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Micron/Crucial leaving the consumer memory market place to focus solely on enterprise (AI/data center) memory sales.

This is horrible for laptops as if you wanted to upgrade your RAM you pretty much only had Crucial as no other provider made universal SO-DIMMs, Crucial was the only RAM manufacturer to include all profiles.

Now you have to search the exact speed your system requires. Good luck as this is really messy and hard. Fuck this is horrible but I'm low key happy I went with 32GB RAM (customized) for my laptop.
 
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BennyBlanco said:
This is cope. They will chase every penny they can. Sony is gonna be competing against data centers who will gladly outbid them for all this hardware. The chipmakers do not give a fuck about long term relationships when there's huge money on the table right now. Why would they? It's not like Sony is gonna manufacture its own RAM.
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Sony:

blackjack-bender.png
 
BennyBlanco said:
This is cope. They will chase every penny they can. Sony is gonna be competing against data centers who will gladly outbid them for all this hardware. The chipmakers do not give a fuck about long term relationships when there's huge money on the table right now. Why would they? It's not like Sony is gonna manufacture its own RAM.
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Sony is a partner and investor of the two new TSCM manufacturing plants in Japan (one opened in 24 the second is about to open), maybe they can secure some production for themselves.
 
LQX said:
We need stronger laws to protect the consumer market but with this administration we can forget about it. Consumers are are going to get fucked for the next few years. So glad tariffs scared me into buying my upgrades sooner than later. Where is China with the cheap shit when you need it?
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Honest question, what can be done? Unless you want to nationalise consumer ram production then these companies are going to follow the money regardless of who loses out.
 
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Sethbacca said:
Obv just an assumption on my part, who knows anything at this point. I don't see any of these companies giving up multi billion dollar relationships though.

The people that are going to be most fucked by this will be the PC enthusiast market.

That's my prediction anyway.
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Dell is a massive company that sells a lot of PCs/servers to businesses, $104 for 8GB of RAM. Yeah, I don't believe any corpo will "honor" anything.
 
BennyBlanco said:
This is cope. They will chase every penny they can. Sony is gonna be competing against data centers who will gladly outbid them for all this hardware. The chipmakers do not give a fuck about long term relationships when there's huge money on the table right now. Why would they? It's not like Sony is gonna manufacture its own RAM.
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Out of all of them, Sony are the only gaming company with the competance to do it. I don't know if this bubble bursts before that can pay off but Sony making more chips would be great news imo
 
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RoboFu said:
* for now

if they were so sure of this whole AI server thing they would be overstocking their warehouses but they are not and they are limiting their supply.
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all modern fab lines across the board are pretty much at capacity. There is not "slack" anywhere to stock these mythical warehouses.
 
adamsapple said:
Console RAM and storage doesn't occur naturally in the wild either, choro.
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Yes but ram in a console isn't part of the consumer memory market. Only PC is.

It's not a worry for console gamers. Console makers buy in bulk and don't use bleeding edge tech. Consoles are also subsidized. Switch 2 also uses relatively little ram vs what a system builder would need today across system ram and gpu.

However this affect consoles, it will affect the consumer memory market much more as we have already seen.

As we can see today. This has already occurred. Currently PS5 is cheaper than ever, so it Switch 2, but PC ram has skyrocketed almost and 500 percent would not be a crazy guess.(I understand that Sony has reported they have already acquired ram thru the fiscal year but even when that runs out, you will not see the direct increase in prices of the console that has been seen in the consumer memory market, rather milder increases if any)

It would be a great marginalization technique for PC gamers to use to say that this affects everyone(I am not accusing you of having an agenda, to the contrary I know you do not) but just pointing out to others reading who may have seen this stated across the web. It sounds right(that console prices should go up too) but I don't think it is. A similar thing happened with mining a few years ago to the PC market. I predicted that like mining the AI hardware fiasco will be temporary but while it lasts PC will feel it far more keenly than any console gamer. I think the price increases hit consoles a little and hit the consumer ram market quite hard.

12-3-25 3:50pm just editing to add that I will not change any text in the above original. It will be difficult to pull an apples to apples comparison but when we do I would say that we cannot use today's date as the starting point.

It isn't fair to take 1 year from today since RAM prices are already up 500% for PC gaming right now according to google ai. Instead we would need to use a date for comparison from before ram prices began to increase. For ease of calculation I suggest the console we use to verify this is the Switch 2 and we should use its launch date June 5th 2025 when it had a MSRP of $449.99 in the US. If we really want to test this we should compare the MSRP of base Switch 2 in the US on June 5th 2025 and June 5th 2026 and get a price difference. If the price difference is zero it will just be zero. Then we look at a set of g.skill high end ram on newegg on on June 5th 2025 and June 5th 2026 and compare those prices and see which one goes up the most.
 
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And with rumored very short contracts, I think there is possibility that next gen consoles will be delayed until ~2029-2030. Unless they want to cut memory from 32GB to 16-24, or go with 1000$+ prices.

Zacfoldor said:
As we can see today. This has already occurred. Currently PS5 is cheaper than ever, so it Switch 2, but PC ram has skyrocketed almost and 500 percent would not be a crazy guess.
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This shit just started, there is still ton of stock of produced consoles. Give it few months...
 
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Zacfoldor said:
Yes but ram in a console isn't part of the consumer memory market. Only PC is.

It's not a worry for console gamers. Console makers buy in bulk and don't use bleeding edge tech. Consoles are also subsidized. Switch 2 also uses relatively little ram vs what a system builder would need today across system ram and gpu.

However this affect consoles, it will affect the bleeding edge gaming PC ram market much more as we have already seen.

As we can see today. This has already occurred. Currently PS5 is cheaper than ever, so it Switch 2, but PC ram has skyrocketed almost and 500 percent would not be a crazy guess.

It would be a great marginalization technique for PC gamers to use to say that this affects everyone but the real truth is that consoles will be mostly unaffected but PC will not. A similar thing happened with mining a few years ago to the PC market. I predicted that like mining the AI hardware fiasco will be temporary but while it lasts PC will feel it far more keenly than any console gamer.
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Hey Siri, remind me in 12 months so we can all laugh at how this post aged.
 
Gonna need to reuse the memory we already have. Just box up your PS5's and mail them to Sony. Army of workers with soldering irons at the ready.
 
pqueue said:
all modern fab lines across the board are pretty much at capacity. There is not "slack" anywhere to stock these mythical warehouses.
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Samsung has confirmed that it will "minimise the risk of oversupply" by limiting its capital expenditure on new DRAM production. They want to "balance customer demand and pricing". In other words, they will intentionally not produce enough memory to maintain high prices. They will make an intentional effort not to overinvest in DRAM manufacturing. This is despite the fact that their spending would be paid for by today's DRAM prices.
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minimizing oversupply is not the same thing as limiting manufacturing.

the fabs are near max. the issue is that demand is significantly outpacing available supply.

Samsung, Micron, et al intend to keep it that way to maintain profit margins. they are slow rolling increases in manufacturing capabilities, limiting volume orders to shorter terms, etc.
 
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Damn, what a shitshow. And it will probably stay like this at least until sometime in 2027. Madness.

And sometime in 2027 DDR6 Ram is supposed to enter the marked ?
 
BennyBlanco said:
This is cope. They will chase every penny they can. Sony is gonna be competing against data centers who will gladly outbid them for all this hardware. The chipmakers do not give a fuck about long term relationships when there's huge money on the table right now. Why would they? It's not like Sony is gonna manufacture its own RAM.
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And those very same AI data centers extensively use the best of the best imaging sensors. Sony is that defacto imaging sensor company.

There will be deals made. Beyond the PS6, however, the cloudeth will be uponeth through armageddon.

end of the world GIF
 
RoboFu said:
My only decision now is should I splurge for ps5 pro or just ride out the ps5? 🤔
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Or order pro from amazon, sit on it for 30 days to see if anything awful happens, return it and repeat. I had a pro chillin at my place for a minute when it was unclear how the tariffs were going to affect.
 


Micron is one of the "Big 3" memory manufacturers and the only one based in the US. At this point I wonder what Samsung and SK Hynix will do. The DRAM industry is notoriously cyclic and subject to boom and bust cycles in addition to being notorious for many incidents of price fixing and cartel behavior which has resulted in many prosecutions and fines against the "Big 3"
 
Seiryu21 said:
It's a hot take, but PC gamers are pretty terrible customers. They pirate games and are constantly looking for the cheapest option in an open market.

If there's no way to capture a customer on PC, then companies will just move on to where the money is.
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Can't take you serious when steam makes billions, and the PS2/1 and xbox 360 were famous for being piracy havens.
 
HIgh prices in the short-term... but a massive opportunity for a medium sized Semi-conductor manufacturer like Kioxia to completely monopolize the consumer DRAM and NAND markets.

When the AI bubble bursts, and it will because as is already self-evident manufacturing for the hardware back-end is completely bottlenecked, whoever owns the consumer memory market at that point will clean house.
 
pudel said:
I mean in the end it only means we will see no technical progress in games anymore for the next time...because there is no tech anymore supporting it. Next playstation/xbox will be the default for quite some time. On the other hand it wouldnt have been different anyway.
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Yeah thats what I predict to. The baseline will be stagnant for years and years and years if the ai bubble dont burst by next year.
 
just make games for 16gb or 32gb RAM or whatever
it's not like games are becoming better with higher RAM usage or anything. it's mostly stagnant since 2010
 
Xbox 360 slim said:
Can't take you serious when steam makes billions, and the PS2/1 and xbox 360 were famous for being piracy havens.
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For the hundreds of millions of gamers allegedly on Steam, the income is very low.

Last real data was 2021 because a trial, and it was 2 billion for Valve, so probably some 7-8 billion overall. Since then it's probably a bit more, specially adding Steam Deck sales and all. 10 billion, 12 maybe. For having like 200m active users monthly and getting that after Newzoo half the playtime comes from GAS, it's not so much. Oh, and the gambling with loot boxes.

I think that's why the other poster said that, they spend big money in the rig, but then play the uncle scrooge or jack sparrow game about buying games. Selling anything over 25 is very hard on Steam, some other publisher said these days.

I mean, in the Newzoo report it was stated only 5% of Steam users buy games released in the current year and at full price or nearly.

Most users wait for heavy discount sales, buy very old games, or buy pirated keys in those online stores and then activate them on Steam as part of their library.
 
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Hector Hall said:
For the hundreds of millions of gamers allegedly on Steam, the income is very low.

Last real data was 2021 because a trial, and it was 2 billion for Valve, so probably some 7-8 billion overall. Since then it's probably a bit more, specially adding Steam Deck sales and all. 10 billion, 12 maybe. For having like 200m active users monthly and getting that after Newzoo half the playtime comes from GAS, it's not so much. Oh, and the gambling with loot boxes.

I mean, in the Newzoo report it was stated only 5% of Steam users buy games released in the current year and at full price or nearly.

Most users wait for heavy discount sales, buy very old games, or buy pirated keys in those online stores and then activate them on Steam as part of their library.
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Is that bad? The guy said PC players are bad customers, because all they do is pirate.
 
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