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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

#181

Post by brenainn »

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.

My 64gb DDR5 kit started having stability issues running XMP a few weeks out of warranty. I bought it two years ago. Looked into replacing it and the same kit is now double the price. Bumping the voltage a bit and having better cooling gets it through memtest thankfully. The fun of building your own computer is pretty much gone for me these days.

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

#182

Post by silon42 »

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.

revenue, obviously, but maybe it would scale with employee numbers... if you have lots of employees, you get taxed less.

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

#183

Post by boguscoder »

addaon wrote: post #160
ajb wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Nothing costs trillions.

Have you seen our debt recently?..

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

#184

Post by mk89 »

ryandrake wrote: post #142
Loughla wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The out of touch leader is a trope that I'm willing to bet has existed as long as we've had leaders. I remember first hearing the phrase "yes man" in relation to a human ass kisser my dad worked with in like 1988. It's very easy to unknowingly surround yourself with syncophants and hangers on when you literally have more money than some countries. This is true now and has been true forever. I'm not sure they're more…

It's more than the fact they are surrounded by sycophants. It's also that, despite the mythology the executive-worship-industry tries to paint, CxOs and board members of companies are just not very creative or visionary people. They largely spend their time looking at their peers and competitors for hints about what they should be doing. And today, those hints all are "do AI". They're not sitting down and deriving fr…

> They're not sitting down and deriving from first principles that AI is the way--they're seeing their buddies steering other companies and they're all saying AI is the way, so they say AI is the way, too.

I think you're underestimating a bit. We must implement AI because they were able to sell it so good that they got billion $ investors (see all the money coming from Qatar/saudi arabia etc). That's a lot of money coming in that allows to innovate/etc.

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

#185

Post by phyzix5761 »

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.

I see it a bit differently. In marketing, companies like AppLovin with the Axon Engine and Zeta Global with Athena are already showing strong profitability, both in earnings and free cash flow. They’re also delivering noticeably higher returns on ad spend compared to pre-AI tools for their customers. This is the area I’m researching most closely, so I can only speak for marketing, but I’d love to hear from others seeing similar results in their industries.

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

#186

Post by Jackson__ »

bloudermilk wrote: post #70

Wild experience building a PC today and discovering the prices are less competitive with Macs than they’ve always been. Building a well-appointed gaming/production/CAD rig is suddenly very expensive between RAM, GPU, and nvme prices being so high.

It's not like apple is going to eat the cost of this for either though. As soon as their tariff supply runs out they'll price hike like everyone else.

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

#187

Post by runeks »

Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46012710 (from 2024)

> hbm chips are now emerging as another bottleneck in the development of those models. Both sk Hynix and Micron, an American chipmaker, have already pre-sold most of their hbm production for next year. Both are pouring billions of dollars into expanding capacity, but that will take time. Meanwhile Samsung, which manufactures 35% of the world’s hbm chips, has been plagued by production issues and reportedly plans to cut its output of the chips next year by a tenth.

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

#188

Post by AnthonyMouse »

chii wrote: post #159
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #105

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. 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…

> anybody can sue them. who bears the costs of this suit? And who determines what makes for a good market share size to be the threshold? And by having such a rule, an industry that would have higher efficiency to when consolidated would not be able to (but you wouldn't know). It's a bad set of policy imho. A better way would be for gov't to increase competition by adding supply, or demand, whichever one is the bottl…

> who bears the costs of this suit?

The goal is to not have it happen, because the company is going to see that they're only slightly below the threshold and voluntarily split themselves into smaller pieces and buy themselves a safety margin because if they don't everybody knows the lawsuits are going to vaporize them once they exceed the threshold.

> And who determines what makes for a good market share size to be the threshold?

Anything in the vicinity of 5%-15% would be fine.

> And by having such a rule, an industry that would have higher efficiency to when consolidated would not be able to (but you wouldn't know).

This is extremely rare and the circumstances where it happens aren't a mystery. It's when entering the market has extremely high fixed costs but then the unit cost of usage is negligible, e.g. it costs a huge amount of money to install water and sewer but then the incremental cost of someone washing their hands is insignificant.

For those things you either have the government do them, or if it's a private company then it's a regulated utility which is completely banned from anything that even vaguely resembles vertical integration as the price of being allowed to have more than the threshold amount of market share.

> A better way would be for gov't to increase competition by adding supply, or demand, whichever one is the bottleneck to competition.

The problem is generally caused by the incumbents capturing the government and then enacting rules that inhibit rather than increase competition. That's why you need anyone to be able to initiate the lawsuit, so they can't capture the government department which is supposed to be thwarting them because then it's the entire public.

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

#189

Post by chii »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #188
chii wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> anybody can sue them. who bears the costs of this suit? And who determines what makes for a good market share size to be the threshold? And by having such a rule, an industry that would have higher efficiency to when consolidated would not be able to (but you wouldn't know). It's a bad set of policy imho. A better way would be for gov't to increase competition by adding supply, or demand, whichever one is the bottl…

> who bears the costs of this suit? The goal is to not have it happen, because the company is going to see that they're only slightly below the threshold and voluntarily split themselves into smaller pieces and buy themselves a safety margin because if they don't everybody knows the lawsuits are going to vaporize them once they exceed the threshold. > And who determines what makes for a good market share size to be t…

> so they can't capture the government department

so why not solve this issue directly? Transparency, auditing and public awareness etc are needed to prevent regulatory capture. Public apathy are the reason why it is currently "easy" to do capture regulators.

The fact is even if a law suit is possible from anyone in the public, no one is going to pay to do a law suit (which has costs), when the result doesn't net them more profit. So unless the law suit enables the accuser to wholesale take a piece of that company as private property from the owners - which no law currently would allow nor have precedents for - why would anyone expend private money for a public good?

And in any case, i don't the apathy going away, even if the law suit was free. Because currently, the same apathy is allowing regulatory capture in the first place. So solving public apathy first, and foremost, is the solution.

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

#190

Post by nvader »

laterium wrote: post #156
Tempest1981 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do we all need 128GB now? I was happy with 32. Close a few Chrome tabs, and save some DDR5 for the rest of us. :-)

Why did you waste all your money on 32gb when 4gb is enough? Why did we all need 32gb?

Get this. Pen and paper. No need for silicon at all.

You're welcome.

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