho.
Mouse replacement on a weekend coz old one broke same story (button smashed in and not usable at all any longer). Online not cheaper, no same day available at any price, Amazon delivery without Prime no next day either. Local chain store had it for immediate pickup and I was gaming again in 30 minutes.
I'm curious where you live. Anecdotally, this is the opposite to the experience of everyone I know.
In many cities in the US, there's Microcenter, where you can walk out with every part you need. We also still have smaller stores that can build clones for you/hand you the boxes, but they don't quite have the same variety of parts.
Microcenter is one of the very few local DIY stores remaining. Best Buy has some stuff like hard drives but, even in the Boston area, I can't think of many other examples at this point.
Of course, you have Newegg and other online stores.
In some cities. I happen to be from one of them. Now I live in a far bigger city (Los Angeles) and the closest Microcenter is 2 hours away. Worse with traffic on a Tuesday afternoon. They’re only in a handful of states, sadly. There are not many places that offer a reasonable selection of boards that are close. Fry’s was the last bastion for many folks. Best Buy sometimes has a few options. But today is a far cry from the days of Circuit City, Computer City, CompUSA, RadioShack… not to mention dozens of mom & pop stores. Online is the main way nowadays.
> I'm curious where you live. Anecdotally, this is the opposite to the experience of everyone I know.
Actually, his experience is the standard PC enthusiast experience for the vast majority of DIY'ers in many nations. And is now subject to threat if businesses catering to consumers shut-down.
> Actually, his experience is the standard PC enthusiast experience for the vast majority of DIY'ers in many nations.
I have to genuinely question this. I haven't heard of anyone I know buying PC components at a physical store in like 20 years, and I know people from various nations.
There are still physical stores in most cities so I guess they are still selling if they aren't out of business. They cater for a more enthusiast/gaming oriented population than in the past but still.
You have to take into account that same day delivery from amazon and the likes is only a real thing in the USA. Most other markets do not have the same service, even with accounts such as Amazon Prime. There is only one online store I know that is providing same day delivery in my area in Spain and it is a physical (and rather expensive) chain, El Corte Inglés.
Not having same day delivery isn't really a dealbreaker for most people. Most people aren't like, "I need to upgrade my computer RIGHT NOW"
And it is available in other countries.
I am guessing you purely stick to the mobile-phone/corpo-laptop crowd then ? Finding PC enthusiasts should not be that difficult. They are legions of them all over the world - not just in the developed nations.
Even normal folks upgrade RAM. My aunt did so last year for her old desktop PC. PC components are available in the local computer hardware market of any nation. (Though admittedly, most people buy parts online nowadays and local hardware markets are shutting down)
> I am guessing you purely stick to the mobile-phone/corpo-laptop crowd then ? Finding PC enthusiasts should not be that difficult. They are legions of them all over the world - not just in the developed nations.
No. I'm a PC enthusiast myself, as are most of those people I know. I run an online (PC) gaming community.
> (Though admittedly most people nowadays just buy online and local hardware markets are shutting down)
Literally what I was saying.
Then I misunderstood what you were saying. PC community has actually increased over last few years as people have become dissatisfied with the big-2 consoles.
I was questioning the assertion that a vast majority of gamers buy their components from physical stores as opposed to ordering online.
Yes, this is the sad trend excepting for some markets that circumvent paying tax or the markets in the manufacturing cities.
I'm in Melbourne, I can ride my bike a few kilometers and buy standard PC parts. Not everyone here lives that close to a store, but there are multiple established chains with stores all over the metropolitan area. Even so these stores probably do the bulk of business in online sales.
I recently discovered Scorptec has a "total spend" under Account => Order History. Horrifying! Ublock to the rescue, ##.total-amount.card-title.
I usually buy my cables there since the price difference for brand cables is negligible and I like to have my cable actually do the rated specs. Full pc parts no, but then again I usually buy niche parts not widely available. I usually go to the small repair shop first, and if they don't have any to the big brand. Small shop is a bit more expensive but the guy can order specialized small parts (printer memory module comes to mind) if you ask nicely and even directed you to other shops. Medium sized 100k+ city in NW Europe.
California had Fry's until a few years ago. Once they went under it basically ended the local market.
I'd love to see more market-style parts locations a la Huaqiang or Akiahabara
A couple of years ago, one rainy Saturday morning, I woke up with a devastating hangover and nothing else to do - so I decided to build myself a PC, like in good old days. Turned out it wasn't at all difficult to find a local store; only two-three hours later I was already driving home with all these sexy looking boxes filled with hardware. That was in Sweden.
Last local walking distance shop closed earlier this year (city in Germany). Used to go there for parts needed on short notice: mouse, cables etc. Not sure if there are many left now in this city that stock components like motherboards, gfx cards or RAM.
> Used to go there for parts needed on short notice
Which is why they shut down - the addressable market of people having an emergency need for an item from a limited selection of electronics isn't that big, and that's becoming the only market.
It's not your fault that you don't want to pay over the odds for everything when you're not in a rush, and it's not their fault they need to pay commercial rent, utilities, payroll, insurance and all the other overheads.
But the outcome is simply that staffed local physical shops have a lower efficiency ceiling in terms of getting items to customers.
Aren't mediamarkt still selling computer parts in Germany? Maybe not ram and mother boards but in my city in Spain Mediamarkt still sell all the peripherals, some internal drives and cabling at the very least.
Anecdata != data.
That MicroCenter continues to exist tells me that there's at least enough people shopping for parts in meatspace that there's net revenue to be had.
Microcenter has a total of 29 stores across the US. Yankee Candle has almost 10x as many locations (240).
Yes, Microcenter "exists", but primarily through selective cultivation of their locations. From a pure market footprint perspective, they are outclassed by a candle company, and many other niche businesses.
I guess I really wasn't clear enough.
At no point was I entirely denying that some people go to physical stores to buy components. I was just countering the idea that a majority of people do so, as opposed to ordering online.
I've bought memory (16 GB DDR4), storage (2 TB NVMe), and various peripherals from BestBuy within the last five years.
I live in Central NJ, which is pretty densely populated and surrounded by tech firms. The nearest MicroCenter to me is 35 miles away in Brooklyn.
I can do this in in Tokyo, and even small town Netherlands. Though in the last I’ll only have a choice between two different crappy mouses.
I think that is the main difference: choice
30 years ago you would buy what was available locally, possibly you could obtain from the shop owner that he orders a part from his distributor's catalog and that was it. And we weren't giving it much second thought.
Now when we know we can obtain any brand or any model online we are much more picky about our component choices. I know for me it is the same in other areas I am knowledgeable like bicycle parts. Regardless of the price more often than not the local bike shop doesn't have the exact tire model I want so if I am not in a hurry I order online. I wasn't unhappy buying whatever was available back in the days as it was just not a possibility and I had less knowledge about what was available, even when receiving magazines every month. Ignorance is bliss sometimes.
I'm not the parent poster, but in my experience it depends on the location. I live in the Bay Area. We had Fry's Electronics before it closed, and when Fry's closed I shifted to Central Computers. We finally have a Micro Center in Santa Clara now! I find Central Computers and Micro Center to have reasonable prices that are competitive with online stores. However, it can sometimes be a difficult drive through traffic getting to these stores, and so it's often more convenient for me to order something online. I've had nothing but good experiences shopping from Newegg.
When I was an undergrad at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo 20 years ago, I relied heavily on Newegg, since there were no large electronics stores in San Luis Obispo back then for computer enthusiasts. Best Buy today has come a long way and is now a great place for PC enthusiasts, but this wasn't the case 20 years ago; it had much more of a consumer electronics focus back then. Four years ago I was visiting Cal Poly friends in Santa Maria; we were building my PC together. I bought the wrong power supply online, and so we ended up going to Best Buy in Santa Maria, where I was able to find the correct power supply for a good price!
Even with Best Buy's improved selection, nothing beats Micro Center in either Silicon Valley or Irvine, but if you're in neither location and Best Buy doesn't stock what you need, then you have to order online.
As much as I love Micro Center, though, nothing beats Yodobashi Camera in Akihabara, Tokyo. That store is electronics heaven, at least for new components. For used components, I peruse Akihabara's alleys, which are filled with small shops specializing in used and retro gear.
In the small-town bits of Ohio I've lived in for most of my life, computer stores come and go from time to time. There used to be more of them but they still exist.
The one that my first PC came from (in 1988) was open for something like 20 years. Another that still remains has been there for 33 years.
Plus, I mean: Best Buy stocks some PC parts. So does Wal-Mart. They're not "local," but they're nearby and they have stuff.
I have complete confidence that I could leave the house in the morning with nothing but some cash, and come home with enough parts to build a performant and modern PC from ~scratch in about an hour or two -- including travel.
And that's Ohio -- it's flyover country, full of corn fields and cowpies.
Microcenter is headquartered here in Ohio. Arguably the best PC focused "brick and mortar" store still in existence. I feel like I stepped back into my childhood every time I go into one of their stores
Yes. Microcenter was founded in Columbus, Ohio -- IIRC as a shop on High Street most of a lifetime ago. The present headquarters are, IIRC, just up the road in Hilliard. They maintain an excellent and enormous retail store in the area. There is an amazing (and not at all cheap) Greek restaurant across the street.
But after I drive to Microcenter and shop there and drive back, I'm fuckin' tired. I won't want to build a PC when I get home. I'll want to think about either getting a pizza or going to bed, and the bed will probably win.
So usually, I don't shop at Microcenter at all. I adore that place (and yeah, I'm impressionable: Keeping Raspberry Pi Zero W's in stock at every checkout register and selling them for $5 made an impression on me), but it's just too far away from where I live.
What usually happens instead, despite still having much more local alternatives, is this: I order the stuff. It shows up on my porch a day or two later. I build it at my leisure.
Not OP. But Microcenter is in many US cities and prides itself on 18 minute pickup. I buy most of my tech that way.
I love Microcenter. Built my current gaming rig with all parts purchased there. It's been about 8 years, so not sure if they still operate this way... but when I built my PC, I:
- Went online, ordered everything for pickup (didn't pay yet)
- Drove there, they had it all bagged and ready
- I showed them online prices for some of the parts
- For the ones they could verify (I think it was all of them) by going to the website and checking, they matched the prices
- Then I paid and took my stuff home
I also got my M1 MBP there (it was 25% off when the M2 models came out).
Please, if you have a Microcenter near you, give them your business. I don't want them to go away. Once all this memory madness dies down, I'm going to go there to build a new gaming rig.
I'm not the same person, but I live in Denver and I go to a store to buy my components. We have a Micro Center here and I enjoy having a physical location I can go to, so I make sure to give them my patronage when I purchase stuff.
In Canada, BC's lower mainland (and parts of Ontario, Alberta, and a few others I can't speak of first-hand) have both Memory Express and Canada Computers. We used to have NCIX as well, though they've left (at least) BC
I think NCIX left the realm of the living entirely
You're right, per Wikipedia. I guess I saw an old sign or something on a trip through Ontario (or it was just a long day).
Best Buy sells PC parts and accessories nationally in their stores, even though the selection is not great.
I walked into a Central Computers the other day and was flabbergasted. I had never seen a Threadripper PRO or a 10G switch in a store before!
rue montgallet still exists in Paris. Yes, very less than it used to be, but still there.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Xjj6uIIUT_0 gives a good idea of how it is now
Unfortunately, the aggregator website is basically no longer updated. So now you have to go door-to-door to check their prices. Also, with all the talk of counterfeits flooding Amazon and whatnot, I'm no longer that comfortable buying expensive stuff from random stores.
But, I guess, if you need a mouse right now and don't insist on the absolute best price, they're still there, yeah.
In practice, I live two streets away from there and yet I do all my shopping online (not that I buy that many parts anymore).
You're lucky then. Hardware availability has increased by orders of magnitude for me — not an exaggeration. Even 10-15 years ago I'd be happy to have access to two motherboards, three CPUs, three video cards — all of them at least a generation old, and Intel + nvidia, nothing else — and cheap noname RAM/SSDs. Over the past 5-8 years I've mostly been able to get access to the same hardware y'all are buying, thanks only to increased pervasiveness of online shopping.
Brick and mortar stores are as useless as they've always been. Even now they're selling old hardware (couple of generations old or older) for more than it was ever worth. For example, one such store not far from me has been trying to offload a 12-year old LCD monitor for several years now, for two times of its original price. I wonder why.
Online shopping is almost 30 years old itself. Before that there was mail order; I have a couple of mid 80s PC mags which are almost entirely adverts for parts.
Computer Shopper baby
> It's only recently that an average person could jump on eBay and get assembled low-level electronic module/boards for cheap, and assemble into their project.
People have been tinkering with electronic/electric modules for decades:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heathkit
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DigiKey
> Yes, you'll probably have difficulty walking into a STORE to buy PC components, but only because online shopping has been killing local shops for decades now.
Rather: very commonly the local shops don't stock the parts that I would like to buy, and it is often hard to find out beforehand which kind of very specialized parts the local shop does or doesn't stock.
True story concerning electronic components: I went to some electronic store and wanted to buy a very specialized IC, which they didn't stock. But since the sales clerk could see my passion for tinkering with electronica, he covertly wrote down an address of a different, very small electronics store including instructions which tram line to take to get there (I was rather new to the city), which stocks a lock more stuff that tinkerers love. I guess the sales clerk was as disappointed with the range of goods that his employer has decided to concentrate on as I was. :-)
On the other hand, lots of former stores for PC component now have whole lots of shelf rows with mobile phone cases instead. I get that these have high sales margins, but no thanks ...
Thus, in my opinion it is not online shopping that killed local shops, but the fact that local shops simply don't offer and stock the products that I want to buy.
I feel this vibe. It's part of the reason I invested in a monster home workstation - threadripper 9995wx, 768gb ecc ram, 96gb Blackwell pro. I expect it may easily be the last proper home PC I buy that is scaled in line with the scaling that I grew up with in the 80s and 90s.
Increasingly, what we have are mobile terminals - possibly with a dock for monitor connections - for remote big iron. And the continuous push from governments for more control - seemingly synchronous demands for age gating (i.e. requiring IDs) and chat snooping - males me think this remote hardware won't really be yours before long.
Windows, caught up in the LLM mania, is to be left by the wayside too.
The Terry Davis tinfoil-hat version of me has a theory that this wider industry trend of pushing away consumers from general purpose home computers towards only using remote datacenters from locked down mobile/thin edge devices, is supported by both industries and governments because:
Number one, you become a recurring subscription instead of a one and done deal, making it incredibly profitable for industry
And number two, the government can more easily snoop on your data when it's all in the cloud versus a HDD box in your closet.
Granted, I think we're far away from that future, but I do feel that's the future the powers that be desire and they can use various mechanism to force that behavior, like convenience, and pricing, like for example making PC parts too expensive for consumers and subsidizing cloud and mobile devices to accelerate the move, and once enough consumers only know how to use Apple or Google devices they'll be less inclined to spend more money to build a PC and learn what a Linux is.
I'm cynical enough to not argue against your number two theory.
But the first one? I'm less convinced. I think the underlying assumption is that companies look to make the most money off consumers. I can get behind that.
But just the other day I was looking at a new GPU and considered running a local LLM. I was looking at spending no more than 1000 €. That would get a me 5070 TI 16 GB. Not enough to reasonably run anything interesting. I'm not looking to "tinker with things", I want to actually use them, mostly for coding. A JetBrains subscription would run less than 10 € per month [0], and keep me up to date with the evolution of things. My 5070 would be stuck at its mostly useless level forever, since I don't see requirements going down any time soon. If prices didn't change, I'd need more than 100 months, or 8 years, to break even. And during these 8 years, I'd never have a decent LLM experience by buying it outright.
Sure, this would be a capable GPU for other uses. But in my case, it would just sit around under my desk heating up my room.
---
[0] You'd get a 20 € discount if paying for a whole year upfront (10/month, 100/year). I'm also excluding VAT, since I'd buy this for work and have a VAT registered company.
My suspicion is it’s mostly a result of the slowing pace of computing growth.
When computers go obsolete in 2 years nobody wants them on their balance sheets, when they last 6 sales go down and you get more years of profit from owning them. This hasn’t been an instantaneous transition, but a low shift in how the industry operates.
Whoa that definitely sounds like a monster rig! Out of curiosity, how much did that cost? Blackwell alone can be $10k+! It's definitely an investment, especially since it may soon become a relic, not in terms of specs, but in terms what manufacturers will actually end up making.
A little over 20k CHF. I delegated building (and ensuring the parts work together and testing) to Dalco, a Swiss company that specializes in academic compute clusters and the like. The price was competitive with building it myself.
The CPU is more expensive than the workstation blackwell card. 8x 96GB DIMMs - 96GB was at a corner in the price per GB, 128GB was more expensive per GB - is also more expensive now than the GPU. In fact the prices for that kind of package on ebay seem to be approaching the price of the entire box.
It's not just market forces. Computers are actually too subversive for the powers that be to allow mere citizens to have them.
Give citizens computers and they have encryption. This alone gives them a fighting chance against police, judges, three letter agencies, militaries.
Give citizens computers and they can wipe out entire sectors of the economy via the sheer power of unrestricted copying.
The future is bleak. Computer freedom is dying. Everything then word "hacker" ever stood for is dying. Soon we will no longer have our own systems, we will have no control, we will be mere users of corporation and government systems. Hacking will go extinct, like phreaking.
This fact brings me a profound sadness, like something beautiful is about to perish from this earth. We used to be free...
Alright this might be taking things a little too far… the free software movement is stronger than it’s ever been and hardware is also more accessible than it’s ever been. Losing this one company is simply not a death bell of the entire enthusiast computing market.
I too am very sad. This has been my brand of ram for a long time. I’m also more of a software guy than hardware, but I appreciate being able to have high-performance gaming class systems for my work. It runs circles around much of the stuff my colleagues run, including in deployment in various cloud environments.
This isn't "we are only going to sell products to big companies" nor is it "we are only going to make products that are locked down appliances"... the "consumer" versions of these products are just cheaper unreliable parts that lack the error correction or power loss protection of the enterprise parts, and in a world where we routinely have disks with tens of terabytes of storage in computers with a terabyte of memory, the argument for why "consumer" grade parts can even make sense to exist is pretty weak. It maybe sucks that, in the very short term, there will be a quick uptick in prices, but focusing on the better parts will also help bring their prices down... and, fwiw, they really aren't that bad to begin with: you can build a micro-ATX machine with a Xeon or an EPYC in it for what feels like a pretty reasonable price.
I still have a sense of melancholy and cultural loss from the closing of Fry’s Electronics.
Apple CPUs come with their own GPUs on die and RAM in the chip package now. How much more is going to be put on the chip and assembled in increasingly fine grained processes?
Apple puts the RAM in the chip package because they integrate the GPU, and then they want to be able to have multiple channels to feed the GPU without having that many slots. (Their entry level models also don't have any more memory bandwidth than normal PC laptops and there is no real reason they couldn't use a pair of SODIMMs.)
But low end iGPUs don't need a lot of memory bandwidth (again witness Apple's entry level CPUs) and integrating high end GPUs makes you thermally limited. There is a reason that Apple's fastest (integrated) GPUs are slower than Nvidia and AMD's fastest consumer discrete GPUs.
And even if you are going to integrate all the memory, as might be more justifiable if you're using HBM or GDDR, that only makes it easier to not integrate the CPU itself. Because now your socket needs fewer pins since you're not running memory channels through it.
Alternatively, there is some value in doing both. Suppose you have a consumer CPU socket with the usual pair of memory channels through it. Now the entry level CPU uses that for its memory. The midrange CPU has 8GB of HBM on the package and the high end one has 32GB, which it can use as the system's only RAM or as an L4 cache while the memory slots let you add more (less expensive, ordinary) RAM on top of that, all while using the same socket as the entry level CPU.
And let's apply some business logic to this: Who wants soldered RAM? Only the device OEMs, who want to save eleven cents worth of slots and, more importantly, overcharge for RAM and force you to buy a new device when all you want is a RAM upgrade. The consumer and, more than that, the memory manufacturers prefer slots, because they want you to be able to upgrade (i.e. to give them your money). So the only time you get soldered RAM is when either the device manufacturer has you by the short hairs (i.e. Apple if you want a Mac) or the consumers who aren't paying attention and accidentally buy a laptop with soldered RAM when their competitors are offering similar ones for similar prices but with upgradable slots.
So as usual, the thing preventing you from getting screwed is competition and that's what you need to preserve if you don't want to get screwed.
> integrating high end GPUs makes you thermally limited.
Even if you have a surface area equivalent to a high end cpu and high end gpu, combined in a single die?
A high end CPU (e.g. Threadripper) is 350W. A high end GPU (e.g. RTX 5090) is 575W. That's over 900W. You're past the point of die area and now you're trying to get enough airflow in a finite amount of space without needing five pounds of copper or 10000RPM fans.
Separate packages get you more space, separate fans, separate power connectors, etc.
In theory you could do the split in a different way, i.e. do SMP with APUs like the MI300X, and then you have multiple sockets with multiple heatsinks but they're all APUs. But you can see the size of the heatsink on that thing, and it's really a GPU they integrated some CPU cores into rather than the other way around. The power budget is heavily disproportionately the GPU. And it's Enterprise Priced so they get to take the "nobody here cares about copper or decibels" trade offs that aren't available to mortals.
You must surely know that Apple didn't originate any of that.
Yes, for sure. But it’s they’ve made it the norm, I don’t think I’m going to buy a more traditional computer again (unified RAM judt works so well for local AI), and the computer markers are going to adopt it completely eventually.
Hard disagree on it working well for local AI - all the memory bandwidth in the world doesn’t matter when the GPU it’s connected to is middling in performance compared to dedicated options. Give me one (or several) 3090/4090/5090 any day of the week over a Mac.
I’ve got an M3 Max with 64G, and can run larger models well than a single 5090. Yes, the GPU isn’t as fast, but I have a lot more memory and my GPUs still don’t suck that badly.
You illustrated my point exactly: yes, a single 32GB 5090 has half the memory of your Mac. But two of them (or three 3090/4090s) have the same total memory as your Mac, are in the same ballpark in price, and would be several times faster at running the same model as your Mac.
And before you bring up the “efficiency” of the Mac: I’ve done the math, and between the Mac being much slower (thus needing more time to run) and the fact that you can throttle the discrete GPUs to use 200-250W each and only lose a few percent in LLM performance, it’s the same price or cheaper to operate the discrete GPUs for the same workload.
I don't know. Can you bring your GPUs on an inter-continental plane trip and play with LLMs on the plane? It isn't really that slow for 70B 4-q models. These are very good CPU/GPUs, and they are only getting better.
Sure, the GPUs sit in my basement and I can connect to them from anywhere in the world.
My point was not that “it isn’t really that slow,” my point is that Macs are slower than dedicated GPUs, while being just as expensive (or more expensive, given the specific scenario) to purchase and operate.
And I did my analysis using the Mac Studio, which is faster than the equivalent MBP at load (and is also not portable). So if you’re using a MacBook, my guess is that your performance/watt numbers are worse than what I was looking at.
The whole point of having it local is not to use the network, or not need it, or not needing to jump the GFW when you are in China.
Ultra is about 2X of the power of a Max, but the Max itself is pretty beefy, and it has more than enough GPU power for the models that you can fit into ~48GB of RAM (what you have available if you are running with 64GB of memory).
If you travel to China, sure, what I’m talking about probably won’t work for you.
In pretty much any other situation, using dedicated GPUs is 1) definitely faster, like 2x the speed or more depending on your use case, and 2) the same cost or possibly cheaper. That’s all I’m saying.
I think this is an incorrect zero-sum mindset. Yes in the short term there is a fixed amount of GPUs, ram etc. But in the long run the money from ai and crypto is invested in building factories, researching new nodes etc. These investments will lead to better and cheaper products trickling down to everyone.
It's like the loss of Radio Shack, all over again.
> I wonder if it's possible even for a company to make even 1980s-era electronics without massive capital expenditures? How feasible is it for a small company to manufacture the equivalent of a Motorola 68000 or Intel 386?
Very feasible but it would have to be redesigned around the cell libraries used in newer nodes since the i386 was manufactured on >1um size nodes.
Prototypes would cost around $1-2k per sq mm at 130nm and $10k per sq mm at 28nm (min order usually around 9 sq mm). Legacy nodes are surprisingly cheap, so non-recurring engineering will generally be the bulk of the cost. The i386 was originally >104 sq mm but at 1um, so you could probably fit the entirety of a i386 clone in 1-2 sq mm of a 130nm chip. Packaging it in the original footprint and the lead times on prototypes would probably be more annoying than anything.
At this point it's getting ridiculously easy to justify the acquisition of such manufactory - I wonder if there are existing players in other categories (be it hardware or even software) that are considering about trying to get into this field. I mean - I get it that someone like OVH may not have the caps yet to handle something like this - but I wouldn't be surprised if they could find a good company to partner with - same is for pretty much everywhere.
I'm really wondering about hardware as well but today's tech is surprising in it's scale and requirements - I wouldn't be surprised if we could do mid 70's tech as hobbyist today - but further than that...
This is a classic slippery slope fallacy. Micron's reversible exit from one of its businesses is clearly does not signify the end of the PC era. As long as the demand for DIY PCs persists, there will be suppliers providing the products needed. If you follow the industrial memory market, you probably know that it is currently experiencing a severe supply shortage. I think Micron's decision simply reflects the current market situation.
> Micron's reversible exit from one of its businesses is clearly does not signify the end of the PC era.
No one is saying that it's the sole culprit. But when average PCs start costing $3000+ from now on, it seems like the end of an era.
I think you should split the problem into hardware and software parts:
- Hardware
We won't have any hardware without secure boot and we won't have the signing keys. Signed firmware is required for everything x86, everything Apple, everything mobile, probably everything ARM too. Rockchip ARM could still boot without signed firmware last time I checked a few years ago, but I'm not sure about the newer CPUs.
[ Short story: I have an Asus Tinkerboard S. It came with an unprovisioned emmc onboard. Just empty. A few years ago I made the mistake of trying the official OS from Asus. It automatically set up the CPU to boot from emmc first and provisioned the emmc with boot0, boot1 and rpmb. These partitions can't be written and can't be removed. Their creation is a one-way operation according to emmc standards. Now I have to keep the emmc masked because it won't boot otherwise. So beware of any devices with emmc. ]
You can, of course, use MCUs for general computing today. ESP32 is pretty powerful - it's probably 4 times faster than a 486, certainly more powerful than an i386 or a 68000 you suggested. The big problem here is memory, graphics and software. No MMU requires a completely new OS. Linux (uclinux) could boot at some point without a MMU, but it won't fit in 540KB memory. MCUs can access external memory (PSRAM), but via slow buses and it's paged. Also there are no hi-speed buses for graphics.
There is some hope coming from the chinese CPUs. AFAIK, they don't support secure boot at all. I'm planning on getting one as soon as their proprietary firmware/UEFI/ACPI and be replaced by uboot.
- Software
It's useless to make a i386 or 68000 today. There's nothing but old software for them. Not even linux has i386 support anymore. This is an even bigger problem than hardware. Much, much bigger. To have any hope of a minimally useful computing platform, we need a working browser on that platform. This is an absolute requirement. There's no way around this. I had to abandon Win98, then WinXP, and soon Win7 because of no working browser.
Linux is generally usable today, but as soon as Linus retires, it's going to fall into the same user-lockdown like all others. The basic infrastructure is all in place: secure boot, root login basically deprecated, access rights and security settings administered by the distro and package manager, not the user, no per-program firewall rules, automatic updates as standard, surveillance infrastructure via udev (hardware events), dbus (software events) and gtk accessibility (input events), etc. Linus fought hard to keep them outside the kernel, but he won't live forever.
To have any hope of privacy and/or freedom our personal computers we need to turn the security paradigm completely on it's head: users are not the threat - programs are. The user should login as root (or system account in Windows) and every program, including services, should run under their own limited accounts with no access to the rest of the system, especially user's files.
Of all OSs today, Gentoo portage is probably the easiest package manager to tweak into creating accounts and groups for programs instead of users and Gobo Linux has the best separation of programs in it's filesystem. I'd love to see a merger of these two.
Hobbyist computing? Ha! First get a browser working.
I'm more optimistic as I think about SBC manufacturers, plenty of other manufacturers wanting to service this market, and companies like Framework (warts and all - I don't think they're perfect) didn't really exist a couple of decades ago.
I'm actually a big fan of Apple hardware (when you crunch the numbers for base spec machine and when you're able to get discounts, the price/performance for the half-life you get is incredible), but I'm also planning to get back into home-brew builds a bit more over the next year: I need to build a NAS, a home lab, I might look at a gaming rig... and I'm far from alone.
So yes, it's a niche market, but a profitable one for a lot of players, and one that Micron will be glad is still available to them when the data centre bubble bursts.
We will still ba able to buy Raspberry Pis, install Linux and self-hosted solutions. We don't have to do what everyone else is doing.
I don't think any SBCs will be a replacement for quite some time. At what point will there be a raspberry pi with 128 GB of RAM and a 16/32 core? That's what I'm running right now, and I really hope I don't have to downgrade in the future.
Yes I guess we've reached a point where it's harder for individuals to grow their hardware or even maintain it. I'm not sure the huge investment in servers for AI is going to be good for companies either. We're honestly in a science-fiction novel right now, I have no idea what's going to happen politicaly with AI.
I don't really believe in AGI if that's what they're going for, but hey they'll get something close to that.
not going to happen as long as business hardware != consumer hardware
It’s never been easier to be a hobbyist or a small electronics company. Honestly I don’t know what you’re talking about.
Micron is exiting this business because it’s a commodity. It’s everywhere. There are numerous companies producing parts in this space. Their investments are better spent on other things.
> I wonder if it's possible even for a company to make even 1980s-era electronics without massive capital expenditures? How feasible is it for a small company to manufacture the equivalent of a Motorola 68000 or Intel 386?
I don’t know what your threshold is for massive capital expenditure, but you could get a tapeout for a 68000 clone easier than at any point in history. There are now even takeout services that will let you get a little piece of a shared wafer for experimenting with making your own chips for very low prices. There are even accessible tools available now.
The hobby and small scale situation is better now than at any point in history. I don’t know how anyone can be sad about it unless they’re ignoring reality and only speculating based on the most cynical online takes about how the future is going to do a complete 180.
> Micron is exiting this business because it’s a commodity. It’s everywhere. There are numerous companies producing parts in this space. Their investments are better spent on other things.
Numerous as in plenty? Or basically three? Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron make up over 90% of the market share of DRAM. Micron saying goodbye to the consumer market basically leaves us with yet another duopoly.
Micron isn't exiting the consumer business. Their consumer brand (Crucial) is going away.
You don't buy SK Hynix or Samsung RAM (unless you are an OEM typically.)
Consumers can still buy RAM from companies like G.Skill, TeamGroup, Corsair, Kingston, etc. Those companies can use chips from any of the big three.
That's not how it works.
Crucial winding down doesn't mean that there's less flash fabs in the world, just like there are plenty of DRAM companies that sell to the consumer market that don't have their own flash fabs (Corsair, Gskill, Geil, etc). Those consumer oriented brands bought flash from Micron (not crucial), SK (also doesn't have a consumer facing DRAM brand), and Samsung. That's just as true today as it will be post Feb 2026 when Crucial closes it's doors because Micron selling components to say, Corsair, is an Enterprise transaction from Micron's perspective (B2B), even if the ultimate end product is a consumer oriented one.
I am not sure if I understood your comment correctly but from my stand point Sk Hynix definitely has a consumer facing brand : https://pcpartpicker.com/products/memory/#xcx=0&m=444
Technically you're right, they do. They don't really serve the US Consumer market (anymore) though. There's no (or comparatively very few) established sales channels with consumer retail vendors by SKHynix themselves in the USDM. It's all reseller stuff, often plucked from OEM devices (prebuilts, workstations, etc).
What you linked is OEM RAM. The enterprise market still uses lots of UDIMM's, even though it certainly favors RDIMMs. Yes, it's DDR UDIMM's that are compatible with consumer PC's. But it's not sold like Samsung or Crucial consumer-oriented memory is, at least in the US market. Check the availability of it compared to say Crucial or Samsung. It's virtually non-existant. Check the comments on that very site as well, note how many people are talking about getting them from pre-builts (aka OEM/SI). Note, SK selling UDIMMs to SI/OEM's for consumer products is not a "consumer transaction" to SK, that's a B2B enterprise sale to another company from SK's perspective.
So technically yes, but practically no, not in the US they don't. Elsewhere I'm unsure, but SK has been deprioritizing consumer DRAM sales for a while now, just like Micron.
Micron cuts off the business because there is a much more profitable place to deploy their capacity. The real reason Micron has a resource crunch that forces them to exit a steady business is that enterprise now places a huge premium on things didn't use to be that important.
This massive tide floats all boats and there will be smaller players filling the gap. With slightly worse chips at first yes, but historically DRAM had been a cyclical businesss where new manufacturing capabilities were brought online en masse after a boom.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IS5ycm7VfXg
Here is a video of Sam Aloof who now runs Atomic Semi with Jim Keller. It likely took thousands of dollars to make his own custom Z2 chip that only has 1200 transistors and its nowhere near the likes of the 68k or Intel 386. They might have more advanced stuff now at Atomic Semi but they haven't announced anything
It’s not going away it’s shifting to robotics
You should look into what’s happening with DIY robotics because it looks eerily similar to what I experienced in the early to mid 90s with PC hardware and software
And you can do way more than just host a bbs with robots
I'd like to see a market for hobbyist computing by hobbyist computer shops, but I'm not sure it's economically feasible.
Jump in the DeLorean and head to the 1980s / 1990s
It is interesting that your comment made no mention of single board computers (SBC) like Raspberry Pi. These are the more likely future of hobbyist computing as the price to develop custom PCBs is lower than ever. Yes, you need to buy the components, but it will come a day where you shop by parts then some LLM arranges the parts on an SBC. Finally, you review the the PCB layout, and click a button to place an order with PCBWay or a competitor. X days later a tiny board appears at your house exactly built to spec and runs Linux. The coolest part: The cost is so low that millions and millions of more (young) people can join the hobbyist computing party.
Wow. They're not selling off the business, they're totally exiting it.
This is a big loss. Crucial offered a supply chain direct from Micron. Most other consumer DRAM sources pass through middlemen, where fake parts and re-labeled rejects can be inserted.
> They're not selling off the business, they're totally exiting it.
From what I understand, OpenAI just bought out a significant proportion of the capacity of Samsung and Hynix, which is the big reason prices just spiked. They're two of the three DRAM manufacturers, Micron being the third.
That gives us a good idea as to what Micron is doing here: They have contracts with their other customers to supply DRAM at whatever price they previously negotiated, but now prices are higher, and they don't have to honor supply contracts with Crucial because they own it. So they're taking all the supply that would have gone to Crucial and selling it to the high bidder instead.
Spinning off the brand in that context doesn't work, because then "Crucial" would need to come with supply contracts or they'd have no access to supply and have nothing to sell. Moreover, the supply constraint isn't likely to be permanent, and whenever prices come back down then Micron would still own the brand and could start selling under it again, which they couldn't if they sold it.
> Moreover, the supply constraint isn't likely to be permanent, and whenever prices come back down then Micron would still own the brand and could start selling under it again, which they couldn't if they sold it.
Why not just announce limited supply, then, instead of exiting?
This seems like a "automaker invests more in financing arm, because it's the most profitable" concentration mistake, towards an industry with wide concerns over intermediate term financial sustainability.
> Why not just announce limited supply, then, instead of exiting?
Because it would be a lie. The amount of supply they're planning to allocate to Crucial in the near future is zero. Keeping the website up as a place you can go and order nothing would only mislead people into thinking they should come back in a few days when they're restocked, when that isn't going to happen anytime soon.
> This seems like a "automaker invests more in financing arm, because it's the most profitable" concentration mistake, towards an industry with wide concerns over intermediate term financial sustainability.
Their business is manufacturing DRAM. Also selling it at retail makes sense most of the time because they get the retailer's margin too, but it doesn't right now, and that's the side business.
They can spin it back up once the bubble pops.
The announcement doesn’t say that they’re selling the Crucial brand. And it’s a valuable brand. So, I agree, they will wait for the bubble to pop and then start it back up. I assume the higher prices let them keep the operation around in mothballs and the employees working elsewhere in the company.
They are rerouting RAMs for consumers to enterprise for server build up - for higher margins I’m sure. MAG7 will happily pay more but poor consumers like us can’t - this is more bad news for us.
Wondering if we're going to have a situation in the future where we end up having to buy the hand-me-downs from industry after they're done with them (and thus kind of outdated tech)? Kind of seems like the days of building your own PC are numbered.
This is already happening in the NAS HDD space. Prices on new units have been stagnant or rising for a couple years now.
It's been happening in all spaces.
There are reputable eBay sellers shipping decomm'd previous-gen servers for bargain basement prices.
If you're fine running last gen (and you should be, for home lab use) then it's worth it to monitor prices over time.
They typically hit a floor, as supply from decomm waves coinciding swamps demand, but the resellers still want to move things as quickly as possible.
Honestly, it's actually pretty awesome the deals you can get on used enterprise gear.
At the cost of power consumption. My small homelab is already at 600Ws which is around 290$/mo in california.
I prefer to just not think about it and blame charging my car. Also in Cali.
I don't know if I'd buy any of the servers or older computers but the internal components are pretty dang good. Stuff like hard drives, network cards, hbas, that's the real money saver right there.
For sure.
I upgraded my home rack to use cx3 cards, and I sport a ds4246 that has a single 18tb sas hard drive in it lol.
Kind of cool I have 56gbps network between them, tho I can only get 30gbps at max in iperf3 lol (due to some pcie bw limit)
I think that’s off by a factor of 10.
What direction
Is there a particular reason you're in California?
Work.
Even the hand-me-down situation has been changing. I remember in the 2010s being able to shop at Weird Stuff in Sunnyvale, which was a treasure trove of old enterprise equipment, a heavenly place for a retrocomputing enthusiast like me. I even bought accessories for my NeXTstation there! The shop kept the good retro stuff in the back away from the general public for people who asked kindly about retro gear :). I saw some 1980s and 1990s classic Macs, too, in the restricted area.
Unfortunately Weird Stuff is a thing of the past, though this had less to do with a reduced supply of surplus and more to do with Silicon Valley’s high real estate prices. Thankfully there are still good stuff to be found at e-waste recyclers, but if more companies are relying on the cloud, and if more devices are integrated boards with everything soldered on (such as most modern Apple hardware), the hand-me-downs of the future are going to be harder to work on than today’s hand-me-downs. I’m just an average software guy whose hardware experience is limited to a graduate-level computer architecture course and building PCs. I can talk about caching and branch prediction, but I’ve never picked up a soldering iron in my life; I’m no Louis Rossmann.
Enterprise as in the level of support and care these products will come with, as opposed to consumer or business.
Hyperscalers and even "smaller" shops by comparison, such as CoreWeave, TerraWulf, Lambda.ai.
So yes, enterprise customers doing AI data centre buildouts. They are going all out for them at the expense of their consumer business due to supply constraints.
I don't see this situation changing for many years to come. Would indirectly affect the cost of any electronics that has storage or memory on it. Would be interesting to see how Samsung plays this one out with their limited inventory - they make RAM + SSDs, use it themselves on their phones, laptops, etc. Also supply to consumer and business customers. Interesting times.
Exiting the market. Not abandoning the factories. They will be retooled for AI market, which is more profitable.
This is like developers shifting from building homes targeted at homeowners to building build-to-rent neighborhoods for Blackrock and company xD
notably, Blackrock doesn't actually have any stake in housing. Plenty of other private equity firms do, of course.
Thanks boss, they were the same company for a while and then got spun off. There is so much confusion that AI even has a hard time keeping them straight if you aren’t careful.
Anyway it doesn’t matter the name for the purpose of my argument. And lol at “unfounded conspiracy theory” it’s only a “conspiracy” that Blackrock is buying homes (crucially, no one is actually suggesting that, except the people who are confused between Blackrock and Blackstone), because Blackstone definitely is buying homes.
Should countries have a upper limit on the ratio of server:client memory supply chain capacity? If no one can buy client hardware to access the cloud, how would cloud providers survive after driving their customers to extinction?
It shouldn't be possible for one holding company (OpenAI) to silently buy all available memory wafer capacity from Samsung and SK Hynix, before the rest of civilization even has the opportunity to make a counteroffer.
What if we realize that 8 GB of memory is actually a tremendous amount, and experience a resurgence in desktop operating systems as people begin to prioritize memory for productive computation again instead of using up a gigabyte for a chat client?
Phones are already memory constrained and affected by artificial NAND shortage, it's not specific to one form factor.
> Should countries have an upper limit on the ratio of server:client memory supply chain capacity? If no one can buy client hardware to access the cloud, how would cloud providers survive after driving their customers to extinction?
You mean a central planning, command and control economy? There is a lot of history of countries trying these things and they don’t have the outcome you want.
DRAM manufacturing is a global business. If one country starts imposing purchase limits for whatever reason, the DRAM consumers are going to laugh as they move their data centers and operations to another country that doesn’t try to impose their laws on a global market.
> It shouldn't be possible for one holding company (OpenAI) to silently buy all available memory wafer capacity from Samsung and SK Hynix, before the rest of civilization even has the opportunity to make a counteroffer.
Good news: That’s not how markets work. DRAM manufacturers don’t list a price and then let OpenAI buy it all up. Contracts are negotiated. Market prices fluctuate.
No supplier of anything is going to let all of their inventory disappear to one buyer without letting the market have a chance to bid the price higher.
> DRAM manufacturers don’t list a price and then let OpenAI buy it all up.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46143535
https://thememoryguy.com/some-clarity-on-2025s-ddr4-price-su...Any market where the prices are negotiated is a bad market.
That means that it is a market where there is an asymmetry of power between vendors and buyers, caused by the fact that the vendors know more than the buyers, i.e. only the vendors know the right price for their products.
Therefore in such a market there are winners and losers among the buyers. Those buyers who buy quantities great enough to have negotiating power and who have knowledge about the right prices can buy at those prices, while the other buyers are fooled by the vendors into paying excessive prices.
The fact that the big-volume buyers deserve discounts has nothing to do with price negotiation. In a good market, where there is enough competition, the volume discounts can be public and available for anyone.
Also, a public auction for a product where the demand exceeds the offer has nothing to do with a secret price negotiation.
Any vendor who promotes price negotiation is a vendor who desires to steal money from its customers, instead of performing a mutually advantageous exchange.
We can prevent this from happening by enforcing 100-year-old antitrust laws.
Antitrust laws don't work because they're subjective and are enforced by political appointees.
The simpler solution is a tax on scale -- a graduated corporate revenue tax, aggregated across any group of entities which meet the common control [1] criteria. Then it's just a tax, and you simply have to collect it. Very little wiggle room.
If splitting your company in half wouldn't impair any of its lines of business, the CEO has a powerful financial incentive (lower tax rates on the two halves) to do so.
[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/26/1.52-1
I don't think that works in the situation of fabs. They are big and expensive pieces of tech with the latest fabs being the most expensive to construct.
You can't exactly break up a chip manufacturer when they have just 1 or 2 plants tooled for the latest memory.
IMO, recognizing chip fabrication as a national security asset and turning it into a public corporation would be the better way to go. Let the likes of intel/amd/or micron continue developing chips. But also, take control of the most expensive and risky part of chip manufacturing to make sure we don't fall behind due to corporate budget cuts. You also keep and continue to build expertise in a vital part of modern society.
Is that a joke? Socializing important industries has always been a disaster. Government run organizations have never been able to innovate on a sustained basis.
Lots have even in America. 2 famous ones are the NIH and the National Laboratories.
In fact, the largest, most advanced, and best known semiconductor manufacturer is primarily government owned: TSMC.
The only thing that gets in the way of their ability to sustain innovation is administrations hostile to publicly funded research.
Outside of innovative industries, there are plenty of examples of important government ran organizations aren't "disasters". Some of which can only be effectively ran via government. For example, healthcare.
What's been a disaster is relying on privatization and capitalism to solve all problems. That's the system of government we had in the dark ages.
TSMC is not primarily government owned.
Not only that, there was government-led chip research in Taiwan before TSMC (ITRI). And it was going nowhere. If Morris had stayed in ITRI, Taiwan would probably look like a developing country whose primary value is to host the US military bases today.
TSMC's largest shareholder remains the Taiwanese government. And it would not have been a thing without the direct intervention of the government through ITRI.
It would not exist without the government's direct intervention.
I mean, to take that one step further, if the underlying process-node technology (e.g. EUV) were nationalized, then you an entire nation-state's budget (and ability to get cheap loans) could be thrown at the problem of rapid horizontal buildout of fab capacity. Economics similar to nuclear power generation.
Exactly. And even if it ultimately doesn't turn a profit (which, who knows, it probably will turn a profit) you've still created a pretty favorable circumstance for chip manufacturers.
There's a reason why basically only Intel does inhouse fabrication and even they have had to rely out outsourcing it.
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> Religion, nationalism, race, etc are the correct ways and historically successful ways to deal with this
What??
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What do you think antitrust laws are going to do? Force Micron to continue producing consumer DIMMs in a heavily commoditized market? Stop server builders from building servers? Stop companies from building data centers around the globe?
This is just supply and demand.
Antitrust laws can/should be applied to, eg., Google for search and web monopolization.
If someone is willing to pay more than you for a limited supply of some resource, that isn't a market monopoly.
Allowing one sector of the economy to starve out investment in others is unlikely to be something without consequences.
Monopolies never last in the tech industry. IBM had a monopoly on mainframes. And they even kind of still do, but now no one cares because disruptive innovations in other computing platforms have made mainframes nearly irrelevant. Now startups like OpenAI and Perplexity are using disruptive innovations to rapidly make Google's traditional web search business irrelevant.
OpenAI is having to pull insane amounts of funding to even stay alive.
Google is about to lay waste to everyone.
Google is using their nation state wealth to once again dominate a new sector. Wealth gained from unfair monopolization of search and web and mobile.
Google changed the notion of the URL bar to search. They control every ingress. Now, if you want to access a name brand registered trademark, it flows through Google search. Brands have to pay extortion money to Google to keep others from sniping their rightful name brand.
Google gets even more money because there's a bidding war.
Google pays to put themselves as middle men in front of nearly every web access.
Google doesn't just have a monopoly on this, it's downright unethical and should be tried in court or have laws written to make this illegal.
I have no love for OpenAI, but how do they even compete with the hundreds of billions of dollars this nets?
> Monopolies never last in the tech industry
Google is an invasive species in the ecosystem. They're killing viable competition by engorging themselves and taxing non-productively.
Capitalism should be hard. It should be live or die regardless of size or scale. Google is barely breaking a sweat.
These suggestions seem to me part of an absurd struggle against basic market economics.
This isn’t antitrust because the companies aren’t reselling it to you at a much higher price after cornering the market (cough cough Ticketmaster & scalpers).
> These suggestions seem to me part of an absurd struggle against basic market economics
Perhaps the limited competition caused by 25+ memory manufacturers consolidating down to a 3-member cartel is a sign of market failure. I use "cartel" deservedly, as the RAM manufacturers were found guilty of price-fixing in multiple times in the past.
"The market is always right"
-Thoughtless, deluded, Homo economicus religion, idiot
Devices like smartphones and tablets that are locked down will continue to exist.
It’s these pesky pc things that people do bad things like piracy with/s
If you asked me to estimate the weighted fraction of clients accessing cloud services using devices with retail DIMMs, I would say much less than 1%.
It's not just retail DIMMS, most notebook and smartphone vendors are also impacted by NAND being redirected to datacenters.
It's the same memory wafer capacity. They're not separate.
Yeah but Micron is only exiting the retail business. They will still sell DIMMs to Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc.
They will probably sell Micron-label DIMMs to anyone who offers to buy 1000 of them.
This.
And they're effectively saying they've had enough of running call centers, tracing lost parcels, weirdo customers who show up at the factory, running marketing campaigns etc.
A consumer facing business is a lot of overhead, and since more and more hardware now has soldered ram, it is a shrinking business too.
Shrinking businesses are super hard to run - it's far easier to grow a business than shrink it whilst maintaining the same margins.
> And they're effectively saying they've had enough of running call centers, tracing lost parcels, weirdo customers who show up at the factory, running marketing campaigns etc.
When this is a company's core complaint, then the usual strategy for getting out of the D2C business (without losing D2C revenue) is finding a channel partner willing to absorb the dealflow. I.e. turning your B2C channel into a single B2B(2C) enterprise customer.
> Most other consumer DRAM sources pass through middlemen, where fake parts and re-labeled rejects can be inserted.
Large DIMM vendors are definitely not buying through middlemen.
Any vendor consuming a lot of RAM chips over a threshold will be negotiating contracts with RAM chip manufacturers. It’s not that hard even at medium scale.
and when the AI boom pops, Micron is going to lose out on the consumer market. This is a horrible business decision. All they had to do was increase the price.
Pop already! Let's get all this nonsense over with.
I think others will pick up the slack. The Chinese seem to be pretty good at producing competent Flash/DRAM products (I don't think they are behind that much). They also don't seem to be all in on the AI craze, so maybe we will buy their stuff if nothing else?
There is KLEVV, the outlet of SK Hynix. They are crass!
https://www.klevv.com/ken/main
And don't forget about https://www.nanya.com/en/
While I never had a problem with https://semiconductor.samsung.com/dram/module/ , I think they will be rare/more expensive now, or 'soonish'.
For chinese CXMT and YMTC there is https://www.biwintech.com/
We live in interesting times!
(Cackling madly...)
Strange that Klevv is putting RGB LEDs on DIMMs, and Samsung isn't. Where does Samsung plan to put the advertisements?
> KLEVV
Just looked at standard desktop: still no 64GB 5600MT/s modules. CUDIMMs are missing 32GB.
> And don't forget about Nanya
BTW, what is the status of Elpida now?
Elpida was purchased by Micron after the financial crisis (they bought it out of bankdruptcy for a swan song in 2013). Much of the Micron DRAM you might buy is made at the former Elipida fab in Hiroshima.
Mostly R&D.
Hynix also started selling consumer SSDs with "SK Hynix" branding like 2-3 years ago. I guess we'll see how long that lasts.
With ram, you can verify pretty quick what you are getting.
I really wouldn't want to buy any NAND vendor until a bunch of years after they build a reputation. It's too scary to get a decent bargain SSD drive that actually oh secretly dies really early, doesn't actually have anywhere near the endurance it claims.
huh, that explains why they always seem to sell the best 6000CL30 RAM.
Yep. I've followed Micron since before Y2k. I've seen the ups and downs of their stock. Seen a CEO literally crash and burn (RIP).
This is a mistake. The consumer business is a bet , which they excel at. Yes, its not printing money right now, but it is an option. Exiting the consumer business will mean they may miss insights into the next hot consumer trend.
The game for large companies like this should be to keep small bets going and literally, just survive. That's what Micron was doing, that's what NVIDIA did for a better part of a decade. Now that both are printing money.
Yet, Micron has decided its retiring from placing more bets. Mistake.
What is there to sell? The brand itself has value I guess, but that "Direct Access" goes out the door the second they sell it, so there's no value specifically in that to anyone else.
Crucial is primarily a Marketing and Support company, they didn't really make anything although there was a small engineering team that did DIMM/Module binning, but mostly contracted out heatsinks to glue to Micron DIMMs. On the SSD side of things, they used Phison controllers with Micron flash, just like pretty much any other consumer SSD that isn't Samsung or SK/Solidigm.
Corsair, Gskill, Geil, etc don't buy components from Crucial, they get them Micron. Crucial closing their doors has no bearing on that as far as we can tell.
They probably considered dumping it on some Private Equity firm or something, but likely decided to keep the IP in case they decide to resurrect it in the future should the market landscape change.
It sucks that they're winding down crucial, but it makes sense. Frankly I'm surprised they didn't pull the trigger sooner, and by sooner I mean years sooner.
I wonder why they didn't pull a GE, and sell/license the brand. But I'm glad they didn't.
Why would anybody buy it? This is a bad sign for consumer memory in general. It's more likely we're going to see more exits from this segment instead.
I guess no Chinese interest wanted to buy it, to jumpstart a favored brand that's a step above random-name when people are picking which to buy on Amazon. Or wasn't willing to pay enough for it.
Maybe they keep the brand to resurrect it some years in the future when the surge of data centers has faded away and they'll have to find custumers between consumers.
I like this theory. I'd forgotten that of course a company like that thinks further into the future than many software companies do/can.
I feel like the "democratization of technology" is on the back slide. For the longest time, we had more and more access to high end technology at very reasonable price points.
Now it feels like if you're not Facebook, Google, OpenAI, etc. etc. computation isn't for you.
I hope this is just a blip, but I think there is a trend over the past few years.
I also hope its just a blip, but I don't actually think it is.
The democratization of technology was something that had the power to break down class barriers. Anyone could go get cheap, off the shelf hardware, a book, and write useful software & sell it. It became a way to take back the means of production.
Computing being accessible and affordable for everyone = working class power.
That is why its backsliding. Those in power want the opposite, they want to keep control. So we don't get to have open devices, we get pushed to thin clients & locked boot loaders, and we lose access to hardware as it increasingly only gets sold B2B (or if they do still sell to consumers, they just raise prices until most are priced out).
When the wealthy want something, that something becomes unavailable to everyone else.
Arguably Google and others like them would not even exist without access to cheap off the shelf hardware in their early days.
Yes, and that's a part of the appeal to companies like Google. They've climbed the ladder, and now they're pulling it up behind them so others can't climb up to catch them.
Definitely. And there's a tendency for individuals and particularly corporations to pull up the ladder behind them. They know that leaving things accessible means they could face major competition 5 years down the road. So they do what they can to prevent that.
Exactly! Apple wouldn't have existed without access to the MOS 6502 and other electronics, which allowed Woz to carry out his dream of building a personal computer. Microsoft might not have existed without the Altair 8800. Many 1990s and 2000s web startups got off the ground with affordable, available hardware, whether it's hand-me-down RISC workstations or commodity x86 PCs.
Granted, to be fair, many of today's startups and small businesses are made possible by AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and other cloud services. It is sometimes cheaper to rent a server than to own one, and there are fewer system administration chores. However, there's something to be said about owning your own infrastructure rather than renting it out, and I think a major risk of compute power being concentrated by just a few major players is the terms of computation being increasingly dictated by those players.
> Those in power want the opposite, they want to keep control. So we don't get to have open devices, we get pushed to thin clients & locked boot loaders
While it's undeniable that MAFIAA et al have been heavily lobbying for that crap... the problem is, there are lots of bad actors out there as well.
I 'member the 00s/10s, I made good money cleaning up people's computers after they fell for the wrong porn or warez site. Driver signatures and Secure Boot killed entire classes of malware persistence.
Is this not just "with freedom comes responsibility" applied to technology? Often the freedom to do something means that, when given that sovereignty and missing the requisite experience, that means you also end up with the freedom to harm yourself (whether through a misunderstanding of a danger or just simple error.)
Do we want to accept that as a potential consequence, or have someone else choose for us what consequences we are allowed to accept?
> Do we want to accept that as a potential consequence, or have someone else choose for us what consequences we are allowed to accept?
Unfortunately, I think the old guard here is dying out and the majority want someone else choosing for them, which is why all the age verification & chat control-like bills have broad bipartisan support.
I'm in the "with freedom comes responsibility" camp. Obviously we should build secure systems, but our devices shouldn't be impenetrable by their own user. The "security" we are getting now is just security against the user having the freedom to do as they wish with their devices and software.
The cultural zeitgeist surrounding internet and computing freedom has changed to be in favor of more control and censorship. Not sure how we can stop it.
I don't see how it can be a blip if AI actually turns out to be successful. They'll likely gobble up any lose hardware for their datacenters until only scraps are left or the AI bubble pops if AGI isn't achieved in the next few years and stock values fall off a cliff
Interesting take.
In a naive way, when rich entities are interested in a limited resource it's basically over.
Somehow I can see a parallel with the housing crisis where the price go higher and higher.
I can't see both of them ending anytime soon unless there is a major paradigm shift in our life.
What's causing the housing crisis?
Corruption, Zoning, Investment housing
It's likely that all the mega cloud and AI companies want regular people forced to go to them for solutions and buying up any companies that might pose a potential for allowing that. In response they will use a small percentage of the trillions being thrown at them to eliminate those companies that allow for self hosting or mid tier providers to thrive.
Software has been moving in the right direction. Tons of open source projects for every application imaginable. But hardware has gotten more closed. You can't replace batteries in phones, they get pre-loaded with state level spyware, laptops today have about the same hard drive space as 10 years ago to drive cloud usage, and GPUs and now memory seem to be becoming increasingly cost prohibitive for consumers.
It's definitely just a blip.
I'm not a fan of ultra big tech, but I don't get the concern here exactly.
What high end technology do you want that you can't get?
In the 90s, I paid nearly $10k for a high-end PC. Today, I can get something like an Nvidia RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell for ~$8k, with 24,064 CUDA cores and 96 GB RAM, that's capable of doing LLM inference at thousands of tokens per second.
I realize the prices from this example are a bit steep for many people, but it's not out of line historically with high-end hardware - in fact the $10k from the 90s would be something like $25k today.
My point is I don't see how "if you're not Facebook, Google, OpenAI, etc. etc. computation isn't for you." I'd love an example if I'm missing something.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgADKpMStts
100% agree.
A little foil hat conspiracy i supposed, but the big companies saw nobodies become incredibly wealthy over the last decade, and this is the new companies protecting their position by limiting technology.
This is an unreal thing to say. Dude I can buy a chip on eBay with almost a gigabyte of L3 cache. That’s never been possible before.
Crucial was always a brand that I associated with quality, and I used their memory to upgrade several MacBooks back when it was still possible to upgrade the memory on MacBooks.
That being said, the only SSD I’ve ever had fail on me was from Crucial.
In recent builds I have been using less expensive memory from other companies with varying degrees of brand recognizability, and never had a problem. And the days of being able to easily swap memory modules seem numbered, anyway.
I've long (very, very long) been a storage snob. Originally via the IBM UltraStar drives, and continued with the Intel SSDs. Even with good backups, a drive failure is often a pain in the ass. Slightly less so with RAID.
IBM really locked me in on the Ultrastar back in the mid '90s. Sure, it has proven itself to be a great product. But some of the first ones I bought, one of the drives arrived failed. I called the vendor I bought it from and they said they wouldn't replace it, I'd have to get a refurb from IBM. So I called IBM, when I told them I had just bought it they said I needed to call the place I bought it from because otherwise I'd get a refurb. I explained I had already called them. "Oh, who did you buy it from?" I told them. "Can you hold on a minute?" ... "Hi, I've got [NAME] on the line from [VENDOR] and they'll be happy to send you a replacement."
That's because the SSD business was little more than a carbon copy of most other consumer non Samsung or SK/Solidigm brands. They've been phison controller with some cheap NAND flash with a different coat of paint for generations now, or in the case of the portable/external ones, that plus a 3rd party enclosure and IO module that they'd contracted out. In terms of hardware, this sub-business-unit was no more "Micron" than Corsair is (Support may be a different story). Enterprise SSD's and Consumer ones diverged years ago, and today are about as different from one another as GPU's are from CPU's.
The only real difference between Crucial RAM and Micron's unbuffered RAM was which brand's sticker they put on it, with some binning and QA on the higher-end enthusiast SKU's and a heatsink. This sub-business-unit was almost entirely redundant to Micron.
> And the days of being able to easily swap memory modules seem numbered, anyway.
I keep seeing people say this in threads across platforms discussing this news, and it baffles me. Why?
All the higher margin non consumer markets are moving away from socketed ram for integrated ram for performance and manufacturing cost reasons. It’s hard to see what the motivation for spending some of their limited foundry time on products that are only of interest to lower margin direct consumers if this keeps up
> All the higher margin non consumer markets are moving away from socketed ram for integrated ram
Absolutely, positively, wildly untrue. Just because there is a boom in memory-on-package designs doesn't mean the market is moving away from expandable/socketable memory. The opposite is true. It's supplementing it because we're trying to cram as much ram as possible into things, not because we're trying to reduce it.
There has never been more demand for RAM. Many of the memory-on-compute/memory-on-package designs are going into systems with socketable ram. Those systems btw have never had more memory channels/slots available. Intel just cancelled their 8 Channel SKU's for their upcoming Xeon parts because their partners pretty much all universally told them they'd be buying the 16 channel variants instead, because demand is so high, and that's not unique to Intel. AMD and Ampere are seeing and responding to similar demands, by continuing to increase their supported memory channels/memory capacities.
> and manufacturing cost reasons.
This generally increases price, even when using things like LPDDR, especially as the capacity of the packaged RAM goes up (the fact that this can't be replaced makes yield issues a big concern whereas in socketable RAM it's effectively a non-issue). There are ways that it can be used for cost effectiveness, but those applications are generally not "high margin" nor are cost-sensitive applications of this deploying a lot of SKU's to cater the wide variety of demand in type/speed/capacity (eg (LP)DDR vs GDDR vs HBM and all the variations therein, not to mention buffered vs unbuffered, Load reduced, computational, storage class etc), because even with the chiplet/modular production of CPU's, that is not a linear scale up of cost-to-manufacture (or engineer) as complexity goes up. This isn't like Cores on a CPU where you can just disable some if there's a manufacturing defect, you need to swap memory controllers and scale qty of those controllers and use different kinds of DMA interlinks depending on the ram type (can't just swap HBM for DDR and expect everything to work)
For most performance oriented products, the memory-on-package thing is a new layer of RAM that sits between the cache of the compute unit (CPU/DPU/Whatever) and traditional socketable DRAM, not as a replacement for it. There are very real thermal and packaging limits though. For example, how are you going to install 2TB of DDR directly onto a CPU package? How are you going to cool it when teh available surface area is a fraction of what it is with socketable RAM and you're theoretically hitting it even harder by leveraging the lower latency while placing it so close to the compute that's using it, that even if the RAM is idle it's still subject to far more heatsoak than equivalent socketable RAM is?
This is further substantiated by the demand for things like CXL which allows you to further expand RAM by installing it to the PCIe bus (and thus, through things like RDMA/RoCE, through the network fabric) like you would any other PCIe add in card, which is leading to an explosion in something called Storage Class Memory (SCM), so that we can deploy more socketable/expandable/replacable RAM to systems/clusters/fabrics than ever before.
I could go on and on actually, but I'm not trying to attack you, and this post is long enough. If interested, I could continue to expand on this. But the point is, memory-on-package designs aren't replacing socketable memory in high margin markets they're supplementing it, as a direct result of demand for RAM being so astronomical and there being multiple hard limits on how much RAM you can cram into a single package effectively. The last thing people want is less RAM or less choice in RAM. The RAM itself may evolve (eg SOCAMM, Computational Memory, MCR, SCM etc), but socketable/replaceable/expandable memory is not going away.
EDIT:
> It’s hard to see what the motivation for spending some of their limited foundry time on products that are only of interest to lower margin direct consumers if this keeps up
This is a fair concern, but entirely independent of the first part of your comment. Worth noting that just because Samsung is the only game in town left selling consumer DIMMs (at least in the US), doesn't mean that the consumer market isn't getting supplied. Micron, Samsung and SK are all still selling DRAM components to consumer facing brands (like Corsair, Gskill, Geil). It's entirely possible they may reconsider that, but consumers aren't the only ones with volume demand for DDR4/DDR5 DRAM UDIMM's. OEM's like DEll, HP, etc and various SI's all have considerable volume demand for them as well, and combined with consumer demand, does place considerable pressure on those companies not to fully exit supplying the market - even if they chose to only do it indirectly going forward.
My most memorable RAM upgrade was adding 512KB to an Atari ST in 1988. Had to suck the solder out of 16x(16+2) factory flow-soldered through-holes, then solder in the 16 individual RAM chips and their decoupling capacitors. I was a teenager and hadn’t soldered before. I had no one to show me how, so I got a book from the library with pictures.
Was a huge relief that the machine come up successfully. But then it would lock up when it got warm, until I found the dodgy joint.
Was a very stressful afternoon, but a confidence builder!
I bet there are many people whose sole experience inside a computer is popping in some DIMMs. I’ll be kinda sad if those days are also gone. On the other hand, super integrated packages like Apple’s M-series make for really well-performing computers.
Huh... I did that, too :)
And before that I duct-taped the insanely large 16KB RAM extension (from 1KB), so it doesn't reset with the slightest movement, on my Sinclair ZX81, which I've also assembled and soldered from a kit :)
A fellow survivor of RAM-pack wobble!
There are dozens of us!
I also had a Crucial SSD fail. I believe it was either 256GB or 512GB SATA, around 2013-2014. Right around the same time OCZ released a batch of SSDs that were so bad they went out of business, despite being a leader in performance. It was a fairly large story about defective silicon. Good lesson in not being too loyal to brand names.
What a disaster for Micron. Having a consumer facing brand is 'crucial' for brand awareness. Micron is the smallest of the big 3 in DRAM and the only one in America. They're going to be swallowed up and replaced by CXMT.
The brand aware "consumers" are really just DIY PC builders, which is relatively a small number. Enterprise DRAM business is doing so great that Micron just doesn't see the consumer market is worth chasing.
This is bad for consumers though since DRAM prices are skyrocketing and now we have one less company making consumer DRAM.
The people who occupy the b2b ram buying kind of jobs are not aliens from another planet. Brand awareness in consumer markets, especially ones that are so closely tied to people's jobs (nerds gonna nerd) is going to have a knock on effect. It's not like a clothing brand or something.
Sometimes reputation and suchlike in the consumer market can directly boost your B2B business. Consumers and professionals alike will look at backblaze drive reliability figures.
Other times professionals will sneer at a consumer product, or a consumer product can diminish your brand. Nobody's wiring a data centre with Monster Cables, and nobody's buying Cisco because they were impressed by Linksys.
Not that it invalidates your point, but Cisco sold Linksys in 2013.
Yes, but the consumer brand has to have a good reputation for that to pan out positively in B2B. Crucial has a decent reputation, but the problem is that there hasn't been any innovation in the consumer DRAM market for 2 decades that wasn't driven by/copied from the enterprise sector. The difference between a Crucial DIMM and a Micron Unbuffered dimm is which brands sticker they put on it, and maybe a heatsink and tighter binning/QA. That's not unique to Micron/Crucial. Aside from "Moar RGB", what innovation has happened in this space in the consumer side of things that isn't just a mirror of the enterprise side (eg DDR4 to DDR5)? XPO/XMP? That's Intel/AMD dictating things to DRAM companies. So what impression really are people meant to carry over from Crucial to Micron in this instance? How is Micron meant to leverage the Crucial brand in this space to stand out above others?
Similar story on the SSD side of things regarding reputation/innovation, especially when you consider that Crucial SSD's are no more "micron" in a hardware sense than a Corsair one built using Micron flash (support is a different matter), as the controllers were contracted out to 3rd parties (Phison) and the flash used was entry level/previous gen surplus compared to what's put in enterprise. The demands and usecase for consumers and even prosumers/enthusiasts are very different and in general substantially less than on the enterprise side of things with SSDs, and that gulf is only growing wider. So again, what is meant to carry over? How can Micron leverage Crucial to stand out when the consumer market just doesn't have the demands to support them making strong investment to stand out?
Frankly, taking what you say farther, I think if this is what they want to do (having consumer brand recognition that can carry over in some meaningful way to B2B), then sundowning crucial now (given the current supply issues) and then eventually re-entering the market when things return to some sense of "normal" as Micron so that both consumer and enterprise brands are the same brand, "Micron", makes much more sense.
Considering how many people don't realize Crucial is a Micron brand, or that Micron components are in a lot of non-crucial consumer brand products, I'd argue it wasn't that crucial.
Especially considering that there's little innovation in the consumer DRAM and SSD spaces vs their enterprise counterparts that Micron can flex their talent in.
Micron had infinite brand awareness in the electronics industry long before they made SSDs. Heck they don't even use their own name for those products. They've been a memory vendor for more than 40 years and they're the only vendor with US domestic memory fabs. Something tells me their future will be just fine. Disclosure: Micron stock holder.
Every low end IoT box made in china will be 'encouraged' to use CXMT aided by state subsidies. This will shrink the market for market price DRAM. When the AI bubble pops DRAM makers will discover the importance of diversification.
> What a disaster for Micron.
Almost certainly this is because of a windfall for Micron, at least in the short term. Datacenter memory demand is going through the roof, and that was where margins were highest already. It makes no sense to continue to try to milk a consumer brand that can be sold at, what, a 20% markup over generics?
Most likely Micron was planning this forever, and the current market conditions are such that it's time to pull the trigger and retool everything for GPU memory.
Micron is chasing AI glory. Their stock valuation has no room for consumer business, which is a distraction.
You can’t think about companies like it’s 2024. We’re in a gilded age with unlimited corruption… Anything can happen. They can sign a trillion dollar deal with OpenAI, get acquired by NVidia, merge with Intel, get nationalized by Trump, etc.
> Micron is chasing AI glory.
Sounds to me like they are using the tried and true method of selling equipment to the people rushing for gold
Perhaps, but when the gold rush is over and the demand for shovels falls, you've now salted the earth you're returning to.
People aren’t going to care. They’ll re-enter the market, perhaps with a new name, and people will have no qualms buying their stuff.
You’re exactly wrong. In the race to supply AI data center, there is no “consumer” (in the sense I think you mean) making or influencing a buying decision. Without a clear path to increase supply, why take $1 when you can have $6 or $7?
https://www.biwintech.com/
That's planned, not a disaster. They've deprioritized brand awareness. Siemens for instance doesn't need brand awareness, if they did, they'd pick an english name.
Micron are estimated to have 23% and 21% of global revenue for DRAM and HBM in Q2 2025.
Their 'smaller' market, SSDs - has an estimated 13% of global NAND revenue.
https://counterpointresearch.com/en/insights/global-dram-and... https://counterpointresearch.com/en/insights/global-nand-mem...
I don't know their breakdown for consumer vs enterprise, but the Crucial brand is consumer focussed. Obviously enterprise at this point is incredibly lucrative.
We're gonna need a bigger pin.
Tangent: this is going to happen with SOTA LLMs as well, isn't it.
Consumers are so annoying. And by consumers, I mean "anyone can get an API key for the latest model."
I am a huge believer in AI, but the build-out right now, justified or not, will definitely hit a slowdown at some point. Not being diverse in their customer base could really hurt them later on. Sometimes you keep something going for tomorrow's business even if it is costing you something today.
It's just a brand. They can start it up again later if enterprise demand falls.
I hear the cries of a thousand people in marketing right now. Building a brand takes time. I could see this if they were thinking they needed to re-invent the brand and to help with that they were strategically taking a break but that seems like a stretch.
It's kind of the opposite. Crucial is a throwaway brand so that the premium brand (Micron) can sell cheaper shit without tarnishing their enterprise branding.
my expectation is that they would either sell crucial RAM at such a low volume and/or such a high price that it would do more damage to the brand than sunsetting it and returning to it when the slowdown occurs.
At the moment AI is to me like the debunked assumption of the existence of the Moai on Easter Island.
We cut down our trees to build more AI datacenter sculptures to please the AI gods.
Or the nuclear craze of 50s where radioactuve material where stuffed in everything like toothpaste, cream etc.
AI being a useful component in our futures (depending on how much as a society we'll shun slop) and the current scale of AI investment being a line-go-up bubble are complementary, not exclusive.
It really is just dotcom all over again.
There's a huge difference between "AI" and "tech bros and finance guys getting amazed by an LLM that talks back to them without realising it's just a language model and not intelligence, so they started chucking the massive piles of cash they had lying around the world to evade taxes to them in a pyramid scheme of colossal scale". We currently are heading more and more towards the latter, and when it crashes it will sow so much distrust and curse the "AI" name so much that we'll probably get a decades-long AI winter after that. In the end none of this nonsense will help the world towards getting better AI any time soon.
Already most "AI researchers" outside of the big corps have basically turned in the last 3 years from "people training their models and doing research" to "webdev plugging into other people's APIs to use LLMs they don't know crap about". When, not if, the big AI bubble bursts, the damage done to the sector will be immense
This will surely maximize quarterly profits until the next cloud or AI bust.
Diversification is resilience.
Putting consumer on hold makes some sense. An exit? This will be written about in business books.
Sad. I've been buying Crucial as an attempt to avoid counterfeits, both buying direct and on eBay. Every DIMM and SSD from them has been perfect so far.
(ProTip: When you see 'Crucial'-labeled DIMMs with chips that don't have the Micron 'M' logo, I wouldn't buy that, or I would send it back.)
I'm half joking but if this AI boom continues we're going to see Nvidia exit from consumer GPU business. But Jensen Huang will never do that to us... (I hope)
There is a couple reasons why Jensen won't take off the gaming leather jacket just yet:
1. Gaming cards are their R&D pipeline for data center cards. Lots of innovation came from gaming cards.
2. Its a market defense to keep other players down and keep them from growing their way into data centers.
3. Its profitable (probably the main reason but boring)
4. Hedge against data center volatility (10 key customers vs millions)
5. Antitrust defense (which they used when they tried to buy ARM)
6. Techies who use NVidia GPUs in their PCs are more likely to play with AI and ultimately contribute to the space as either a developer or a user
7. Maybe just don’t put all your eggs in one basket, especially when that basket is an industry that has yet to materialize its promise.
They'll access GPUs through their company VPN
If they're unemployed, they'll just rent from the cloud
How many of you still manage your own home server?
> 1. Gaming cards are their R&D pipeline for data center cards. Lots of innovation came from gaming cards.
No way that is true any more. Five years ago, maybe.
https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/1izlt9w/nvidi...
on the contrary. this is the place they can try out new tech, new cores, new drivers, new everything with very little risk. driver crash? the gamer will just restart their game. the AI workload will stall and cost a lot of money.
basically, the gaming segment is the beta-test ground for the datacenter segment. and you have beta testers eager to pay high prices!
we see the same in CPUs by the way, where the datacenter lineup of both intel and amd lags behind the consumer lineup. gives time to iron out bios, microcode and optimizations.
Why would anyone sell a handful of GPUs to nobodies like us when they could sell a million GPUs for thousands apiece to a handful of big companies? We're speedrunning the absolute worst corpo cyberpunk timeline.
Because when you lose even one of those big companies in your handful, it tanks your business. Customer diversity is a good thing.
And they're not selling a handful of GPUs to nobodies like us; they're selling millions of GPUs to millions of nobodies.
Gaming is now less than 10% of nvidia's revenue. We're really not adding any meaningful diversity to their bottom line anymore.
> Customer diversity is a good thing.
Tell that to Micron.
The way things are going no one will be able to afford a PC.
Instead we will be streaming games from our locked down tablets and paying a monthly subscription for the pleasure.
You will own nothing and be happy.
Might almost be a good thing, if it means abandoning overhyped/underperforming high-end game rendering tech, and taking things in a different direction.
The push for 4K with raytracing hasn't been a good thing, as it's pushed hardware costs way up and led to the attempts to fake it with AI upscaling and 'fake frames'. And even before that, the increased reliance on temporal antialiasing was becoming problematic.
The last decade or so of hardware/tech advances haven't really improved the games.
DLSS Transformer models are pretty good. Framegen can be useful but has niche applications dure to latency increase and artifacts. Global illumination can be amazing but also pretty niche as it's very expensive and comes with artifacts.
Biggest flop is UE5 and it's lumen/nanite. Reallly everything would be fine if not that crap.
And yeah, our hardware is not capable of proper raytracing at the moment.
> Framegen can be useful but has niche application
Somebody should tell that to the AAA game developers that think hitting 60fps with framegen should be their main framerate target.
The latest DLSS and FSR are good actually. Maybe XeSS too.
The push for ray tracing comes from the fact that they've reached the practical limits of scaling more conventional rendering. RT performance is where we are seeing the most gen-on-gen performance improvement, across GPU vendors.
Poor RT performance is more a developer skill issue than a problem with the tech. We've had games like Doom The Dark Ages that flat out require RT, but the RT lighting pass only accounts for ~13% of frame times while pushing much better results than any raster GI solution would do with the same budget.
The literal multi-million dollar question that executives have never bothered asking: When is it enough?
Do I, as a player, appreciate the extra visual detail in new games? Sure, most of the time.
But, if you asked me what I enjoy playing more 80% of the time? I'd pull out a list of 10+ year old titles that I keep coming back to, and more that I would rather play than what's on the market today if they only had an active playerbase (for multiplayer titles).
Honestly, I know I'm not alone in saying this: I'd rather we had more games focused on good mechanics and story, instead of visually impressive works that pile on MTX to recoup insane production costs. Maybe this is just the catalyst we need to get studios to redirect budgets to making games fun instead of spending a bunch of budget on visual quality.
Well in the case of Doom: The Dark ages, it's not just about about fidelity but about scale and production. To make TDA's levels with the baked GI used in the previous game would have taken their artists considerably more time and resulted in a 2-3x growth in install size, all while providing lighting that is less dynamic. The only benefit would have been the ability to support a handful of GPUs slightly older than the listed minimum spec.
Ray tracing has real implications not just for the production pipeline, but the kind of environments designers can make for their games. You really only notice the benefits in games that are built from the ground up for it though. So far, most games with ray tracing have just tacked it on top of a game built for raster lighting, which means they are still built around those limitations.
I'm not even talking about RT, specifically, but overall production quality. Increased texture detail, higher-poly models, more shader effects, general environmental detail, the list goes on.
These massive production budgets for huge, visually detailed games, are causing publishers to take fewer creative risks, and when products inevitably fail in the market the studios get shuttered. I'd much rather go back to smaller teams, and more reasonable production values from 10+ years ago than keep getting the drivel we have, and that's without even factoring in how expensive current hardware is.
I can definitely agree with that. AAA game production has become bloated with out of control budgets and protracted development cycles, a lot of that due to needing to fill massive overbuilt game worlds with an endless supply of unique high quality assets.
Ray tracing is a hardware feature that can help cut down on a chunk of that bloat, but only when developers can rely on it as a baseline.
I think Nvidia realises that selling GPUs to individuals is useful as it allows them to develop locally with CUDA.
This is a huge reason.
They are already making moves that might suggest that future. They are going to stop packaging VRAM with their GPUs shipped to third-party graphics card makers, who will have to source their own, probably at higher cost.
They will constrain supply before exiting. It's just not smart exiting, you can stop developing and it will be a trickle, also will work as insurance in case AI flops.
In the words of Douglas Adams, there are those who say that this has already happened.
Honestly, I'd prefer it. It might get AMD and Intel more off their ass for GPU development. I already stopped buying Nvidia gpus ages ago before they saw value in the Linux/Unix market, and I'm tired of them sucking up all the air in the room.
Intel GPUs are probably not going to last much longer, considering they did a deal with nvidia for integrated GPUs.
Jensen is to paranoid to do it. But whoever comes after him will do it ASAP.
They did get burned when crypto switched to dedicated hardware and nvida were left with for them huge surpluses of 10xx series hardware. But what they’re selling to AI companies now is a lot more different from their consumer gear
Keep the retail investors happy so they keep pumping your stock.
Wonder if Google will ever start selling TPUs.
They already have: https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/tpuv7-google-takes-a-s...
Beyond the Coral, you mean? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensor_Processing_Unit#Edge_TP...
I was thinking large ones, to other AI companies.
This seems a bit foolish? Even just limiting stock to paper launches and massively raising the price would let you say "oh, it's just the market" but here it makes them look like they're putting all their eggs in one basket.
First, AI took all the hype.
Now, AI is taking all the RAM.
Soon, AI will be taking all the electricity.
i don't know why you are getting downvoted, as power planning is a real problem right now when planning new data center builds.
Because it's a meme response, which generally don't go over well on HN.
Well the best kind of meme, the one that's so entrenched in reality that's it's not a joke.
It's starting to no longer be just that.
It's accurate though.
never crossed my mind that it is
And it seems Supermicro also stopped selling standalone motherboards.
https://www.spectrumsourcing.com/spectrum-news-feed/industry...
Oh snap, that's crazy. In a bad way.
> Going forward, customers must order the full server system to obtain the motherboard.
I have a home server with one of their X11 boards, it is almost 8 years old. It is a bad time to upgrade but once I do it will have to be one from ASrock Rack I guess.
Their MX500 series SSDs were just king of price, performance and reliability. I even installed them in industrial PCs with intense vibrations and large temperature cycles, they're still chugging along like it's nothing.
Agreed, the first gen MX500 with M3CR023 fw proved IMHO to be the second most reliable SATA SSD 2.5" form factor with the Samsung 860 range SSDs (860 Evo / Pro).
Sadly, the MX500 is now difficult to find in western europe. Only lower grade BX500, still quite reliable but not as fast as the MX500 with cache + DRAM.
Had quite a lot of controller issues (become sluggish for periods of time) with the sandisk/WD ones like green/blue and SSD plus.
Huh, I've had the opposite experience with the BX500. Hit a bit hard on them and the SSD drops off the bus. Or fill them up to 80% and witness them crawl to a stop. Dirt cheap drives, but don't ask too much of them.
I wrote the BX500 ils easier to find than the MX500, not that it is better. Obviously the BX is worse than the MX, having no SLC cache.
Oh I never said you wrote it's better, your message is quite clear :)
Just that I would not really compare the two. The BX500 is the only Crucial SSD I've ever had troubles with and kinda eroded my trust in the brand. My >10 years old M4 is still working like a champ, so does my MX200.
DRAM-less SSDs are a plague that is very hard to avoid, as it's never mentioned in the spec sheets.
Just bought one last week, sadly not many options left for 2.5" SSDs
I've been reduced to buying samsung 970 evos. The supply of DRAM supporting SATA SSDs has really dried up.
MBA/Wall Street short term driven decision.
(Crucial the brand not the adjective)
They announced a month ago that their upstate NY fab was delayed by 2-3 years so the painting was on the wall
https://archive.md/WSsLm
https://www.syracuse.com/micron/2025/11/micron-chip-factorie...
They don't need the fab for Crucial the brand.
Anything the fab outputs will feed into Micron selling to datacenters
I have also bought Crucial for decades. Great quality and reliability for a fair price. Anybody doing anything semi-professional will be impacted by this questionable decision.
If you are going to sell shovels for a gold rush its pretty silly to keep rational market compatibility on things like prices, defect rate, packaging, correct contents.. Probably better to spare the brand (for a reboot?) and also not compete as much with all that junk when it shows up again on eBay.
Probably inevitable since they got banned from their largest market[1] in the fallout of the semi/chip bans , with the addded disadvantage that their only play to recoup profits would be through narrowing market ang hiking prices. And here we are - im pretty certain the other DRAM cartel members are willing to play along , as long as their profits spike.
[1] https://www.morningstar.com/news/marketwatch/20251017180/why...
Bummer. Crucial had a lifetime warranty on memory. So when my 2012 Macbook pro cooked the aftermarket memory I had put in it, they replaced it for free. A few years later same system cooked the new memory chip. Again they replaced it no charge. Got six years out of it before keyboard failed, would have bricked itself far earlier if not for crucial.
Every day I hate AI and big tech more and more. Just when I think I couldn’t hate them anymore, they find a way.
AI and big tech are just the ultimate expression of human greed. What you hate is human nature.
> What you hate is human nature.
Such a defeatist take. Human nature is to come up with culture to check human nature. Human nature is to feel community expulsion as badly as physical pain, because human nature is to punish anti-social behavior. We are equally capable of love, empathy, anger and violence. What isn't human nature, is watching everything taken from you, while you tell yourself that's just the way things are. That's pathology.
No. I refuse to just sit back and accept being abused by the elite just because "well, that's just the way it is", "that's human nature". Holy war is also human nature. Revolution is human nature.
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In May this year, the 2x48GB Crucial SODIMM kit sold for £180. Today, the same kit is £275 in the Crucial Amazon store, and sales are limited to one unit per customer. The free market price seems to be over £500. Not a good time to be building a Mini PC or DIY laptop.
I’m sure that decision will look real smart in 3 years time.
Can tell if sarcastic.
Ask me again in 3 years.
This sucks! I know more about software than hardware. Crucial is the only ram I have bought for decades now. As a practical matter does this mean one needs to buy DDR5 ram now from MicroCenter for a build planned for next year? I just put 128gb into my latest Linux workstation. I had been planning to build a new NAS to replace my aging TrueNas (nee FreeNAS). I was just thinking about possibly building another dev box after being very happy with this AMD 9950x performance.
Hey, I got an Akamai banner when I loaded the site.
They're one of the 0.1% left that don't use Cloudflare :)
then you'll be surprised when you do `$dig www.{microsoft,apple}.com`
It was 2017 that I decided to go all in ensuring that my main work computers were built from parts sourced via the local Micro Center. The real eye-opening situation is even if I have a top line most expensive MacBook Pro or most expensive Dell laptop with full warranty, the truth is anytime there was a hardware issue which happened every 2 to 3 years it would destroy a day or more of work. you cannot have it fixed and returned to you the same day being able to have more redundancy in the ability to source individual parts locally is a gigantic financial benefit when you’re livelihood depends on a working high-performance systems as a high-end consultant. I also ensure that I have two laptops capable of running my work though neither perform as highly as my high-end gaming class workstation.
Nearly every pc in my current collection has Crucial ram. My main desktop has a Crucial NVME drive, and I've got 2.5in SATA SSDs from Crucial in family computers.
I don't want to have to start buying obscure keysmash chinese brands for normal looking affordable hardware.
God dammit Micron.
When richer people than you want things, those things can become unavailable to you (or at least less available).
I really hope this bubble pops, all these investors lose their shirts, and prices come down to something reasonable.
This mostly means richer people have too much money if they can do that.
What's next, a new tech allowing you to turn food into money at a rate nobody can afford to eat anymore?
Universal p̶a̶p̶e̶r̶c̶l̶i̶p̶ Money Machine. I'd probably read that short story.
When it eventually does, they'll just come up with something else. Nvidia got a taste of inflated prices from the Crypto and then AI, and they're not going to just let that go. If nothing exists they'll make something and hype it endlessly to try to keep this going.
Better hope it’s not something like potable water. Not even joking.
Then I sure hope Nvidia completely ceases to exist, like SGI, who, ironically, was decimated by Nvidia and cheap consumer hardware.
Unlikely. Unless some new technology comes around that completely invalidates existing GPUs and Nvidia cannot pivot to it quickly enough, there's just no way. They're too big, too rich, too powerful. They basically own the dedicated GPU market, with AMD holding maybe a piddly 10% at best.
Once the bubble pops, there will be a recession, lots of regular people will lose their jobs and won't be able to afford anything even IF prices come down.
They've got you coming and going.
Yup. As much as I am skeptical of AI and do believe this is a bubble, I don't want to see a repeat of ~2000.
Lots of demand, limited supply. So who wants to build a DRAM manufacturer? It sounds intimidating, but I'm positive we can figure it out.
Despite not really needing it yet, I took the opportunity to go straight to Amazon and pick up a 2tb 2230 for my Steam Deck. I’m also going to upgrade the homelab to an M4 Mini now, despite having decided earlier this month that the current N100 was fine for a few more years. Genuinely feels like whatever is happening is going to fundamentally change the way these products are marketed and sold in a permanent way.
Seems foolish, I've been a long-term shareholder in Micron but this seems aimed at short-term profit maximization. So I guess I'll be a short-term shareholder now.
I've only ever bought crucial ram for the past 20 years.
My understanding of this is Crucial is going out of business because the alternative was raising their prices. Is that accurate?
To be fair, the market has to be impacted by the Shift to non-upgradable devices.
At least in my house, most of the computers can't be upgraded with Crucial parts, because they use Apple Silicon.
Disagree. has very little to do with it. Though it finally clicked why I keep seeing people repeat this, it's Apple users. (Not a dig btw, I can totally see why it'd feel that way from their POV).
For starters, in the past, Crucial RAM wasn't really compatible with the Apple devices that did have socketable/upgradeable RAM. Technically some of their laptops/imacs did, but Apple really didn't want you servicing/upgrading those on your own, Crucial DIMMs weren't QVL approved by Apple (even though it'd generally work), and those were all SO-DIMMs not standard desktop DIMMs. The Mac Pros and what not that had upgradeable ram were all (L)RDIMM, not UDIMM. Crucial didn't make (L)RDIMM, that was Micron's market. Point being, this change in dynamic from Apple had virtually no impact on Crucial, as it was a market they never really served, or at least certainly not in the past decade.
The consumer market isn't shifting to non-upgradeable devices. There are more and more of them, but they're largely either not a market Crucial served to begin with (Apple), or supplementing the consumer devices that do have upgradeable RAM (Steam Deck, very compact HTPC's/Thin Clients, things that aren't really desktop replacements).
But the Market has shifted, Mac is increasing in marketshare and that shift is even higher on expensive laptops, where people get expensive upgrades.
Two or three years ago, I bought an XPS 15 with minimum memory specs and immediately maxed the RAM to 64gb and threw in a 2tb nvme drive. Last year I purchased a M3 Macbook Pro and made no upgrades. I don’t expect to go back to PC, because the Mac performance is so great and the power managment actually works.
When I threw my XPS 15 in my bag, it often comes out of my bag with no battery. The Mac not only gets awesome battery life, but it doesn’t randomly discharge when closed and sleeps properly.
Indeed. The market is changing. The overall personal electronic (computational) device market (Desktop, Laptop, Mobile/Tablet) is growing year over year, and because of that, mac shares going up doesn't mean Desktop PC ownership/sales are being cannabilized. Desktop Market (in terms of yearly sales) is relatively stable, and in terms of ownership continues to grow, while laptop/mobile/tablet (regardless of Mac/Android/Windows/Arm/etc) is growing healthily.
Crucial didn't leave because no one was buying RAM, or even that less people were buying RAM. Or at least that was the situation prior to shit going sideways with pricing/availability in the past 2 months, but that's independent of Apple/Crucial/Micron. They left because there's been little margin in unbuffered DIMMs (aka consumer RAM) for years, and there's virtually no demand or opportunity for innovation in the space for Micron to leverage the brand to make their B2B/Enterprise sales look better, and what Does make them stand out (largely cosmetics these days) is not a core competency of crucial or Micron. There's even less demand for anything interesting/innovative/worth having a whole separate company/BU for in the markets that are growing (Apple, Mobile, Laptops).
Also, now is a prime opportunity to exit the market, but it's also clear this has been in the works for a while though. Look at their limited and frankly half-assed product offerings for DDR5, then compare to what they offered on DDR4. Substantially less SKU's, with very little offerings for the enthusiast market. This wind down started circa 2020.
As far as Crucial is concerned, Apple has never been relevant or a danger to their bottom line. And if Micron wanted in on that money, they're better served doing it as Micron, as opposed to Crucial, which was tantamount to operational overhead in that context.
Will this impact B2B or just dramatically increase cost to business customers? Some industries require US-based supply chains, in my organization all our RAM and SSDs are Micron.
This is very sad. Ive been using Crucial for decades, the most reliable I have ever had.
they've never done me wrong over the years with crucial whether it's ssd or memory... godspeed and i'm sad to see a good player quit.
Very sad news. Crucial Micron is (soon "was") an great brand for computer assembly and upgrade. It is sad to see the brand rushing to the "easy money" stream. This won't be forgotten when the current bubble will evenually pop and they might meet the same fate as the now forgotten Elpida (who bought Qimonda wich also failed).
The MX500 1st gen (fw M3CR023) was the second best SATA SSD range with the kings the Samsung 860 Evo and Pro. P3 and P3+ were very good drives with great princing for some time, not comparable to the Samsung 970 Evo and Evo+ though.
Never had a failure on about 500 units of crucial MX300/500/P1/P3/P3+/P5. Always updated their firmwares, though.
Comparatively, had lot of sluggish controllers on Sandisk/WD green/blue SATA SSD, and some BX500. But a lot better than any entry level generic Phison S3111 based SSD.
Also very few failures with DDR3/4 DIMMs and SODIMMs. Less than with Kinston and Corsair modules. About the same as Samsung OEM modules from HP/Dell.
Now let's just hope Samsung will not follow in their tracks. I don't see WD-Sandisk going corporate only since they do not make DRAMs modules.
Micron leadership probably just heard about Roko's basilisk.
Like Pascal's wager that absurdity is an appeal to stupidity. I expect the people running these companies are more interested in a different type of wager. One where they risk the future of the company to pump shares and make a quick profit.
Even less consumer supply means higher prices. What’s fascinating is the very thing that enabled AI — gaming - may be one of the early casualties as it gains in priority.
For me they were always the reasonable choice from a cost, speed, and reliability perspective.
Bummer, growing up we had a Micron computer. There was a time where they made whole computers. Now they don't even make memory.
That's a shame. I liked buying RAM from them.
> “The AI-driven growth in the data center has led to a surge in demand for memory and storage. Micron has made the difficult decision to exit the Crucial consumer business in order to improve supply and support for our larger, strategic customers in faster-growing segments,” said Sumit Sadana, EVP and Chief Business Officer at Micron Technology.
"AI"-driven collapse will go down as the stupidest crisis in human history. The idiotic waste of gigantic amounts of civilizatory resources, for something that hasn't remotely proven useful yet, while simultaneously neglecting existentially mandated reforms and investments, in an outrageously obvious critical moment in time ... well that's gonna dwarf even historic missteps of organized religion and island cultures.
I am calling it now:
* Cancelled: Cyberpunk.
* New lore timeline: Hypepunk > Crash-Core > Silicon Gothic
* Historian epoch title: The Dark Ages.
Indeed it was naive of us not to have called that controversial medieval lull in societal progress "The First Dark Ages".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography)
The term is up for grabs again. Also, future historians may not categorize medieval times as we do. By then, libraries may have been converted to data centers and historic artifacts burned to fuel GPUs, or destroyed through hallucinated restoration advice. Remaining digital traces may have been exhaustively overwritten by verbose AI prose, or simply lost when AWS introduced generative DNS. In a 1000 years, the only preserved evidence of medieval times may be an LLM's summary of "A Knight's Tale".
"The idiotic waste of gigantic amounts of civilizatory resources, for something that hasn't remotely proven useful yet"
https://ai.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/AI-S2501208
Remember when AOL bought Time Warner?
I do think it's proven useful, much like the internet had in the nineties.
Doesn’t hold a candle to ATT burning $60B+ on it less than a decade ago. Or $30B+ on DirecTV.
2010s ATT leadership was something else.
Dude, that's like someone's opinion. Also neural nets doing pattern recognition on x-ray images is not the reason Micron abandoned their consumer shovel business.
I hate everything about this. Nothing good is coming from this AI hype bubble.
This seems like a very short-sighted mistake...
The AI memory bubble is going to bust eventually. They have such enormous brand recognition and are known for selling a quality-first product.
To just throw that all away is insane.
For the last ten plus years I have only bought Crucial RAM. I am well beyond disapointed to hear this.
Agreed. The RAM in my current PC is 64GB of DDR4 from Crucial. Now I seriously don’t know which brand I can trust when I build my next PC.
We should have a consumer Coop for computer hardware, so that we can negotiate prices and availability.
Such a great reputation over the decades . It felt good to have something USA made in the build . What a shame.
Time to launch a RAM-renting startup, kind of like Netflix in its DVD era.
Looks like Crucial is not so crucial for Micron's business anymore.
Sounds like an opportunity for Chinese companies to step in and dominate, they have their playbook with solar, batteries, EVs.
Gotta love Phison controllers then... despite noticeable progress with modern NVMe controllers, I still wish you good luck.
Or even worse : Maxio
Wasn't Micron using Phison controllers in basically every single SSD they made?
Hard to believe Micron leadership is this stupid, but here we are. They’ll deserve the result.
> This decision reflects Micron’s commitment to its ongoing portfolio transformation and the resulting alignment of its business to secular, profitable growth vectors in memory and storage. By concentrating on core enterprise and commercial segments, Micron aims to improve long-term business performance and create value for strategic customers as well as stakeholders.
What the fuck does "secular" even mean in this context? Is there religious DRAM?
What a short-sighted, boneheaded move. I'm so tired of the MBA-ificiation of every single part of my life.
Yes, the MBAs and private equity firms are about 80% of the way through ruining everything that was ever good in the world. They've been accelerating exponentially. Probably won't be long now. I like to think it can't get much worse but I thought that several times before and I've been proven wrong each time. Optimism is getting much harder to hold on it.
They didn't mess up Valve yet :)
Try buying GTA San Andreas on Steam - if you didn't buy it before some cutoff date a few years ago, all you can get is the shit AI textures "remaster".
Steam is a powerful force, and I applaud them for staying private and not IPO'ing - but their founders won't be around forever (hell Gabe, please transfer Steam into some sort of public-good trust or whatever, or have provisions in your will making it impossible for whomever inherits the company to enshittify), and sadly even they can't beat down on the studios too hard lest they end up like Netflix.
It's not exactly Valve's fault what Rockstar has decided to do with sales of their games.
secular is the opposite of cyclical in business. ie a long-term trend.
And same. Though blowing significant fractions of a trillion dollars into (imo) investments that are never gonna return anything near to making that a good plan (ex a government bailout) will inevitably redirect huge portions of stuff we care about. The world's gdp is about 90T iirc; that is basically taking 1/90th of the stuff the world does in a year and putting it into ai.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/secular
>Is there religious DRAM?
RAM optimized for TempleOS and Holy-C
If only this were the case.
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I consulted my paper dictionary, which doesn't use as much electricity as Belgium or thousands of gallons of water, and it reads: "of or relating to a long term of indefinite duration: <secular inflation>, <A secular increase in the quantity of money is required in a growing economy... – Milton Friedman>".
Congrats on being the tone deaf baffoon of the day.
would you kindly not
consumers getting told 'get fucked' in 2025 is the motto of the day while companies chase those juicy a.i profits
well hopefully we see more proliferation of system of chips / unified architectures such as the one offered by apple being offered by amd, intel etc for consumer stuff.
Uh shite. That's the goto for ssds with capacitors on, such that when the power dies they're able to leave things in a reasonable state.
All the samsung ones I've tried have died within a year. Fast until they died I suppose.
Any recommendations for nvme in a post-micron world?
Use a UPS?
Generative AI really is the gift that keeps on giving.
The US put YMTC in a black list just so that they wouldn't outcompete Micron... and now Micron just gave up by itself, and YMTC was set back so now it can't supply the RAM market either, great job guys!
Bad news for Boise.
Why? Micron will still fabricate things there... just not for us.
Does this impact the western digital and SanDisk brands too? IIRC those brands got folded into Crucial.
Insane decision. This whole bubble is irrational.
> Enterprise customers pay more and buy in bulk.
Uh, isn't that normally a contradiction? bulk is cheaper(???)
The products they buy command a premium. Consumers are generally more price-conscious.
I'm wondering, at what point could we consider that DRAM is in "market failure" state?
Another Big Tech company getting hollowed out to maximize short term profits.
This brand has existed for what, 20+ years? You dont think they can look at long-term trendlines of revenue and expenses?
Please explain how this is "short term" thinking.
Betraying a decades-long loyal customer base for a bunch of AI companies that might get wiped out in a couple of years.
Or maybe, consumer volume is dropping precipitously as more and more people rely on non-upgradable mobile devices, while competition is ramping up, and monopolistic sales channels, (i.e. Amazon), take a larger share of revenue?
$MU, another ticker to short
"We're still going to make memory, just not for peasants."
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“The AI-driven growth in the data center has led to a surge in demand for memory and storage. Micron has made the difficult decision to exit the Crucial consumer business in order to improve supply and support for our larger, strategic customers in faster-growing segments,” said Sumit Sadana, EVP and Chief Business Officer at Micron
AI is destroying so much. God knows how bad things will get once the bubble bursts.
The way GPUs went. It's not a bubble.
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If this AI bubble bursts and the anticipated demand evaporates, this will be one of the biggest debacles in the history of American business, akin to New Coke.
Akin to New Coke? Are you being serious? It’s several orders of magnitude worse than that.