A few weeks ago, we attended Computex, one of the world's largest technology trade shows. We've seen some pretty boring shows over the past 20 years or so, but this one was possibly the most boring yet, which will probably surprise exactly no one. The climate simply wasn't right for a fun show. DRAM pricing is still cooked, NAND pricing is equally cooked, and as a result, GPU pricing is... pretty horrible.
It's not exactly a fun time to be a PC gamer, especially if you need a new gaming PC or a platform upgrade. Now simply isn't the time for any of that. The question everyone around here has been asking is: When will the right time come? When will this nightmare be over?
It's an interesting question that no one can really answer right now, but there seem to be two distinct opinions about how all of this will play out.
There's the "you'll own nothing and be happy" crowd, and then there are those of us who are simply hoping to ride this out and return to something resembling normality. To be clear, we don't think things will ever go back to exactly how they were five years ago or so, and that's what I want to explore today.
By "more normal," we mean that products such as DDR5 memory, or DRAM in general, will eventually become cheap again, as will SSDs. In fact, with production ramping up and competition from China increasing, we could find ourselves in a situation where DRAM and NAND pricing completely collapses once it becomes clear that these AI data centers aren't actually going to be built in time.
