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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

#341

Post by CamperBob2 »

trhway wrote: post #253
rasz wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A LOT of businesses learned during Covid they can make more money by permanently reducing output and jacking prices. We might be witnessing the end times of economies of scale.

I think in part it is a system level response to the widespread just-in-time approach of those businesses' clients. A just-in-time client is very "flexible" on price when supply is squeezed. After that back and forth i think we'll see return to some degree of supply buffering(warehousing) to dampen down the supply levels/price shocks in the pipelines.

I thought that, too, but then the Nexperia shitstorm hit, and it was as if the industry had learned nothing at all from the COVID shortages.

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

#342

Post by robotresearcher »

bombcar wrote: post #146
phoboslab wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just looked at the invoice for my current PC parts that I bought in April 2016: I paid 177 EUR (~203 USD) for 32GB (DDR4-2800). It's kinda sad when you grow up in a period of rapid hardware development and now see 10 years going by with RAM $/GB prices staying roughly the same.

Olds remember the years around '95 when RAM stayed the exact same price per megabyte for what seemed a decade.

I paid about GBP 20K for the 192MB RAM in a Sun SPARC 5 workstation in 1995. That’s maybe $27K USD in 1995 dollars. Gulp.

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

#343

Post by aerhardt »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #100
epistasis wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was Lina Khan's big thing, and I'd argue that our current administration is largely a result of Silicon Valkey no longer being able to get exits in the form or mergers and IPOs. Perhaps a better approach to anti-monopoly and anti-trust is possible, but I'm not sure anybody knows what that is. Khan was very well regarded and I don't know anybody who's better at it. Another approach would be a wealth and income ta…

Khan was largely ineffectual. The current administration, if it can be blamed on SV at all, is more likely to be the result of Harris's insanely ill-timed proposal to tax unrealized capital gains just as election season was kicking into high gear.

She was largely ineffectual because she was cock-blocked by the ruling classes. I lean libertarian-capitalist and still I think this. Although it's not a settled debate in the classic liberal or libertarian traditions, there are plenty of arguments in them against the excessive concentration of power.

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

#344

Post by lazide »

hollerith wrote: post #338
ls612 wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DRAM manufacturers have literally been convicted of price fixing in the past why do you have to white knight for them?

Most of us who've been on Earth for a while know that courts often get it wrong. Even if the particular court decision you mention was correct does not mean that price fixing is the main reason or the underlying reason DRAM prices sometime go up.

They blatantly were doing it, admitted to it, and did it again later. What kind of crazy is this?

Is this the ‘but he loves me, he wouldn’t hit me again’ of the tech world?

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

#345

Post by lazide »

justin66 wrote: post #319
lukeschlather wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The pop culture perception of AI just being image and text generators is incorrect. AI is many things, they all need tons of RAM. Google is rolling out self-driving taxis in more and more cities for instance.

Congrats on engaging with the facetious part of my comment, but I think the question still stands: do you think the current level of AI-driven data center demand will continue indefinitely? I feel like the question of how many computers are needed to steer a bunch of self-driving taxis probably has an answer, and I bet it's not anything even remotely close to what would justify a decade's worth of maximum investment…

Data center AI is also completely uninteresting/non-useful for self driving Taxis, or any other self driving vehicle.

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

#346

Post by hylaride »

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?

It depends. It takes more energy, which can be undesirable in battery powered devices like laptops and phones. Higher end memory can also generate more heat, which can be an issue.

But otherwise more RAM is usually better. Many OS's will dynamically use otherwise unused RAM space to cache filesystem reads, making subsequent reads faster and many databases will prefetch into memory if it is available, too.

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

#347

Post by 15155 »

Jackson__ wrote: post #314
15155 wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basically every integrated circuit is exempt from retaliatory tariffs, current custom MacBook Pros are shipping from China direct: which tariffs are you referring to?

I'm referring to the plane loads of hardware they shipped in during the tariff panic.

Which tariffs would be applicable to this hardware?

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

#348

Post by Therenas »

Jackson__ wrote: post #186
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.

I can‘t imagine Apple doesn‘t have capacity booked well in advance, and their suppliers aren‘t going to stiff them because they‘d lose those long-term contracts. Sure, if the shortage lasts a year or more, there‘ll be issues, but if it‘s short term they might be fine.

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

#349

Post by bobbob1921 »

Yokolos wrote: post #243
snuxoll wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, but if new capacity is also redirected to be able to be sold as enterprise memory, we won't see better supply for consumer memory. As long as margins are better and demand is higher for enterprise memory, the average consumer is screwed.

Does it matter that AI hardware has such a shorter shelf life/faster upgrade cycle? Meaning we may see the ram chips resold/thrown back into the used market quicker than before?

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

#350

Post by downrightmike »

Yokolos wrote: post #175
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)

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…

Maybe we'll get default to ECC in everything with this?
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