DIMM view
As Oisin reported over the weekend, Steam Machine engineers Yazan Aldehayyat and Pierre-Loup Griffais gave a big Valve thumbs-down to the practice of platform exclusives – a hot topic in the context of Xbox owners Microsoft retreating back into whatever kind of shrivelled, joyless husk Xbox is nowadays. The same interview, with Bloomberg scoopsmith Jason Schreier, also touched on the acutely PC-spoiling subject of RAMnarök and its subsequent, en-masse embiggening of hardware prices. Good news? No! Obviously it’s all terrible!
"Honestly, it’s still getting worse," Aldehayyat said of the months-long memory shortage. "Just in case people are not aware. What people are seeing on retail shelves right now, from our observations, is lagging what we’re seeing from a bulk supply by at least three to six months."
While that’s not necessarily a warning that the Machine is going to get even more expensive – Aldehayyat himself told me that Valve daren’t speculate on future pricing – it is yet another assertion from a hardware maker, following the grim tidings of Lenovo, Zotac, and Seagate, that we’re likely in this mess for the long haul. Even more disturbingly, that "three to six months" delay would suggest we can’t even take solace in the current stability, of sorts, that RAM and storage components have settled into.
Retroactively tracking the prices of DDR5 SO-DIMM modules, like those used in the Steam Machine, suggest that they haven’t peaked significantly higher than they have in previous months; this Lexar stick costs about what it did in March, and this Crucial two-pack has held at £320 for weeks. On the compact SSD side, this Crucial P310 did spend half of July in the clouds, but has just dropped back to December 2026 levels, while WD’s Black SN770M is currently at its lowest price since February. Nothing about this is pleasant, clearly, but if we’re only seeing a months-long delayed reaction to worsening stock supply, the possibility of these components merely avoiding further price hikes starts looking like a best-case scenario. Which, to offer some economic analysis of my own, is bloomin’ rubbish, mate.
Should you need a reminder of how we got here, a handful of very big, very rich tech companies convinced the world that we need AI to do all our thinking for us, and promptly set about building enormous, polluting, abysmally loud AI data centres to meet demand. These compute-heavy facilities also happened to suck up DRAM chip supply faster than it could be replenished, sparking worldwide shortages and accusations of price fixing. There is no known short-to-medium remedy, though I do recommend kickflipping a train through a data centre so hard that it explodes. It certainly made me feel better.