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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

#351

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 shortage could last a decade. Do we really think the current level of AI-driven data center demand will continue indefinitely? The world only needs so many pictures of bears wearing suits.

No, the 10% best scenario return on AI won't make it. The bubble is trying to replace all human labor, which is why it is a bubble in the first place. No one is being honest that AGI is not possible in this manner of tech. And Scale won't get them there.

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

#352
post #334
post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Intel's consumer processors (and therefore the mainboards/chipsets) used to have four memory channels, but around the year 2020 this was suddenly limited to two channels since the 12th generation (AMD's consumer processors had always two channels, with exception of Threadriper?). However this does not make sense, as for more than a decade the processors have only grown increasing the number of threads, therefore two…

> Intel's consumer processors (and therefore the mainboards/chipsets) used to have four memory channels, but around the year 2020 this was suddenly limited to two channels since the 12th generation (AMD's consumer processors had always two channels, with exception of Threadriper?).

You need to re-check your sources. When AMD started doing integrated memory controllers in 2003, they had Socket 754 (single channel / 64-bit wide) for low-end consumer CPUs and Socket 940 (dual channel / 128-bit wide) for server and enthusiast destkop CPUs, but less than a year later they introduced Socket 939 (128-bit) and since then their mainstream desktop CPU sockets have all had a 128-bit wide memory interface. When Intel later also moved their memory controller from the motherboard to the CPU, they also used a 128-bit wide memory bus (starting with LGA 1156 in 2008).

There's never been a desktop CPU socket with a memory bus wider than 128 bits that wasn't a high-end/workstation/server counterpart to a mainstream consumer platform that used only a 128-bit wide memory bus. As far as I can tell, the CPU sockets supporting integrated graphics have all used a 128-bit wide memory bus. Pretty much all of the growth of desktop CPU core counts from dual core up to today's 16+ core parts has been working with the same bus width, and increased DRAM bandwidth to feed those extra cores has been entirely from running at higher speeds over the same number of wires.

What has regressed is that the enthusiast-oriented high-end desktop CPUs derived from server/workstation parts are much more expensive and less frequently updated than they used to be. Intel hasn't done a consumer-branded variant of their workstation CPUs in several generations; they've only been selling those parts under the Xeon branding. AMD's Threadripper line got split into Threadripper and Threadripper PRO, but the non-PRO parts have a higher starting price than early Threadripper generations, and the Zen 3 generation didn't get non-PRO Threadrippers.

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

#353
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. :-)

Exactly. I recently doubled my RAM and have now 4GB.

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

#354
post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It also consumes more physical space. /s

Not really /s, since it is a limited resource in e.g. Laptops.

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

#355

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…

Firefox is particularly good at having lots of tabs open and not using tons of memory.

    $ ~/dev/mozlz4-tool/target/release/mozlz4-tool \
        "$(find ~/Library/Application\ Support/Firefox/Profiles/ -name recovery.jsonlz4 | head -1)" | \
        jq -r '[.windows[].tabs | length] | add'
    5524
Activity monitor claims firefox is using 3.1GB of ram.

    Real memory size:      2.43 GB
    Virtual memory size: 408.30 GB
    Shared memory size:  746.5  MB
    Private memory size: 377.3  MB
That said, I wholeheartedly agree that "more RAM less problems". The only case I can think of when it's not strictly better to have more is during hibernation (cf sleep) when the system has to write 128GB of ram to disk.

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

#356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting that Samsung put their prices up 60% today, and a retailer who bought their stock at the old price feels compelled to put their prices up 2.5x. When the AI bubble bursts we can get back to the old price

The cost of inventory on the shelves basically doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is the market rate. If those retailers didn’t increase their prices when the price hike was announced, anyone building servers would have instantly purchased all of the inventory anyway at the lower prices, so there wouldn’t actually have been weeks of low retail RAM prices for everyone. Every once in a while you can catch a re…

> If those retailers didn’t increase their prices when the price hike was announced, anyone building servers would have instantly purchased all of the inventory anyway at the lower prices

But that retailer would have made a lot of money in a very short time.

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

#357

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…

There is a reason why there used to be market regulation and breaking up of monopolies. We are now-a-days trying out changes to the stable state from centuries, because that would be so yesterday, and will soon find out, why that state was chosen in the first place.

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

#358
post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 c…

But that thing they all were peddling and getting investors over could be anything ! For a while it was "blockchain." Everyone had to do blockchain because everyone was doing blockchain, and investors were giving you money if you say blockchain. I wonder what it will be once the AI bubble bursts. I swear that every 5-10 years, corporate CEOs all get together in a secret meeting where they all agree on the next buzzwo…

But there wasn't really a bubble crash from blockchain, or did I miss something.

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

#359
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>AI is the first industrial breakthrough in a century Is it?

Yeah, I don't know about that.

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

#360
post #63

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…

how is this centralized planning? It’s a corporate decision making operating in a free market to optimize for what majority shareholders want (though the majority of shares are owned by few).

It's centralized vs. decentralized not public vs. private. A centralized private planning committee is still centralized.
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