PINE64 Halts Linux Device Production Amid DRAM and EMMC Shortages (nerds.xyz) 79
BrianFagioli writes: PINE64 has some very bad news for Linux hardware fans. PINE64 says it has no plans to produce additional Linux devices in the near future because of the ongoing DRAM and eMMC shortage. Future production will depend on component pricing after mid 2027, while existing PineNote and PineTab2 inventory could run out in roughly three months. The company says PineTime, PineVoice, and Pinecil production will continue as usual, but the outlook for its Linux hardware is much less certain. "That's it for this post, all in all it's a bit bleak for the Linux devices, but in the meantime PineStore still have a great lineup of MCU powered devices which will continue to expand with more exciting devices," the company said.
Oh no! (Score:5, Funny)
Where will I get a SBC that fails after three months now?
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Re:Oh no! (Score:5, Informative)
I bought a MiniPC from China instead, a GMKtec M5 Plus with 5825U, 32GB DDR4 and a 1TB NVMe SSD — for $295 right before everything went to shit. That one is out of production, but an equivalent machine is now $600. I've had it for over a year now with literally no problems.
The memory is 3.2 GHz, and despite being so cheap it doesn't even report a manufacturer, there doesn't seem to be anything wrong with it. It's got wifi 6 (MT7922) and dual 2.5 GbE (RTL8125) and the only thing that requires even a vaguely recent kernel is the wifi. It came with Windows, and I even shrank that just in case I'm ever desperate for a real Windows machine to flash some firmware or something, but ofc I've never needed or wanted to.
Too bad the combination of AI bullshit and tariff fuckery has doubled the price, I'd buy another similar machine.
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Guess what... I bought the motherboard/CPU combo 2 years ago, and the 126gigs of DDR4 last year... to avoid this crap.
The AI demand for RAM ain't gonna go away... it's going to remain, along with the demand for 'orders of magnitude' more powerful CPUs and GPU/NPUs.
The so-called 'bubble bursting' on the AI stocks won't mean shit... how many things do you have in your home that use AI now? Your phone, your car, your TV, your microwave, your toaster, your fridge?
What if any or, worse... all of those companies
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I did the same, although I "only" got 64GB. I have a 5900X. I bought the MiniPC in part because they are both Zen3, that's handy since I run Devuan on both so if I build a package specifically for this architecture I can use it in both places.
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Mine is a full tower with a Titan X and 9 drives (2 are M.2's).
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I regret not getting more GPU. I have a 4060 Ti 16GB, as the minimum card with decent VRAM. I did buy some 8TB HDDs too, but I only got 3 of 'em.
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The so-called 'bubble bursting' on the AI stocks won't mean shit...
I think you're missing the real problem: the stock market is severely overvalued, and trillions of dollars are being invested in AI, AI data centers, and non-AI data centers. When the AI bubble bursts, as it surely will eventually, suddenly a lot of that money goes away, the stock market crashes, and bad repercussions follow. Gallup says [gallup.com] 62% of Americans reported owning stock in 2025, and many people own stock indirectly through retirement funds or pensions. When the inevitable "correction" happens, a lot
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So, your thinking is that at some point in a few years, AI itself will die off and we'll go back to life without "Clod" and all the others?
What about the self-driving cars? What about the AI-enabled smart TVs? What about all the appliances that have AI baked into them?
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That sounds like some of the hysterical predictions made about the year 2000 problem. I'm not sure how you managed the mighty leap from my post to your comment. My point was not that "AI itself will die off" (whatever that means) but that AI companies as now constituted are financially unsustainable. In the 1990s, a number of Internet Service Providers spent a lot of money on infrastructure projects like laying dark fiber, assuming consumer use of the Web would grow rapidly. They were wrong. Many companies
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Of course, those would all fail, because how else would the AI outfits gather data from you, the consumer? There'd be no continuous stream of money to be made by having your fridge's AI be a local model.
And, even if this round of AI outfits goes bankrupt and folds... the second that news is hinted at, tens of startups will crawl out of the proverbial woodwork to buy OpenAI or whichever, and it starts again... this time using already established models and technology and everything, so they're not starting
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I bought a MiniPC from China instead
Instead? It probably means you bought the wrong thing originally in the first place. SBCs and MiniPCs are a different product class with different purposes. Anyone who suggests using a MiniPCB instead of a small SBC shouldn't be touching SBCs.
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Anyone who suggests using a MiniPCB instead of a small SBC shouldn't be touching SBCs.
Anyone who suggests they know better than someone else what they wanted the computer for should spend less time touching themself publicly.
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If your solutions are equally served by an SBC or a MiniPC then it is you who don't actually know what purpose you are using them for.
This is you: "Yeah I was going to buy an e-bike but instead I bought a John Deere 230R5 mini tractor. Look how clever I am!"
I put it to you that you were never in the market for an SBC from Pine and just wanted to bullshit online like the attention seeking whore you are.
Re:Isn't capitalism supposed to fix this? (Score:5, Insightful)
The communists aren't building any faster, either.
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rsilvergun is simply trolling America and the western civilization again like he does all day long in order to push his Chinese masters agenda!
He (or she) certainly does seem to post a lot.
Mind you, one of the strengths of a democratic society is the freedom to look at your own way of doing things, criticise where appropriate, and make improvements. If there is a good point in what comrade rsilvergun says, it is that pure (sometimes called "unfettered") capitalism has its drawbacks. America at its best has tempered this pure capitalism with a sprinkling of social welfare, anti-monopoly law, or government assistance to business.
As Valgrus Thunderax
There's no such thing as pure capitalism (Score:1)
That's what it means to fire the ref.
Try taking the referee and all the rules out of the NFL and let me know how much fun it is watching football. The same goes for basketball in the nba. The rules in sports games are remarkably complex at the professional level for just that purpose. There are for example half a dozen rules in basketball that exist because people got too tall and the game got boring The watch becaus
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which really just highlights what a stupid game basketball is
Bullshit (Score:1)
It does not take 5 years for someone who already works in the semiconductor industry to enter the market. China is already making viable and useful ram but it's going to of course stay in China. If nothing else the big three producers are Taiwanese and South Korean and they're going to block any attempt to let Chinese companies get a foothold in the rest of t
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There was speculation but not actual eating until about one year ago. And it takes a shit lot longer than one year to build anything the size and complexity of a fab.
High demand on Flash memory hit two years back, but not DRAM.
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Because building more manufacturing capacity is a large expenditure and nobody wants to get stuck holding the cards if the AI boom turns into a bust.
Not so much a bust, but a lot of consolidation as the players who can't turn a profit start burning through all their venture capital money. AI probably won't go away, but I doubt the current hardware buying frenzy is sustainable long term.
Re:Isn't capitalism supposed to fix this? (Score:5, Interesting)
Nope that's not it either. Companies have found out that if they collude and control the entire supply of something, they can make more money by not meeting demand, indefinitely. The free market basically no longer exists and definitely no longer discovers prices by matching supply and demand. Covid fundamentally broke it all. Even without collusion in markets with high barriers to entry, reducing supply, or at least not meeting demand maximizes shareholder profits.
Don't mistake heavy criticism of our present failing system for endorsement of any other system such as CCP China. Saying all other systems are even more horrible is not a valid reason for blindly accepting the many problems we now face.
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In this case the CCP may be the only thing that alleviates the problem for us, because they have made domestic DRAM production a strategic goal. They won't allow domestic suppliers to collude either.
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*When* the AI boom goes bust. Cannot possibly still be "if" at this point.
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Ignore the AC... that's rsilvergun.or his bipolar alter-ego.
Building stuff on US soil will be a bust (because the companies don't want to pay the minimum wages people demand... they f***ed themselves out of a job).
AI isn't going anywhere.. the so-called 'AI bubble' is only in reference to the stock prices... AI ain't going anywhere (did the internet go anywhere then the dot-com bubble burst?).
Build it overseas... cheap child labor (2 cents and 1/4 cup of rice as payment for 14 hours).
Remember... the push to
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Because building more manufacturing capacity is a large expenditure and nobody wants to get stuck holding the cards if the AI boom turns into a bust.
In my heart of hearts, blackened and shriveled though it may be, I sincerely hope that someone cooks up a wholesale new approach that drops memory and GPU requirements right at the same time reality starts to get re-asserted to the financial circles that are currently involved in masturbatory celebration over everything AI. This "more more more" way of tackling the AI problem simply isn't sustainable at this pace forever, and as far as potential it's like we built the Model T Ford, and rather than let ourse
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It'll be solved once the bubble bursts.
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This isn't a bubble. This is a fundamental shift in human technology. I think the problem is we're having a hard time wrapping our heads around that because new technology has always kind of been available for us and made for us. AI is not for you and it is not for me. It
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We just need to invent star-trek style replicators and then we'll be all set. You know: tea, earl grey, hot. It shouldn't be too hard since Claude is already smarter than Data.
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They're not going to let up until the bubble bursts. There is no end to expansion in their eyes.
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You're acting like this is the first ever RAM shortage. It's not. These things are cyclical, and things will get back to normal eventually. The AI tech bubble will eventually burst (but AI will stick around), everybody and their grandmother will stop trying to build data centers in everyone's back yards, and RAM and storage supply will return to normal.
Oh, and Nvidia will pretend to give a shit about gamers again for a few months until the next tech fad that requires GPU acceleration pops up.
If anything, we
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There's a stronger connection than you say: some of that mining hardware ended up being snapped up for training small LLMs. Most of it has become too old for support unless you want to compile llama.cpp yourself, but it's still out there and it's still cheap.
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My current gaming GPU is an ex-miner fire sale item. They got sold on multiple consumer secondhand markets after proof-of-stake transition.
Buying new gaming GPUs then was already horribly expensive so getting one secondhand was a big relief. I can see the games console price attraction.
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This isn't a bubble. This is a fundamental shift in human technology. I think the problem is we're having a hard time wrapping our heads around that because new technology has always kind of been available for us and made for us. AI is not for you and it is not for me. It is for the capital owners who are sick and tired of having employees and customers. They want to replace everyone in the chain from the employee through to the customer with a machine that does whatever the fuck they want it to do.
It certainly is a bubble. Just because Altman et el want their (magic) genies that can grant any wish (yes he actually said that) doesn't mean they are actually going to get them. Reality is distinct from what people want.
The value AI does bring is insufficient to justify current expenditures and certainly not expenditures of a few American "AI" firms when there is more value in training private models on corporate datasets for specific purposes.
The one weird trick stemming from the 2017 attention paper h
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> We have a massive shortage why is nobody stepping up to make more supply?
Look up some stuff instead of just commie ranting.
Apple is testing supply from an up-and-coming DRAM supplier in China. Hynix is working on converting old fabs into a smaller process to create more fast RAM. TSMC is building a fab in Arizona. Samsung is opening a fab in Texas next year.
> the big three can anytime they want drastically increase production within 6 months to a year
Tell me you've never been to a fab without tell
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Even if a miracle happens and apple out bribes The Big Three memory producers which is possible they have a fuck ton of money apple is just going to make sure they have supply. That's not necessarily going to help you or me. They will take advantage of the elevated RAM prices to raise the base price of their hardware to mat
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Nobody wants you to be unhappy.
Sam Altman is doing a pretty good impression of it...
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Are you serious? So fascinating. I always thought America was about freedom of expression, citizen involvement in government, encouraging individuals to campaign (or talking and debating others in a public forum such as this) for reform and change when someone sees something that's unjust or need fixing. But all you can say is if you don't like it leave? That's really what America is now?
Even if I hold different views and values than rsilvergun, kudos to him for having the courage to say things and call f
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But all you can say is if you don't like it leave?
He didn't say you don't like it leave, he was pointing out something fundamental to the country's founding, namely that it's not communist, while taking a dig at the OP's historically stupid posts.
No rsilvergun spouted rubbish. Capitalism in the US doesn't need a referee because of RAM prices caused by *checks notes* non-US companies.
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Don't encourage him. The peak of his thinking is that we're more responsible than China so unfettered capitalism is great actually.
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The RAM crisis is but just one sign of the cracks in the system.
That's hilarious that the country was established in 1776 to counter communism.
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Maybe you should stop panicking lie a wee baby and think from the other end: things are working as well as they can, and the problem is a lot bigger than just snapping your fingers and hoping a genie shows up.
Fabs are expensive and big, and can't be built overnight. Even stupid ordinary homes take months to build, and fans are thousands of times bigger with thousands of times the utility requirements.
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Literally the only reason we're in this mess is because governments have been keeping interest rates artificially low for thirty years to enrich their cronies. No company would be borrowing trillions of dollars if interest rates were 10-15%.
Re:Isn't capitalism supposed to fix this? (Score:4, Insightful)
"The point" is that it's the best system we have, despite its problems.
The alternatives have, historically, led to mass starvation and bloody revolutions in relatively short order. This will predictably happen again if they are attempted, because they violate human nature too strongly.
Be that as it may, technological advancement has always been the game-changer. If anything stands any kind of chance at enabling humans to thrive, sustainably, under a communist system, it will be labor automation (including and especially AI).
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The best system that's been done is called SOCIALISM. It combines the best and most useful aspects of communism with the best and most useful aspects of capitalism. Straight capitalism, like what the right and far right in the US want (and are largely starting to get under their God-Emperor Trump, unfortunately) ultimately leads to fascism and assholitry. See "anarcho-capitalism". The end result will be some system akin to slavery, even if it has a different name, just like has happened in the past. See "sh
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"Socialism" is a broad word that refers to an entire family of different systems. It's not "one thing," and there isn't a single definition for it. There is just a loose group of common elements shared by all the different things that share the label, the main one being collective control over the means of production. (see here [wikipedia.org] for more info).
So it isn't reasonable to say that this is "the best system" without specifying which version you are referring to and citing specific places that have fully implem
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Like a few others above you're falling back on the old, "but other systems are worse so you should be happy with what we have" fallacy. And even worse implying that criticizing the current system and calling for change is the equivalent of lobbying for some other system like a command economy or whatever you think communism is.
You're making a number of assumptions, some of which may not be valid. First you are assuming that the system you have is the system you think it is. Second you are assuming that i
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You seem to have confused my post with someone else's. Specifically:
I never said nor implied "you should be happy with what we have."
I never said nor implied that calling for any change is lobbying for some other system.
No I'm not, you are reading into my post a whole lot of things that I didn't s
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Why do you assume it's a worker thing? The people are there... I can find 50 people in my building (me included, though I'm not on SSI) (all on SSI) who want jobs... it's finding those jobs that's the problem.
America has been 'sold down the river'... even recycled pop cans and cars is off-shored.
It's because there's no profit margin... why pay an American $11 to assemble an XBox gamepad (takes two hours), when a person in China can to it in under an hour at gunpoint for 10C and a handful of rice (and some
Re:Isn't capitalism supposed to fix this? (Score:4, Insightful)
We have a massive shortage why is nobody stepping up to make more supply?
There were really only 3 DRAM manufacturers before this crisis. AI bought out nearly all of the production capacity to make HBM instead of DDR5. Some Chinese companies are now starting to make DRAM but they simply do not make enough. It turns out making even DRAM is hard.
And it's not a short-term shortage everyone knew this was coming and we have known for a couple of years and we knew that was going to get worse and the absolute best case scenario is that it starts to get better sometime around 2029 or 2030.
All you have to do is start a chip foundry plant and start cranking out DRAM. It's just that easy.
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They arent'?
https://www.fool.com/investing... [fool.com]
https://www.pcmag.com/news/mic... [pcmag.com]
https://apnews.com/article/kor... [apnews.com]
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They arent'?
https://www.fool.com/investing... [fool.com]
This article says specifically one SKHynix plant will make NAND which *may* help the SSD shortage while the other one will make HBM for AI datacenters which will not help consumers. The *may* is because the NAND might just go to AI datacenters too.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/mic... [pcmag.com]
Micron is making a new NAND plant. The product may go to consumer SSDs or AI datacenters.
https://apnews.com/article/kor... [apnews.com]
This article does not detail what Samsung is making in these new plants other than "chips". It may be for CPUs/GPUs/AI chips. It could be HDBM or DDR5 RAM; it could be NAND.
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Lol. You're just determined the world is ending hey?
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There's an everything memory shortage. The reason, allegedly, is that OpenAI and then some of the other AI companies, bought up all the fab capacity to make mostly HBM. The memory fabs are fairly multipurpose: they can switch to make different things. The new ones probably can also but even if not, they will take pressure off the existing ones.
Anyway, you can type "new memory fabs under construction" into Google yourself and select whatever articles you think are relevant to your specific pecadillo.
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The consumer DRAM price issues are due to the diversion of efforts for HBM production driving DRAM costs up to meet the more expensive HBM production costs. New plants for HBM will put downward pressure on HBM and by extension downward pressure on the costs making DRAM production more viable. HBM and DRAM production plants aren't dissimilar which is why it was so quick and easy to pivot existing facilities from one to another.
It won't "solve" the problem, but factories supplying to address AI demand indirec
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New plants for HBM will put downward pressure on HBM and by extension downward pressure on the costs making DRAM production more viable.
Your flawed assumption is that RAM companies will shift existing plants back to DDR5 when these plants are built. Considering that HBM is much more profitable than DDR5, why would RAM companies do that when they can just make more HBM?
HBM and DRAM production plants aren't dissimilar which is why it was so quick and easy to pivot existing facilities from one to another.
And you know this, how?
I probably shouldn't be saying this but... (Score:1)
...just FYI the resell value on discontinued Pine64 products on the open market tends to exceed the purchase price.
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This is the only time in my life that the value of computers and parts is rising rather than falling.
Queue the idiots taking about using AI at work (Score:1, Flamebait)
The rest of us suffer while the fucktards in big tech force AI down our throats.WE NO LONGER HAVE PERMISSION FOR PHYSICAL THINGS.
How about you fucktards start paying some reparations rather than taking smugly how you replaced your real dog with a chat gpt one. This is not a fucking joke.
Pine64 is a joke (Score:2)
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If all the slashdot posters who complained any spying cell phones and closed source put their money where their mouth is and bought a Pine phone we wouldn't be having this discussion. Really how many phones have they sold?
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In reality, there are lots of people who would gladly pay a premium for a Linux OS phone, who don't buy and use a PinePhone because it's a dated piece of low quality e-Waste.
The closest thing we have to a quality Linux phone right now is the FLX1s+ and that's still low mid-range at best. At least it's usable.
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This. The Pinephone was worthless when it was released, let alone later on. I'm supposed to buy a worthless phone?
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What?
That's not how it works. Just because you have stock doesn't mean shit if no one buys it...or you price it so no one can buy it.
The problem isn't they were driven by market forces...the problem is they were a small player; and 4 years ago everyone decided they weren't selling to the small players.
I get you hate Pine....but ending production is not the result of anything but saying "we cannot get parts". They're not protesting component costs...they just can't buy them. No one will sell them...at any co
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I can go buy the specific components, DRAM and eMMC on NewEgg, mouser, digikey etc. if I want to right now. The prices are high, but they are available. Pine64 made a conscious choice to discontinue the product instead of maintaining stock at market prices.
PINE64 products are not that great (Score:4, Interesting)
I had a Pinebook PRO and it was... meh. Way too slow and underpowered for modern web browsing. Also shipped with Manjaro, but I'm a Debian fan. I installed Armbian instead; PINE64 doesn't offer much in the way of hardware documentation and so I spent a fair bit of time getting Armbian to work. I had to munge the device tree files based on the ones in Manjaro. I ended up selling the laptop.
In retrospect, I probably should have hung on to it. I could probably sell it for more now!
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Linux support for all ARM devices from any vendor (maybe except for Raspberry Pi) really sucks, honestly. Out-of-date kernel forks, distro forks, u-boot, device tree, etc. Unless you need an embedded system, there's no reason to by ARM. At least not until they all support one of the system standards like SystemReady, has UEFI, generic boot, etc.
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Well...let's look at the only two ARM platforms that aren't embedded:
Apple
Microsoft
And there's your answer. To the rest of the world....ARM = embedded, so they treat it as such. The Apple M silicon and whatever MS is doing are non-embedded ARM chips that can actually do things; but they're Apple and Microsoft...so there's not going to be much Linux overlap.
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What do you mean by embedded/non-embedded? Apple uses SoC and SiPs, they are as "embedded" as anything else being used in a PC. Embedded systems are systems hidden within something else. PCs are the opposite of that.
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In fact it's just a lot of bullshit. Embedded refers to how a product is used, and there are plenty of non-embedded ARM computers.
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What he means is ARM boards and the SoCs that power them are in their own individual and incompatible worlds, intended for being embedded into a product. They were never intended to become PCs and run generic operating systems. Apple might use what is technically a SoC, but they have defined a complete platform for themselves from the boot loader on up to the peripheral hardware to support their OS. If Pine64 were to design a chip, a boot loader, a chipset, and an operating system to match with full hardw
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Had Microsoft required UEFI and allowed the same user control over the secure boot process that they do on Intel, then you'd have something there.
Apple, well they are their own proprietary world, so no different from any proprietary ARM system as far as Linux is concerned. Asahi Linux notwithstanding. I had hoped at one time that Asahi Linux would actually fully support the hardware and make Apple products viable for Linux, but I've long since given up on that idea.
Intel and AMD battery life is pretty good