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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

#261

Post by Jyaif »

humanfromearth9 wrote: post #217
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. :-)

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…

> Is there even a case where more RAM is not really better, except for its cost?

RAM uses power.

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

#262

Post by zrail »

humanfromearth9 wrote: post #217
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. :-)

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…

On consumer chips the more memory modules you have the slower they all run. I.e. if you have a single module of DDR5 it might run at 5600MHz but if you have four of them they all get throttled to 3800MHz.

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

#263

Post by xbmcuser »

I mentioned this previously in a thread about node sizes and got down voted for it, but I stand by my opinion: the rest of the world ie normal people need China to become competitive in chip manufacturing.

Without that competition, everyday consumers are going to get priced out of the market by major corporations. We have reached a point in CPU technology where newer tech is no longer automatically cheaper and faster to make; therefore, we need more competition to keep prices down.

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

#264

Post by duskdozer »

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…

>society is better served by having it produced by the few small companies than the one big company.

well, assuming the scale couldn't be used for the benefit of society and not to milk it dry. but yes probably the best that can have a reasonable chance at success, eventually, maybe.

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

#265

Post by TinkersW »

tonyhart7 wrote: post #33
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…

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

OpenAI appears to have bought the DRAM, not to use it, as they are apparently buying it in unfinished form, but explicitly to take it off the market and cause this massive price increase & squash competition.

I would call that market manipulation(or failure if you wish)--in a just society Sam Alton would be heading to prison.

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

#267

Post by Ray20 »

octoberfranklin wrote: post #104
zozbot234 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

And yet, startups exist.

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

#269

Post by kees99 »

zozbot234 wrote: post #202
Yokolos wrote: post #175

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…

The most likely direct response is not new capacity, it's older capacity running at full tilt (given the now higher margins) to produce more mature technology with lower requirements on fabrication (such as DDR3/4, older Flash storage tech, etc.) and soak up demand for these. DDR5/GDDR/HBM/etc. prices will still be quite high, but alternatives will be available.

> produce more mature technology ... DDR3/4

...except current peak in demand is mostly driven by build-out of AI capacity.

Both inference and training workloads are often bottlenecked on RAM speed, and trying to shoehorn older/slower memory tech there would require non-trivial amount of R&D to go into widening memory bus on CPU/GPU/NPUs, which is unlikely to happen - those are in very high demand already.

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

#270

Post by ifwinterco »

kees99 wrote: post #269
zozbot234 wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most likely direct response is not new capacity, it's older capacity running at full tilt (given the now higher margins) to produce more mature technology with lower requirements on fabrication (such as DDR3/4, older Flash storage tech, etc.) and soak up demand for these. DDR5/GDDR/HBM/etc. prices will still be quite high, but alternatives will be available.

> produce more mature technology ... DDR3/4 ...except current peak in demand is mostly driven by build-out of AI capacity. Both inference and training workloads are often bottlenecked on RAM speed, and trying to shoehorn older/slower memory tech there would require non-trivial amount of R&D to go into widening memory bus on CPU/GPU/NPUs, which is unlikely to happen - those are in very high demand already.

Even if AI stuff does really need DDR5, there must be lots of other applications that would ideally use DDR5 but can make do with DDR3/4 if there's a big difference in price
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