Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The RAM shortage comes for us all

jeffgeerling.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 416 posts

Re: The RAM shortage comes for us all

#171

Post by nish__ »

Reason077 wrote: post #76
nish__ wrote: post #18

Anyone want to start a fab with me? We can buy an ASML machine and figure out the rest as we go. Toronto area btw

A dozen or so well-resourced tech titans in China are no doubt asking themselves this same question right now. Of course, it takes quite some time for a fab to go from an idea to mass production. Even in China. Expect prices to drop 2-3 years from now when all the new capacity comes online?

My napkin math:

According to my research, these machines can etch around 150 wafers per hour and each wafer can fit around 50 top-of-the-line GPUs. This means we can produce around 7500 AI chips per hour. Sell them for $1k a piece. That's $7.5 million per hour in revenue. Run the thing for 3 days and we recover costs.

I'm sure there's more involved but that sounds like a pretty good ROI to me.

Re: The RAM shortage comes for us all

#172

Post by 650REDHAIR »

RachelF wrote: post #110

Perhaps we'll have to start optimizing software for performance and RAM usage again. I look at MS Teams currently using 1.5GB of RAM doing nothing.

I truly hate how bloated and inefficient MS/Windows is.

My hope is that with the growing adoption of Linux that MS takes note...

Re: The RAM shortage comes for us all

#173

Post by tooltalk »

School-Cotton wrote: post #95
Reason077 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A dozen or so well-resourced tech titans in China are no doubt asking themselves this same question right now. Of course, it takes quite some time for a fab to go from an idea to mass production. Even in China. Expect prices to drop 2-3 years from now when all the new capacity comes online?

China cannot buy ASML machines. All advanced semiconductor manufacturing in China is done with stockpiled ASML machines from before the ban.

That restriction is only for the most advanced systems. According to ASML's Q3 2025 filing, 42% of all system sales went to China.

SK Hynix also has significant memory manufacturing presence in China; or about 40% of the company's entire DRAM capacity.

Re: The RAM shortage comes for us all

#174

Post by mastax »

> And those companies all realized they can make billions more dollars making RAM just for AI datacenter products, and neglect the rest of the market.

> So they're shutting down their consumer memory lines, and devoting all production to AI.

Okay this was the missing piece for me. I was wondering why AI demand, which should be mostly HBM, would have such an impact on DDR prices, which I’m quite sure are produced on separate lines. I’d appreciate a citation so I could read more.

Re: The RAM shortage comes for us all

#176

Post by mlyle »

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.

This is only true as long as there's enough of a market left. You tend to end up with oversupply and excessive inventory during the transition, and that pushes profit margins negative and removes all the supply pretty quickly.

Re: The RAM shortage comes for us all

#177

Post by oskarkk »

fullstop wrote: post #155
MPSimmons wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Awesome charts, thanks! I think it bears out that the multiplier for older hardware isn't as extreme as the newer hardware, right?

~2.8x for DDR4, ~3.6x for DDR5. DDR5 is still being made, though, so it will be interesting to see how it changes in the future. Either way, it's going to be a long few years at the least.

Unless the AI bubble pops.

Re: The RAM shortage comes for us all

#178

Post by pja »

seanalltogether wrote: post #135

I wonder if these RAM shortages are going to cause the Steam Machine to be dead on arrival. Valve is probably not a big enough player to have secured production guarantees like Sony or Nintendo would have. If they try to launch with a price tag over $750, they're probably not going sell a lot.

Yeah, I think (sadly) this kills the Steam Machine in the short term if the competition is current consoles.

At least until the supply contracts Sony & Microsoft have signed come up for renewal, at which point they’re going to be getting the short end of the RAM stick too.

In the short term the RAM shortage is going to kill homebrew PC building & small PC builders stone dead - prebuilts from the larger suppliers will be able to outcompete them on price so much that it simply won’t make any sense to buy from anyone except HP, Dell etc etc. Again, this applies only until the supply contracts those big PC firms have signed run out, or possibly only until their suppliers find they can’t source DDR5 ram chips for love nor money, because the fabs are only making HBM chips & so they have to break the contracts themselves.

It’s going to get bumpy.

Re: The RAM shortage comes for us all

#179

Post by txdv »

mastax wrote: post #174

> And those companies all realized they can make billions more dollars making RAM just for AI datacenter products, and neglect the rest of the market. > So they're shutting down their consumer memory lines, and devoting all production to AI. Okay this was the missing piece for me. I was wondering why AI demand, which should be mostly HBM, would have such an impact on DDR prices, which I’m quite sure are produced on s…

Just like the GPUs.

NVIDIA started allocating most of the wafer capacity for 50k GPU chips. They are a business, its a logical choice.

Re: The RAM shortage comes for us all

#180

Post by levkk »

Not a bad time for the secondary market to be created. We keep buying everything new, when the old stuff works just as well. There is a ton of e-waste. The enthusiast market can benefit, while the enterprise market can just eat the cost.

Also, a great incentive to start writing efficient software. Does Chrome really need 5GB to run a few tabs?

Post reply on HN