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Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening

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Re: Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening

#71

Post by octoberfranklin »

Terr_ wrote: post #47
fpoling wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a better solution is exponential tax on a company size. I.e. once a company starts to earn above, say, 1 billion, it will be taxed by income by ever increasing amount. Or put it another way, use taxes to break the power law and winner takes effect all into a Gaussian distribution of company sizes.

Is that revenue, or profit? If revenue, it'll slam certain kinds of high-volume low-profit businesses, and if it's profit then the company will just arrange to have big compensation "expenses" for executives. The latter would have to be backstopped by taxes on individual income.

The sane version of this proposal omits the "exponential" part, applies to profits (net income), and makes the tax rate industry-specific (just like Washington State's revenue tax).

Re: Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening

#72

Post by philipkglass »

octoberfranklin wrote: post #69
philipkglass wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would permanently increase DRAM prices. Memory fabricators either earn billions of dollars in income each year or they can't keep going. There are no little Mom and Pop businesses that can do photolithography on leading process nodes.

Nonsense, it would force vertical de- integration. Chip fabs used to be like book publishers; you don't have to own a printing press to be an author. Carver Mead even described his vision of the industry that way. Nowadays you have to get your cell libraries and a large chunk of your toolchain from the fab. Of course it's laundered through cadence+synopsys, but it's still coming from the fab. You have to buy your mas…

In another comment you proposed a sane version of the parent proposal. I wouldn't have commented if fpoling had originally floated that scheme. I was mainly objecting to drastically increasing taxes "once a company starts to earn above, say, 1 billion" without regard for the minimum viable scale of different businesses.

Re: Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening

#73

Post by octoberfranklin »

Retr0id wrote: post #9
mrsilencedogood wrote: post #3

All I can say is, - the insane frothing hype behind AI is showing me a new kind of market failure - where resources can be massively misallocated just because some small class of individuals THINK or HOPE it will result in massive returns. Even if it squeezes out every single other sector that happens to want to use SDRAM to do things OTHER than buffer memory before it's fed into a PCIE lane for a GPU. - I'm really R…

I wonder, is there any way to avoid this kind of market failure? Even a planned economy could succumb to hype - promises that improved societal efficiency are just around the corner.

A tax on scale.

Yeah I know HN is going to hate me for saying that.

If a big company and a few small companies all have identical costs for producing a product, society is better served by having it produced by the few small companies than the one big company.

Once "better served" is quantified, you know the coefficient for taxation.

Make no mistake, this coefficient will be a political football, and will be fought over, just like the Fed prime interest rate. But it's a single scalar instead of a whole executive branch department and a hundred kilopages of regulations like we have in the antitrust-enforcement clusterfuck. Which makes it way harder to pull shenanighans.

Re: Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening

#74

Post by more_corn »

Everyone here can actually fix that by never buying Samsung anything for your data centers.

They put ads in the refrigerators. Never buy Samsung anything ever again.

That includes everyone who works in supply chain at big tech. Permanent total boycott.

Re: Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening

#75

Post by wqaatwt »

logancbrown wrote: post #44
fpoling wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a better solution is exponential tax on a company size. I.e. once a company starts to earn above, say, 1 billion, it will be taxed by income by ever increasing amount. Or put it another way, use taxes to break the power law and winner takes effect all into a Gaussian distribution of company sizes.

Ah yes, the same tax mentality that is working great for EU innovation.

Corporate taxes specifically were quite high by European standards until 2027 and are not relatively that low today either

Re: Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening

#76

Post by zozbot234 »

octoberfranklin wrote: post #73
Retr0id wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder, is there any way to avoid this kind of market failure? Even a planned economy could succumb to hype - promises that improved societal efficiency are just around the corner.

A tax on scale . Yeah I know HN is going to hate me for saying that. If a big company and a few small companies all have identical costs for producing a product, society is better served by having it produced by the few small companies than the one big company. Once "better served" is quantified, you know the coefficient for taxation. Make no mistake, this coefficient will be a political football, and will be fought…

> If a big company and a few small companies all have identical costs for producing a product, society is better served by having it produced by the few small companies than the one big company.

Why? That's exactly the circumstances where the mere potential for small companies to pop up is enough to police the big company's behavior. You get lower costs (due to economies of scale) and a very low chance of monopolization. so everyone's happy. In the case of this DRAM/flash price spike, the natural "small" actors are fabs slightly off the leading edge, that will be able to retool their production and supply these devices for a higher profit.

Re: Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening

#79

Post by GuB-42 »

PaulKeeble wrote: post #39
hypeatei wrote: post #18

Well, patience as a consumer might pay off in the next year or so when the music stops and hyperscalers are forced to dump their inventories. There still isn't a clear path to profitability for any of these AI products and the capital expenditure has been enormous.

Its a bit of a shame these AI GPUs don't actually have displayport/hdmi output ports because they would make for nice cheap and powerful gaming GPUs with a lot of VRAM, they would potentially be really good graphics cards. Will just have to settle for insanely cheap second hand DDR5 and NVMe drives I guess.

AI GPUs suck for gaming, I have seen a video from a guy playing Red Dead Redemption 2 on a H100 at a whooping 8 FPS! That's after some hacks, because otherwise it wouldn't run at all.

AI GPUs are stripped away of most things display-related to make room for more compute cores. So in theory, they could "work", but there are bottlenecks making that compute power irrelevant for gaming, even if they had a display output.

Re: Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening

#80

Post by xpe »

sharts wrote: post #63
epistasis wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a weird form of centralized planning. Except there's no election to get on to the central committee, it's like in the Soviet era where you had to run in the right circles and have sway in them. There's too much group-think in the executive class. Too much forced adoption of AI, too much bandwagon hopping. The return-to-office fad is similar, a bunch of executives following the mandates of their board, all becau…

how is this centralized planning? It’s a corporate decision making operating in a free market to optimize for what majority shareholders want (though the majority of shares are owned by few).

I think the implied thought (?) is there is a similarity between central planning and oligopoly bandwagoning. To my eye, the causes and dynamics are different enough to warrant bucketing them separately.
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