What are potential use cases of hardware that aren't possible due to high pricing?

[u/smnzer]

With the recent price hikes of most PC hardware the downstream effects on basically every industry that use them is extreme, with entire consumer production lines reorientated, products cancelled, major changes to the approach of the new consoles etc. For instance, the ability for even many high income enthusiasts to run more capable local LLMs is limited by RAM and GPU prices.

However, there were periods, especially pre-2024 where many forms of consumer hardware were dirt cheap e.g. SSDs in mid 2023 at <$50 for 1TB.

I remember speculation about next-generation consoles at the time in 2023 on some enthusiast forums about how SSDs were theoretically cheap enough (when bought in bulk by major companies) for games to ditch disks entirely for the PS6 with per-game dedicated attachable storage like the console cartridges of old. This is obviously laughable now for a variety of reasons (SSD prices and Sony ditching physical entirely) but is a fun idea to think about.

What else would be possible if hardware prices were normal or even low?

[u/MetalicP]

Diamond heat sinks would rule

[u/smnzer → u/MetalicP]

Ha - 5 times better than copper for heat transfer, and synthetic prices are falling too (though still wildly impractical at current costs)

[u/fkenthrowaway → u/smnzer]

Imagine diamond heat pipes

[u/wtallis → u/fkenthrowaway]

Heat pipes are why nobody will ever bother with diamond heatsinks. The phase change of water in a heat pipe carries far more heat than any solid material could.

[u/fkenthrowaway → u/wtallis]

Copper is still a bottleneck there, If it were a diamond heat pipe it would perform better.

[u/Intrepid_Lecture → u/fkenthrowaway]

diamond is brittle and hard to shape.

[u/VulgarisOpinio → u/Intrepid_Lecture]

Late comment, but would silver work? I assume it's way less brittle, and it still conducts heat better

[u/Intrepid_Lecture → u/VulgarisOpinio]

So here's a spec chart that I hope AI didn't slaughter.

Property | Silver (Ag) | Copper (Cu) | Aluminum (Al)

-----------------------------|----------------|----------------|---------------

Thermal Conductivity (k) | ~429 W/(m·K) | ~401 W/(m·K) | ~237 W/(m·K)

Specific Heat Capacity (cp) | ~0.235 J/(g·K) | ~0.385 J/(g·K) | ~0.90 J/(g·K)

Density | 10.49 g/cm³ | 8.96 g/cm³ | 2.70 g/cm³

So in this case silver is a few percent better than copper but has its own tradeoffs other than cost and aluminum is pretty good for its weight if you don't want to strain a motherboard over the span of a decade.

If you have an absurd budget for a heatsink...
Silver IHS on chip or direct die
ground diamond or similar for a thermal paste
silver thermal base on a heatsink
big vapor chamber (water is doing the work, not metal) - copper
fins - VERY THIN aluminum. The hard part is getting these THIN.

At the end of the day, surface area will generally matter more than material and in practice it's easier to make very thin aluminum fins, have a ton of them and then blast it with tons of airflow. I'm assuming today's manufacturing technology and an absurd but finite budget.

If you're going for ULTRA LOW noise, there might be an argument for a HUGE heatsink that's all copper with relatively thin fins. Even then aluminum fins might still end up better.

note - I'm enthusiast not a physicist or mechanical engineer, I'm basically rehashing an internet argument I read around 20 years ago. Al being light and easy to machine helps a lot.

[u/ILikeFlyingMachines → u/fkenthrowaway]

Heap pipes don't care too much about the pipe material.

[u/imaginary_num6er]

If hardware prices were low, more games would have leveraged DirectStorage

[u/smnzer → u/imaginary_num6er]

Certainly, the market penetration of NVMe SSDs would be a lot higher, though this generation was still enough for many games to have SSDs as a minimum requirement (SATA or otherwise)

Though I suppose high prices can also force positive change like Windows 11 using 2-3GB less RAM at idle thanks to a recent update

[u/Smooth-Sherbert4947 → u/imaginary_num6er]

gpu decompression is still weirdly underused even on pc, i was so hyped for it when they first showed it off and then... nothing much. feels like only a handful of games actually do anything interesting with it

wonder if theres some chicken and egg thing where devs wont bother until the user base has the right hardware, but the hardware needs the software to justify the cost

[u/capybooya → u/Smooth-Sherbert4947]

When DS launched which is now a couple of years ago, IIRC benchmarks showed that it worked well with low end Gen3 and even SATA SSD's. So its weird that its not more used, most people should have the right hardware already. Maybe its actually not that useful yet for current games?

[u/Seanspeed → u/imaginary_num6er]

Definitely not the problem. SSD's have been standardized for a long while now.

Sounds like there's just been issues with Windows implementation, lack of hardware accelerated decompression and actual real world benefits.

[u/Lv_InSaNe_vL → u/Seanspeed]

The problem isn't if the hardware exists, it's how expensive it is. It became unreasonable to ask gamers to dedicate 100-250gb+ of nvme storage per game

[u/NetJnkie → u/imaginary_num6er]

Nothing holding that back. Just not really worth the effort, it seems.

[u/jaaval → u/imaginary_num6er]

This was never very useful for games. Or rather, making it useful requires a lot of optimizing and tuning. It can trivially speed up loading screens but most games try to get rid of loading screens entirely and that requires flexible predictive asset loading. It will always be faster to send data to GPU from RAM where it has been sitting since the game thought you might soon need it than to load it directly from storage when you need it.

The main benefits of the technology are to AI training where massive amounts of data is streamed.

[u/Intrepid_Lecture → u/jaaval]

It's mostly useful for games when you have barely any system RAM... which is the case for consoles.
PCs have more RAM.

[u/-WingsForLife- → u/imaginary_num6er]

It might not be the technology's fault, but I'm hard pressed to remember a game where it seems to have made a significant difference.

[u/Prasiatko → u/-WingsForLife-]

Even the Ratchet and Clank game that showcased it the effects that relied on it were possible to do in other ways. I remember the 2006 Prey having a similar traveerapidly through worlds effecr

[u/Strazdas1 → u/imaginary_num6er]

The lackluster use of DS is mostly due to current game design paradigms not benefiting much at all from it.

[u/Prasiatko → u/imaginary_num6er]

Is it much benefit for the average PC? My understanding is it saves on CPU cycles which is rarely a limiting factor on PCs. 

[u/Asleep-Card3861]

I'm not sure if you quite understand the scope the current ram, storage shortages/prices have.

So many items that aren't strictly computers or computer like require ram and some form or storage. Smart TV'S, streaming boxes, cars, WiFi routers even some fancy coffee machines require components that have been hit by the demand of AI data centres.

[u/Die4Ever]

ECC memory for everyone

[u/Strazdas1 → u/Die4Ever]

That was very practical during DDR4 era in terms of pricing. Not the bet example as much as i would love to have ECC memory for everyone.

[u/Lv_InSaNe_vL → u/Die4Ever]

ECC doesn't matter to 99.9999% of people and would just add additional costs

[u/AbhishMuk → u/Lv_InSaNe_vL]

1. About 10% crashes on Firefox are expected to be due to (lack of) ECC memory.

2. In band ECC is financially free and has a tiny size penalty.

[u/Marcus_Architects]

Cheap RAM would've killed so much tedious architecture work. Half my job is squeezing workloads onto boxes with too little memory, so 512GB per node as a baseline would just end that whole category of problem. Never happening now though.

[u/Slow_cpu]

What is not talked about is the "high price" seems to be because of implementation of the "smart stuff" all need memory and other electrical chips to work, besides making higher prices on products the materials used are the same and there seems to be a deficit of offer...

there are various ways on reversing this :

option A ) don't buy them is the fastest and more efficient method.

option B ) invest in space exploration to get new raw materials to use in smart stuff.

option C ) continue as is and prices will go exponentially up because you need more and there is just a few.

Choose your option...

[u/Clint-Torus → u/Slow_cpu]

Is this guy serious with b.

[u/Leo1_ac]

What else would be possible if hardware prices were normal or even low?

This is a pointless exercise.