Every shortage is followed by a glut. Wait and see for RAM prices to go way down. This will happen because RAM makers are racing to produce units to reap profits from the higher price. That overproduction will cause prices to crash.
The RAM shortage comes for us all
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Re: The RAM shortage comes for us all
#62I am very excited for a few years when the bubble bursts and all this hardware is on the market for cheap like back in the early to mid 2000's after that bubble burst and you had tons of old servers available for homelabs. I can't wait to fill a room with 50kW of bulk GPUs on a pallet and run some cool shit.
Re: The RAM shortage comes for us all
#63> maybe it's a good time to dig into that pile of old projects you never finished instead of buying something new this year.
Always good advice.
Re: The RAM shortage comes for us all
#64This is ultimately the first stage of human economic obsolescence and extinction. This https://cdna.pcpartpicker.com/static/forever/images/trends/2... will happen to every class of thing (once it hits energy, everything is downstream of energy).
If your argument is that value produced per-cpu will increase so significantly that the value produced by AGI/ASI per unit cost exceeds what humans can produce for their upkeep in food and shelter, then yes that seems to be one of the significant risks long term if governments don't intervene.
If the argument is that prices will skyrocket simply because of long-term AI demand, I think that ignores the fact that manufacturing vastly more products will stabilize prices up to the point that raw materials start to become significantly more expensive, and is strongly incentivized over the ~10-year timeframe for IC manufacturers.
Re: The RAM shortage comes for us all
#65panem et circenses
But what will happen when people are priced out from the circus?
Re: The RAM shortage comes for us all
#66Anyone want to start a fab with me? We can buy an ASML machine and figure out the rest as we go. Toronto area btw
Sure, we can work on brining in TinyTapeout to modern fab
Re: The RAM shortage comes for us all
#67I 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 wonder if Apple will budge.
Perhaps I don't understand something so clarification would be helpful:
I was under the impression that Apple's RAM was on-die, and so baked in during chip manufacturing and not a 'stand alone' SKU that is grafted onto the die. So Apple does not go out to purchase third-party product, but rather self-makes it (via ASML) when the rest of the chip is made (CPU, GPU, I/O controller, etc).
Is this not the case?
Re: The RAM shortage comes for us all
#68I know this is mostly paranoid thinking on my behalf, but it almost feels like this is a conscious effort to attempt to destroy "personal" computing. I've been a huge advocate for local, open, generative AI as the best resistance to massive take-over by large corporations controlling all of this content creation. But even as it is (or "was" I should say), running decent models at home is prohibitively expensive for m…
I don’t think you need a conspiracy theory to explain this. This is simply capitalism, a system that seems less and less like the way forward. I’m not against markets, but I believe most countries need more regulations targeted at the biggest companies and richest people. We need stronger welfare states, smaller income gaps and more democracy. But most countries seems to vote in the absolute opposite direction.
Re: The RAM shortage comes for us all
#69"dig into that pile of old projects you never finished instead of buying something new this year." You don't need a new PC. Just use the old one.
I just bought some 30pin SIMMs to rehab an old computer. That market is fine.
Re: The RAM shortage comes for us all
#70I know this is mostly paranoid thinking on my behalf, but it almost feels like this is a conscious effort to attempt to destroy "personal" computing. I've been a huge advocate for local, open, generative AI as the best resistance to massive take-over by large corporations controlling all of this content creation. But even as it is (or "was" I should say), running decent models at home is prohibitively expensive for m…
The first "proper" "modern" computer I had, initially came with 8 megabytes of RAM. It's not a lot, but it's enough for a dumb terminal.
That's not disproving OP's comment; OpenAI is, in my opinion, making it untenable for a regular Joe to build a PC capable of running local LLM model. It's an attack on all our wallets.