231–240 of 449 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wouldn't be so sure. I've seen analyses making the case that this new phase is unlike previous cycles and DRAM makers will be far less willing to invest significantly in new capacity, especially into consumer DRAM over more enterprise DRAM or HBM (and even there there's still a significant risk of the AI bubble popping). The shortage could last a decade. Right now DRAM makers are benefiting to an extreme degree sin…
There's not a difference between "consumer" DRAM and "enterprise" DRAM at the silicon level, they're cut from the same wafers at the end of the day.
If there is high demand for the former due to AI, they can increase production to generate higher profits. This cuts the production capacity of consumer DRAM, and lead to higher prices in that segment too. Simple supply & demand at work.
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. :-)
(Not at all)openAI saw they are getting behind their competitors (gpt 5 and 5.1 were progressively worse for my use case - actual problem solving and tweaking existing scripts) are getting better. (Claude and sonnet were miles ahead and I used gpt only due to lower price). Now not only open weights models like Qwen3 and kimik2 exceeded their capability and you can run them at home if you have the hardware or for peanuts on a variety of providers. Cheap-er hardware like strix halo (and Nvidia dgx) made 128gb vram achievable to enthusiast. And Google is eating their punch with Gemini.
All while their CFO starts talking about government bailing them out from spending they cannot possibly fund.
Of course they will attempt to blow up the entire hardware market so if they AI flops they will be able to at least re not you hardware like AWS.
Of course they
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…
No, it's pure capitalism where Atlas shrugged and ordered billions worth of RAM. You might not like it but don't call it "centralized planning" or "Soviet era".
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 disagree. We have been living on the investment of previous centuries and decades in the West for close to 40 years now. Everything is broken but that didn't matter because everything that needed a functioning physical economy had moved to the East. AI is the first industrial breakthrough in a century that needs the sort of infrastructure that previous industrial revolutions needed: namely a ton of raw power. The b…
All the infrastructure will be useless when the data centers move to the next city/state offering a tax cut.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
New type? Lol. It’s a classic ‘tulip bubble’.
Not even. Tulips were non-productive speculative assets. NFTs were what the tulip was. The AI buildout is more like the railroad mania in the sense that there is froth but productive utility is still the output.
The actual underlying models of productive output for these AI tools is a tiny fraction (actually) of the mania, and can be trivially produced at massive quantity without the spend that is currently ongoing.
The big bubble is because (like with tulips back then), there was a belief in a degree of scarcity (due to apparent novelty) that didn’t actually exist.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not even. Tulips were non-productive speculative assets. NFTs were what the tulip was. The AI buildout is more like the railroad mania in the sense that there is froth but productive utility is still the output.
Tulips also grew and could be bred. The actual underlying models of productive output for these AI tools is a tiny fraction (actually) of the mania, and can be trivially produced at massive quantity without the spend that is currently ongoing. The big bubble is because (like with tulips back then), there was a belief in a degree of scarcity (due to apparent novelty) that didn’t actually exist.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A waiver is a waiver. The cost is per square mm. It’s pure supply and demand
No, a wafer is very much not a wafer. DRAM processes are very different from making logic*. You don't just make memory in your fab today and logic tomorrow. But even when you stay in your lane, the industry operates on very long cycles and needs scale to function at any reasonable price at all. You don't just dust off your backyard fab to make the odd bit of memory whenever it is convenient. Nobody is going to do any…
"Hyperscalers" already have multi-year contracts going. If the demand really was there, they could make it happen. Now it seems more like they're taking capacity from what would've been sold on the spot or quarterly markets. They already made their money.