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The RAM shortage comes for us all

jeffgeerling.com

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Re: The RAM shortage comes for us all

#11

Post by kayson »

suprnurd wrote: post #5
jsheard wrote: post #2

I wonder if Apple will budge. The margins on their RAM upgrades were so ludicrous before that they're probably still RAM-profitable even without raising their prices, but do they want to give up those fat margins?

I read online that Apple uses three different RAM suppliers supposedly? I wonder if Apple has the ability to just make their own RAM?

Apple doesn't own any foundries, so no. It's not trivial to spin up a DRAM foundry either. I do wonder if we'll see TSMC enter the market though. Maybe under pressure from Apple or nvidia...

Re: The RAM shortage comes for us all

#13

Post by Loic »

I think the OpenAI deal to lock wafers was a wonderful coup. OpenAI is more and more losing ground against the regularity[0] of the improvements coming from Anthropic, Google and even the open weights models. By creating a chock point at the hardware level, OpenAI can prevent the competition from increasing their reach because of the lack of hardware.

[0]: For me this is really an important part of working with Claude, the model improves with the time but stay consistent, its "personality" or whatever you want to call it, has been really stable over the past versions, this allows a very smooth transition from version N to N+1.

Re: The RAM shortage comes for us all

#14

Post by citizenpaul »

> Micron's killing the Crucial brand of RAM and storage devices completely,

More rot economy. Customers are such a drag. Lets just sell to other companies for billion dollar deals at once. These AI companies have bottomless wallets. No one has thought of this before we will totally get rich.

Re: The RAM shortage comes for us all

#16

Post by Night_Thastus »

fithisux wrote: post #10

32GB should be more than enough. You can go 16GB if you go native and throw some assembly in the mix. Use old school scripting languages. Debloat browsers. It has been long delayed.

16GB is more than fine if you're not doing high-end gaming, or heavy production workloads. No need for debloating.

But it doesn't matter either way, because both 16 and 32GB have what, doubled, tripled? It's nuts. Even if you say "just buy less memory", now is a horrible time to be building a system.

Re: The RAM shortage comes for us all

#17

Post by aynyc »

Ha! Maybe Javascript developers will finally drop memory usage! You need to display the multiplication table? Please allocate 1GB of RAM. Oh, you want alternate row coloring? Here is another 100MB of CSS to do that.

edit: this is a joke

Re: The RAM shortage comes for us all

#19

Post by codybontecou »

Loic wrote: post #13

I think the OpenAI deal to lock wafers was a wonderful coup. OpenAI is more and more losing ground against the regularity[0] of the improvements coming from Anthropic, Google and even the open weights models. By creating a chock point at the hardware level, OpenAI can prevent the competition from increasing their reach because of the lack of hardware. [0]: For me this is really an important part of working with Claud…

This became very clear with the outrage, rather than excitement, of forcing users to upgrade to ChatGPT-5 over 4o.

Re: The RAM shortage comes for us all

#20

Post by gizmo »

The big 3 memory manufacturers (SK Hynix, Samsung, Micron) are essentially all moving upmarket. They have limited capacity and want to use it for high margin HBM for GPUs and ddr5 for servers. At the same time CXMT, Winbond and Nanya are stepping in at the lower end of the market.

I don't think there is a conspiracy or price fixing going on here. Demand for high profit margin memory is insatiable (at least until 2027 maybe beyond) and by the time extra capacity comes online and the memory crunch eases the minor memory players will have captured such a large part of the legacy/consumer market that it makes little sense for the big 3 to get involved anymore.

Add to that scars from overbuilding capacity during previous super memory super cycles and you end up with this perfect storm.

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