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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

#121

Post by reducesuffering »

captainkrtek wrote: post #57
comeonbro wrote: post #35

This 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).

I'm no economist, but if (when?) the AI bubble bursts and demand collapses at the price point memory and other related components are at, wouldn't price recover? not trying to argue, just curious.

IF a theoretical AI bubble bursts sure. However the largest capitalized companies in the world and all the smartest people able to do cutting edge AI research are betting otherwise. This is also what the start of a takeoff looks like

Re: The RAM shortage comes for us all

#122

Post by squidbeak »

captainkrtek wrote: post #57
comeonbro wrote: post #35

This 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).

I'm no economist, but if (when?) the AI bubble bursts and demand collapses at the price point memory and other related components are at, wouldn't price recover? not trying to argue, just curious.

I'm no economist either, but I imagine the manufacturing processes for the two types of RAM are too different for supply to quickly bounce back.

Re: The RAM shortage comes for us all

#124

Post by bullen »

MPSimmons wrote: post #89

This reminds me of the recent LaurieWired video presenting a hypothetical of, "what if we stopped making CPUs": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2OJFqs8bUk Spoiler, but the answer is basically that old hardware rules the day because it lasts longer and is more reliable of timespans of decades. DDR5 32GB is currently going for ~$330 on Amazon DDR4 32GB is currently going for ~$130 on Amazon DDR3 32GB is currently goin…

Yes, DDR3 is the lowest CAS latency and lasts ALOT longer.

Just like SSDs from 2010 have 100.000 writes per bit instead of below 10.000.

CPUs might even follow the same durability pattern but that remains to be seen.

Keep your old machines alive and backed up!

Re: The RAM shortage comes for us all

#125

Post by fullstop »

MPSimmons wrote: post #115
fullstop wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If everyone went for DDR4 and DDR3, surely the cost would go up. There is no additional supply there, as they are no longer being made.

Undoubtably the cost would go up, but nobody is building out datacenters full of DDR4, either, so I don't figure it would go up nearly as much as DDR5 is right now.

https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/

You can see the cost rise of DDR4 here.

Re: The RAM shortage comes for us all

#126

Post by hodgehog11 »

Grosvenor wrote: post #59
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…

Could this generate pressure to produce less memory hungry models?

There has always been pressure to do so, but there are fundamental bottlenecks in performance when it comes to model size.

What I can think of is that there may be a push toward training for exclusively search-based rewards so that the model isn't required to compress a large proportion of the internet into their weights. But this is likely to be much slower and come with initial performance costs that frontier model developers will not want to incur.

Re: The RAM shortage comes for us all

#127

Post by BizarroLand »

plufz wrote: post #68
roadside_picnic wrote: post #37

I 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.

The end goal of capitalism is the same as the end goal of monopoly.

1 person has all the money and all the power and everyone else is bankrupt forever and sad.

Re: The RAM shortage comes for us all

#128

Post by phantasmish »

aynyc wrote: post #17

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

I do sometimes reflect on how 64MB of memory was enough to browse the Web with two or three tabs open, and (if running BeOS) even play MP3s at the same time with no stutters. 128MB felt luxurious at that time, it was like having no (memory-imposed) limits on personal computing tasks at all.

Now you can't even fit a browser doing nothing into that memory...

Re: The RAM shortage comes for us all

#129

Post by fullstop »

acdha wrote: post #118
fullstop wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If everyone went for DDR4 and DDR3, surely the cost would go up. There is no additional supply there, as they are no longer being made.

At some point that’s true, but don’t they run the n-1 or 2 generation production lines for years after the next generation launches? There’s a significant capital investment there and my understanding is that the cost goes down significantly over the lifetime as they dial in the process so even though the price is lower it’s still profitable.

Unless plans have changed, the foundries making DDR4 are winding down, with the last shipments going out as we speak.

Re: The RAM shortage comes for us all

#130

Post by snuxoll »

jl6 wrote: post #108
fullstop wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not. They are buying wafers / production capacity to make HBM so there is less DDR5 supply.

OK, fair enough, but what are OpenAI doing buying production capacity rather than, say, paying NVIDIA to do it? OpenAI aren’t the ones making the hardware?

Just because Nvidia happily sells people discrete GPU's, DGX systems, etc., doesn't mean they would turn down a company like OpenAI paying them $$$ for just the packaged chips and the technical documentation to build their own PCBs; or, let OpenAI provide their own DRAM supply for production on an existing line.

If you have a potentially multi-billion dollar contract, most businesses will do things outside of their standard product offerings to take in that revenue.

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