That’s what you get for being so dim.
this post was submitted on 20 May 2026
126 points (99.2% liked)
PC Master Race
21190 readers
820 users here now
A community for PC Master Race.
Rules:
- No bigotry: Including racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia. Code of Conduct.
- Be respectful. Everyone should feel welcome here.
- No NSFW content.
- No Ads / Spamming.
- Be thoughtful and helpful: especially when new beginners have questions.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
for being so-dimm
FTFY
This guy ECCs
/groan
Cannot wait for that sweet sweet bankruptcy RAM
You will literally never see a single piece of RAM that these companies fail to assemble for the consumer space.
They're not RAM manufacturers. They're RAM assemblers; The companies that assemble the now insanely expensive RAM chips in to deliverable packages like DDR5 sticks.
Aren't they building HBM for the AI chips? Even if a massive stockpile of that ends up in the market because AI died, I don't think we'd benefit from it.
An adapter from HBM to DIMM (DDR5/6) is probably pretty easy, it's basically downclocking. Of course they may need to destroy them for 'tax purposes' (AKA trying to destroy general purpose computing for sweet datacentre subscriptions in this case).
My understanding is that they're fundamentally different - HBM is a 3D printed stack of memory with a massive data bus, and has to live on-chip (like, millimeters away from the processor).
DDR5 has 2x32 bit channels. HBM4 has a massive 2,048 bits bus. There's absolutely no way to run the number of traces it would need through a motherboard...
HBM4 has a massive 2,048 bits bus. There’s absolutely no way to run the number of traces it would need through a motherboard
Presumably you would put a chip next to it to 'downmix'. Just saying, if there's enough of it floating around unused, a way will be found. Chip wouldn't need to do much, and now we're back to normal traces, bit of a waste of potential bandwidth, but better than losing GP compute for the masses.
Could always do something like stick a Blackwell next to it and pop it on the PCIe bus and do a kernel mapping ;) (yes that's a video card, or AI accelerator, that's the joke, but also...)
You reap what you sow.
I don't think that they have much to do with the shortage one way or another. The companies described in the article aren't AI companies or even memory chip manufacturers (I wouldn't have called them "RAM makers", personally). They're companies that buy memory chips and assemble them into things like DIMMs.
EDIT: The mentioned seven companies all appear to be Taiwanese, but the American PNY is a company that also operates in this space that I could name off-the-cuff.
That may be, however they are still part of a chain that has committed to providing a product to companies that technically don't have any money to pay for said product instead of people that they chose to ignore by astronomically inflating prices so that it will all be available for AI and chose to wait for an imaginary "big" payout that probably won't ever come and since almost nobody is buying anything with said DIMMs there is no steady influx of capital and the debt is growing so yeah i'll still say you reap what you sow.