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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

#101

Post by elorant »

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…

Games eventually will move to consoles and the whole PC industry will take a huge hit.

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

#102

Post by adastra22 »

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…

It’s maybe new to you (you’re one of today’s lucky 10,000!), but this kind of market failure has been going on since at least the south sea bubble and tulip mania, if not all the way back to Roman times.

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

#103

Post by bongodongobob »

elorant wrote: post #101
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…

Games eventually will move to consoles and the whole PC industry will take a huge hit.

I don't know if the term console even makes sense any more. It's a computer without a keyboard and mouse. And as soon as you do that, it's a PC. So I don't see how this makes any sense or will ever happen.

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

#104

Post by octoberfranklin »

zozbot234 wrote: post #76
octoberfranklin wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 monopolizat…

the mere potential for small companies to pop up is enough to police the big company's behavior.

If that were true, "you're in Amazon's kill zone" wouldn't be something VC's say to startups. And yet, they do say that.

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

#105

Post by AnthonyMouse »

fpoling wrote: post #38
automatic6131 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need better antitrust and anti-monopoly enforcement. Break up the biggest companies, and then they'll have to actually participate in markets.

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.

> 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.

This is in the right spirit but you want two things to be different about it.

The first is that the threshold for a given industry doesn't make sense as a dollar amount, it makes sense as a market share percentage. Having more than 15% market share should be a thing companies don't want, regardless of whether it's a $100 trillion industry or a $100 million one.

And the second is that taxes create a perverse incentive for the government. You absolutely do not want the government to have even more of a financial incentive to sustain and create more of the companies of that size. What you want is to have fewer of them.

So, what you want is a rule that if a company has more than 15% market share, the entire general public is allowed to sue them into bankruptcy for the offense of market consolidation. Which also removes the problem where they buy off the government prosecutors, because if they commit the offense then anybody can sue them.

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

#106

Post by themafia »

epistasis wrote: post #8
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…

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…

> There's too much group-think in the executive class.

I think this is actually the long tail of "too big to fail." It's not that they're all thinking the same way, it's that they're all no longer hedging their bets.

> we have made the rewards too extreme and too narrowly distributed

We give the military far too much money in the USA.

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

#107

Post by tonyhart7 »

amelius wrote: post #55
tonyhart7 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how is that market failure??? this is literally market of supply and demand at its core

yeah but the demand is based on empty promises

You are overthinking things

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

#108

Post by 55873445216111 »

avidiax wrote: post #37

Does anyone know if the increase in prices in high-end RAM will affect lower end RAM used in embedded devices, e.g. LPDDR4?

It will. The big 3 (Micron, Samsung, SK Hynix) have announced they will quit making LPDDR4 so that they can make more (LP)DDR5.

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

#109

Post by ajb »

sbarre wrote: post #6

I'm so mad about this, I need DDR5 for a new mini-PC I bought and prices have literally gone up by 2.5x.. 128GB used to be 400$ in June, and now it's over $1,000 for the same 2x64GB set.. I have no idea if/when prices will come back down but it sucks.

Dram alternates between feast and famine; it's the nature of a business when the granularity of investment is so huge (you have a fab or you don't, and they cost billions -maybe trillions by now). So, it will swing back. Unfortunately it looks like maybe 3-5 years on average, from some analysis here: https://storagesearch.com/memory-boom-bust-cycles.html

(That's just me eyeballing it, feel free to do the math)

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

#110

Post by mitthrowaway2 »

sowbug wrote: post #61
PaulKeeble wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wouldn't mind my own offline Gemini or ChatGPT 5. But even if the hardware and model were free, I don't know how I'd afford the electricity.

If you can't afford the electricity to afford to run the model on free hardware, you'd certainly never be able to afford the subscription to the same product as a service!

But anyway, the trick is to run it in the winter and keep your house warm.

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