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by Tenoke 22 days ago
I looked for one and it's impossible to find, let alone at a reasonable price + it does suffer from being harder to train/use less common models and workflows (e.g. arbitrary comfyui ones). Spark at least doesnt have that drawback, while AMD has both drawbacks.

Waiting for the market to be less insane is somewhat akin to waiting for the s&p500 to drop a decent amount so you can buy in.

4 comments

No, equities naturally trend up with economic growth. RAM is up because of a supply shock, as new capacity comes on prices will drop, it’s a commodity.
Yes, in the very long term, but in the medium term where the listed capacities even matter we are not close to that. Really, the cost per gb of vram on flagships hasnt went down since 1080ti and thats not accouting for the recent increases which will likely last for years.
There are some minor exceptions but agreed otherwise. Manufacturers have been excessively using VRAM limitations as a price point distinguisher.
But it could get worse for two years yet.
If it flys, floats or FLOPs it is better to rent.
Asus rog 13 128gb is still sub $3k last I checked and ticks the boxes. If you get tired of AI it's a kick ass tablet except the weight and can run AAA games for now decently enough.
Is that a notebook? As the thermals don't really compare for a notebook and these high performance minipcs.
> Waiting for the market to be less insane is somewhat akin to waiting for the s&p500 to drop a decent amount so you can buy in.

I said less insane, not sane. If prices go down 20% but are still up 150% over a few years ago, that would still be an improvement from now.

Or it could work the other way: if new hardware comes out in 2027 such that the tokens/$ ratio works out better, that would also be less insane.

> Waiting for the market to be less insane is somewhat akin to waiting for the s&p500 to drop a decent amount so you can buy in.

lol this is so wrong it's funny - equities go up in price, commodity goods go down in price. the two markets are literally diametrically opposed.

I'd have a better portfolio right now if I invested in RAM instead of equities.
RAM is more like agricultural products (with short shelf-life) than commodities like fossil fuels, mineral ores, etc. You can manage an inventory or speculate on production, but you cannot really hold a "portfolio" of it in any sensible way.

So, you should get into RAM futures if you believe this is more than a transient arbitrage sort of situation. All extant RAM will become obsolete as the demand shifts to newer, fancier versions.

>but you cannot really hold a "portfolio" of it in any sensible way.

xAI effectively did and lucked out to cover their losses and more with it.

> All extant RAM will become obsolete

Yes but on what timescale? Replacing the > 5 year old sticks in my laptop would currently cost well over half what the machine ran me when it was brand new.