[EA Development] About the alarming rise in PC parts prices

Hello. This is 2pay.

Today I’d like to talk about how rising PC component prices are having a significant impact on EA development.

Many people may already know this, but the main memory for PCs has been rising at an astonishing rate, which has become a hot topic.

The memory demand from AI data centers is at the core of this, and related to this there have been moves in the PC parts industry such as Crucial withdrawing its consumer business and Samsung discontinuing production of their old-spec SSDs, leading to whispers that storage could soon become a target for price hikes after memory.

The memory I use in my main PC (64GB) was purchased in May this year for 15,000 yen, but the current market price has risen to 150,000 yen (10 times).

Storage remains cheap, but checking it every few days shows it gradually rising by a few hundred yen each time.

Experts predict memory demand could stay high for the next two years, but if a new standard (DDR6) is released or a start-up begins memory production in the meantime, prices could collapse, and at present it’s hard to justify purchasing.

I believe developers will be affected, to some extent, by the rise in PC parts prices.

Especially in EA development, memory plays a crucial role in improving processing speed through optimization.

My main PC originally had only 16GB of memory, but it became a bottleneck for optimization, so I upgraded to 64GB.

I thought that would be enough, but I still see the memory at 100% usage in Task Manager.

Ideally I would add more, but prices have become too high to afford it.

Create new EA → implement more advanced and complex programs → strengthen hardware to match the programs → memory is too expensive to buy → development time cannot be shortened, leading to delays in release

I think this kind of flow could occur in some cases. (More time = higher power and labor costs)

Alternatively, to allocate investment funds for purchased elevated parts, existing products might be raised in price.

Currently, for EA developers, discerning storage is becoming important.

Storage (SSD, HDD) has a long lifespan, and generally the timing of PC upgrades comes first, so cases where storage has been fully used are rare; however, if optimization is performed for a long period at all ticks, the lifespan (TBW) will be reached in 1–3 years.

I am using a Samsung 990Pro 1TB (600TBW), and if I run optimization all day, 2–4TB of writes occur.

If writing 3TB per day on average, then 600/3 = 200, reaching end of life in 200 days (before reaching the end of life, you would replace it with a new one, so you won’t be able to fully exhaust it).

For those who run heavy optimization, it becomes a consumable.

Because such SSDs have begun to rise in price even if just a little, I’m weighing whether to stock up or not.

Today I talked about the impact of PC parts price increases on development.

Upgrading PC parts to better ones can make optimization many times faster.

For those who are seriously developing, it might be good to stock up on various items as part of year-end adjustments.

Not many people use their SSDs as heavily as I do, but for those who run optimization occasionally, it might be worthwhile to check the storage status once with tools like CrystalDiskInfo.

Thank you for reading until the end.