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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

#401

Post by scotty79 »

xpe wrote: post #379
scotty79 wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hou…

To make sure we’re on the same page… In economics, “central planning” refers to a system where a central authority (typically the state) makes comprehensive decisions about production, investment, and resource allocation across an entire economy, replacing market mechanisms. This is associated with command economies like the Soviet Union’s Gosplan system. And of course I will grant firms use hierarchical coordination…

There almost never are any markets within any single company. Which makes internals of any company a planned "economy".

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

#402

Post by zozbot234 »

wtallis wrote: post #397
zozbot234 wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At some point the best "enthusuast-oriented HEDT" CPU's will be older-gen Xeon and EPYC parts, competing fairly in price, performance and overall feature set with top-of-the-line consumer setups.

Based on historical trends, that's never going to happen for any workloads where single-thread performance or power efficiency matter. If you're doing something where latency doesn't matter but throughput does, then old server processors with high core counts are often a reasonable option, if you can tolerate them being hot and loud. But once we reached the point where HEDT processors could no longer offer any benefi…

I'm not going to disagree outright, but you're going to pay quite a bit for such a combination of single-thread peak performance and high power efficiency. It's not clear why we should be regarding that as our "default" of sorts, given that practical workloads increasingly benefit from good multicore performance. Even gaming is now more reliant on GPU performance (which in principle ought to benefit from the high PCIe bandwidth of server parts) than CPU.

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

#403

Post by tehlike »

evanreichard wrote: post #274
wingmanjd wrote: post #123

At $DAYJOB, we have had confirmed and paid for orders be cancelled within the last week due to price hikes. One DDR5 server configuration went from ~$13k to near $25k USD in a matter of days. We also were looking for DDR4 memory for some older machines and that has shot up 2x as well. Hate this AI timeline.

It's wild. I bought 64GB (2x32) DDR4 SODIMM (CT2K32G4SFD832A) for $100 this April. Cheapest I can find it today is $270. I picked up 32GB (2x16GB) DDR4 (CMK32GX4M2E3200C16) last September for $55. Now it's $155.

I paid 12x64GB samsung lrdimm total $420 just this January or something. $35 each.

Now cheapest single stick is $195

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

#405

Post by wtallis »

zozbot234 wrote: post #402
wtallis wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on historical trends, that's never going to happen for any workloads where single-thread performance or power efficiency matter. If you're doing something where latency doesn't matter but throughput does, then old server processors with high core counts are often a reasonable option, if you can tolerate them being hot and loud. But once we reached the point where HEDT processors could no longer offer any benefi…

I'm not going to disagree outright, but you're going to pay quite a bit for such a combination of single-thread peak performance and high power efficiency. It's not clear why we should be regarding that as our "default" of sorts, given that practical workloads increasingly benefit from good multicore performance. Even gaming is now more reliant on GPU performance (which in principle ought to benefit from the high PCI…

I said "single-thread performance or power efficiency", not "single-thread performance and power efficiency". Though at the moment, the best single-thread performance does happen to go along with the best power efficiency. Old server CPUs offer neither.

> Even gaming is now more reliant on GPU performance (which in principle ought to benefit from the high PCIe bandwidth of server parts)

A gaming GPU doesn't need all of the bandwidth available from a single PCIe x16 slot. Mid-range GPUs and lower don't even have x16 connectivity, because it's not worth the die space to put down more than 8 lanes of PHYs for that level of performance. The extra PCIe connectivity on server platforms could only matter for workloads that can effectively use several GPUs. Gaming isn't that kind of workload; attempts to use two GPUs for gaming proved futile and unsustainable.

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

#406

Post by PunchyHamster »

kbolino wrote: post #396
artimaeis wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Phoebus cartel didn't collude just to make the light bulbs have a shorter lifespan. They upped the standard illumination a bulb emitted so that consumers needed fewer of them to see well. With an incandescent you have a kind of sliding scale of brightness:longevity (with curves on each end that quickly go exponential, hence the longest lasting light bulb that's so dim you can barely read by its light). The bright…

Also, incandescent lightbulb lifespan is reduced by repeated power cycling. Not only is the legendary firehouse bulb very dim, it has been turned off and back on again very few times. Leaving all your lights on all the time would be a waste of power for the average household, and more expensive than replacing the bulbs more frequently.

And same quirk was also shared by fluorescent bulbs

I still try to fight that habit of not unnecessarily cycling even tho all my lights are LED.

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

#407

Post by PunchyHamster »

rasz wrote: post #207
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…

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.

In that case it's far simpler - even IF they wanted to met the demand, building more capacity is hideously expensive and takes years.

So, it would happen even with best intentions and no conspiracies. AI boom already hiked GPU prices, memory was next in line.

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

#408

Post by PunchyHamster »

zrail wrote: post #262
humanfromearth9 wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But you can easily have 128GB and still on 2 modules

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

#409

Post by PunchyHamster »

IshKebab wrote: post #20
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.

Damn I bought a whole computer with 128GB RAM & 16-core Ryzen CPU for £325 a few months ago.

and the guy that sold it to you stole it from where ?

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

#410

Post by PunchyHamster »

themafia wrote: post #106
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…

> There's too much group-think in the executive class. I think this is actually the long tail of "too big to fail." It's not that they're all thinking the same way, it's that they're all no longer hedging their bets. > we have made the rewards too extreme and too narrowly distributed We give the military far too much money in the USA.

Sadly natural result of industries where economies of scale and price of entry make anyone not massive uncompetitive.

I don't think there is even a good solution for that. Govt could essentially sponsor some competition but that's easy to go from "helping to market" to "handouts for incompetent"

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