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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

#211

Post by mrtksn »

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…

Exactly. So instead of electing the people who will allocate the resources, the people who are successful in one thing are given the right to manage the resources for whatever they wish and they can keep being very wrong for very long time when other people are deprived from the resources due to the mismanagement and can't do anything about it.

In theory I guess this creates a demand that should be satisfied by the market but in reality it seems like when the wealth is too concentrated in the hands of the few that call all the decision the market is unable to act.

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

#212

Post by Aerroon »

wat10000 wrote: post #118
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…

This is why I think taxes on the very wealthy should be so high that billionaires can't happen. The usual reasons are either about raising revenue or are vague ideas about inequality. It doesn't raise enough revenue to matter, and inequality is a fairly weak justification by itself. But the power concentration is a strong reason. That level of wealth is incompatible with democracy. Money is power, and when someone ac…

You'll just get a different form of power concentration. Do you think the Soviet Union didn't have power concentration in individuals? Of course it did, that's why the general secretary of the party was more important than the actual heads of state and government.

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

#213

Post by snuxoll »

bilegeek wrote: post #201
nine_k wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bet that friendly Chinese entrepreneurs will sell inexpensive E1.S to m.2 adapters, and maybe even PCIe riser cards for putting an OAM and a bunch of fans, and maybe even an HDMI output. Good hardware won't be wasted, given some demand.

Inexpensive, probably not. E1.S isn't just a different connector, it's a completely different protocol than PCIe.

> it's a completely different protocol than PCIe.

Wrong. It is still just NVMe over PCIe like every other modern SSD form factor.

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

#214

Post by Aerroon »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #11
Retric wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is part of how free markets self correct, misallocate resources and you run out of resources. You can blame irrational exuberance, bubbles, or whatnot markets are ultimately individual choices times economic power. Ai, Crypto, housing, Dotcom etc going back through history all had excess because it’s not obvious when to join and when to stop.

Usually companies run out of resources before they screw up global prices in massive markets. If it was a couple billion dollars of memory purchasing nobody would care.

The problem is that memory manufacturing is hard enough that there are essentially 3 major companies that do it globally: Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron.

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

#215

Post by touisteur »

nyrikki wrote: post #119
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.

I just gave up and built an AM4 system with a 3090 because I had 128G of ddr4 udimms on hand the whole build was for less than just the memory would have cost for an AM5/ddr5 build. Really wish that I could replace my old skylake-x system but even ddr4 rdimms for an older xeon are crazy now let alone ddr5. Unfortunately I need slots for 3xTitan V's for the 7.450 TFLOPS each of FP64. Even the 5090 only does 1.637 TFLO…

If you don't need full ieee-754 double precision, ozaki scheme (emulation with tensor cores) might do the trick. It's been added (just a little bit) to cublas recently.

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

#216

Post by lenkite »

refurb wrote: post #153
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. How so? Costs will be higher with multiple small products, resulting in higher costs for customers. That's the opposite of "society is served better". We draw the line at monopolies, which makes sense.

By the time a company becomes a monopoly, it is immensely powerful - politically and monetarily - getting rid of it or splitting it up is near impossible. Monopoly laws are near impossible to apply as the corporation has sufficient money and influence to turn politicians into servile puppets.

Best to nip corpos before they gain more revenue than a nation state and become "too big to fail".

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

#217

Post by humanfromearth9 »

Tempest1981 wrote: post #144
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.

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. :-)

Last night, while writing a LaTeX article, with Ollama running for other purposes, Firefox with its hundreds of tabs, multiple PDF files open, my laptop's memory usage spiked up to 80GB RAM usage... And I was happy to have 128GB. The spike was probably due to some process stuck in an effing loop, but the process consuming more and more RAM didn't have any impact on the system's responsiveness, and I could calmly quit VSCode and restart it with all the serenity I could have in the middle of the night. Is there even a case where more RAM is not really better, except for its cost?

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

#219

Post by scotty79 »

xpe wrote: post #91
scotty79 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every corporation is a (not so) little pocket of centrally planned economy. The only saving grace is that it can die and others will scoop up released resources. When country level planned economy dies, people die and resources get destroyed.

> Every corporation is a (not so) little pocket of centrally planned economy. This is confused. Here is how classical economists would frame it: a firm chooses how much to produce based on its cost structure and market prices, expanding production until marginal cost equals marginal revenue. This is price guided production optimization, not central planning. The dominant criticism of central planning is trying to set…

Company prices resources within itself completely arbitrarily. How much the hour of work of an employee A is worth with the company and and how much using paperclip costs has no relation how much these things actually cost in the real money. Once they are acquired by company they are utilized not according to their value but to central plans instead. This way paperclip might get vastly overvalued and scarce while hour of work can be vastly undervalued and wasted.

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

#220

Post by daemonologist »

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?

Even if production capacity wasn't shared/shifting to the higher end products (which it seemingly is), there's certainly going to be an increase in demand for DDR4 as it acts as a substitute good. Prices are already up significantly.
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