This one is for Framework team:
So the Discord server is down. A bit disappointed, you can no longer just throw a random question at a crowd and expect quick answer. Alas, not the end of world.
Yeah what about RAM pricing? Has increased by like 200% in some cases. How does this affect Framework? I notice you havent increased pricing on the configurator much, is that okay? Do you still make (lose?) money on memory?
They said this on Xitter:
The memory market is in a bad spot. We haven’t changed our memory pricing, but we did have to delist standalone memory from our Marketplace to head off scalpers and preserve inventory for people buying it with our DIY Edition laptops.
https://x.com/FrameworkPuter/status/1993202080744718609
Our memory costs from our suppliers are increasing substantially though, so it is likely we will need to increase memory pricing soon.
https://x.com/FrameworkPuter/status/1993202082795733134
RAM prices might be going up again.
So, I guess, once existing stocks run out, no more crucial RAM chips for laptops.
I just wanted to thank framework for not changing the price of ram! Thank you!!
I just noticed a second topic about this going to try to merge this!
What is the second topic? And are you referencing Micron closing shop?
RAM prices is the title and it does talk about micron!
I see, you must be referencing this
Yes exactly! Sorry I should’ve made a link!
I fully expect RAM to 4x by the end of next year.
GPUs something similar too.
I hope everyone bought their computers
This was one of the major reasons that I ordered my Framework 16 today. I want a Laptop with 64Gig RAM. and most commercial Laptops top out at 32Gig installable. You couldn’t even get my current Lenovo Legion with more then 16Gig and it has proven not to be enough
Only 64? Not 96 or 128?
LOL…64 will be more then enough. My current Legion has 16Gig. So quadrupling it should be more then enough.
Shame they made pretty decent stuff.
Let’s hope someone else will make a 2x64gb jdec sodimm kit kit.
They will have to eventually, hell even apple will have to somewhat soon if this price ballooning doesn’t stop soon.
I hope not but I fear you may be right, especially since all the dram manufacturers vehemently don’t want to increase production.
I am kind of hoping some manufacturer outside the definitely not price-fixing triopoli picks up the slack.
From what I can find there’s at least one other manufacturer making DDR5 SODIMMs at every size other than 64GB; Crucial seems to be the only one making those. But for 48GB, there’s Mushkin Redline; I have a few sets of these as they came out before Crucial’s. For 32GB I see a set from G.Skill and Kingston on Amazon, and for smaller sizes there’s various manufacturers I see those two along with others like Teamgroup and other smaller manufacturers.
I think the problem, aside from pricing, is going to be higher capacities for a while. It might not be worth it for smaller manufacturers to produce 64GB modules when a set is going to cost north of $1,000 as they’re probably not going to get very many sales, so it’s possible we might see those disappear from the market for a while. That problem is going to be exacerbated for 96GB or 128GB modules and I could see a set easily being priced at $3,000+. That said 128GB is the limit for regular DDR5 modules and therefore we’re likely to see DDR6 before we get there.
Not sure we’ll even get DDR6 SODIMMS, DDR5 ones were hard enough, I do hope we get some alternative like lpcamm and not just have to settle with it being soldered forever.
That also likely depends on which direction everything ends up going – remember in the late 90’s/early 2000’s when CPU manufacturers were trying to push frequency higher and higher until we got the abomination that was the Pentium 4, and then that was abandoned and replaced with multiple cores on the same processor. RAM could go in the same direction; instead of pushing for ever higher frequencies, increase parallelization. That’s actually one of the things that DDR5 did; each DIMM instead of having a single 64-bit channel now has two independent 32-bit channels.
That doesn’t really have much to do with the signal integrity issues sodimms have problems with. The physical layout of sodimms make the minimum trace length way longer than an equivalent soldered or camm based setup which produces massive signal integrity issues that we can barely cope with with ddr5 and ddr6 doesn’t seem to be aiming for wider buses.
Nothing is forever, there’s always another way. Regressions are temporary most of the time. If the current expectations are soldered RAM, it will change as soon as newer methods are discovered.
What about QDR(quad data rate) RAM? XD
I think there’s the problem of endless pursuit. 128GB is enough for most work, my computer seldom exceeds 16GB of usage on my 32GB RAM. Software could do better on optimization to reduce waste and energy consumption
I blody hope there will be some way to make non soldered ddr6 but I doubt it’ll be in the form of sodimms. There is a reason cpus switched away from the whole “dual inline” package at some point too.
While I don’t disagree philosophically, I also don’t like having to pay more for less. While I do have enough ram for the forseeable future, other peole are getting a pretty short end of a stick right now.