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As AI gobbles up chips, prices for devices may rise

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Re: As AI gobbles up chips, prices for devices may rise

#51

Post by zahlman »

johnea wrote: post #5
kankerlijer wrote: post #3

Well thank th FSM that the article opens right up with buy now! No thanks, I'm kind of burnt out on mindless consumerism, I'll go pot some plants or something.

I didn't see any of that. I highly recommend disabling javascript in your browser. Yes, it makes many sites "look funny", or maybe you have to scroll past a bunch of screen sized "faceplant" "twitverse" and "instamonetize" icons, but, there are far fewer ads (like none). And of course some sites won't work at all. That's OK too, I just don't read them. If it's a news article, its almost always available on another si…

I would not be able to handle that due to video streaming, web clients for things like email, etc. And some sites I trust (including HN) provide useful functionality with JS (while degrading gracefully).

But I use NoScript and it is definitely a big help.

Re: As AI gobbles up chips, prices for devices may rise

#52

Post by ekianjo »

shevy-java wrote: post #19

I now consider this a mafia that aims to milk us for more money. This includes all AI companies but also manufacturers who happily benefit from this. It is a de-facto monopoly. Governments need to stop allowing this milking scheme to happen.

There is no monopoly in AI. I can name at least 10 big actors worldwide.

Re: As AI gobbles up chips, prices for devices may rise

#53

Post by bigbadfeline »

appreciatorBus wrote: post #46

[flagged]

> has more demand than forecast

Nah. The demand is driven by corporations that hoard hardware in datacenters, starving the market and increasing prices in the process - otherwise known as scalping. Then they sell you back that same hardware, in the form of cloud services, for even higher prices.

More explanations here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46416934

Re: As AI gobbles up chips, prices for devices may rise

#54

Post by appreciatorBus »

bigbadfeline wrote: post #53
appreciatorBus wrote: post #46

[flagged]

> has more demand than forecast Nah. The demand is driven by corporations that hoard hardware in datacenters, starving the market and increasing prices in the process - otherwise known as scalping . Then they sell you back that same hardware, in the form of cloud services, for even higher prices. More explanations here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46416934

If it’s that easy to make infinite money, maybe the govt should could just do that too so we’d have enough for healthcare and other programs?

Re: As AI gobbles up chips, prices for devices may rise

#55

Post by ip26 »

netbioserror wrote: post #4

Positive downstream effect: The way software is built will need to be rethought and improved to utilize efficiencies for stagnating hardware compute. Think of how staggering the step from the start of a console generation to the end used to be. Native-compiled languages have made bounding leaps that might be worth pursuing again.

I have some hope for transpiling to become more commonplace. What would happen if you could write in Python, but trivially transpile to C++ and back?

Re: As AI gobbles up chips, prices for devices may rise

#56

Post by bee_rider »

whaleofatw2022 wrote: post #49
nrp wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Three major ones: Micron, Samsung, SK Hynix And a couple of smaller ones: CXMT (if you’re not afraid of the sanctions), Nanya, and a few others with older technology

Is this glofo's time to shine?

Do they make DRAM? I thought they made compute chips mostly.

If I recall correctly, RAM is even more niche and specialized than the (already quite specialized) general chip manufacturing. The structure is super-duper regular, just a big grid of cells, so it is super-duper optimized.

Re: As AI gobbles up chips, prices for devices may rise

#57

Post by squibonpig »

appreciatorBus wrote: post #54
bigbadfeline wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> has more demand than forecast Nah. The demand is driven by corporations that hoard hardware in datacenters, starving the market and increasing prices in the process - otherwise known as scalping . Then they sell you back that same hardware, in the form of cloud services, for even higher prices. More explanations here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46416934

If it’s that easy to make infinite money, maybe the govt should could just do that too so we’d have enough for healthcare and other programs?

What? It's just a business you can only execute with lots of resources, and in a space where supply changes slowly.

Re: As AI gobbles up chips, prices for devices may rise

#58

Post by callc »

zahlman wrote: post #48
vee-kay wrote: post #38

For last 2 years, I've noticed a worrying trend: the typical budget PCs (especially Laptops) are being sold at higher prices with lower RAM (just 8GB) and lower-end CPUs (and no dedicated GPUs). Industry mandate should have become 16GB RAM for PCs and 8GB for mobile, since years ago, but instead it is as if computing/IT industry is regressing. New budget mobiles are being launched with lower-end specs as well (e.g.,…

I'm reading this thread on an 11-year-old desktop with 8GB of RAM and not feeling any particular reason to upgrade, although I've priced it out a few times just to see. Mint 22.x doesn't appear to be demanding any more of my machine than Mint 20.x. Neither is Firefox or most websites, although YouTube chat still leaks memory horrendously. (Of course, download sizes have increased.)

Mint is probably around 0.05% of desktop/laptop users.

I think root comment is looking at the overall picture of what all customers can get for their money, and see it getting worse.

This wasn’t mentioned, but it’s a new thing for everyone to experience, since the general trend of computer hardware is it gets cheaper and more powerful over time. Maybe not exponentially any more, but at least linearly cheaper and more powerful.

Re: As AI gobbles up chips, prices for devices may rise

#60

Post by deadbabe »

vee-kay wrote: post #38

For last 2 years, I've noticed a worrying trend: the typical budget PCs (especially Laptops) are being sold at higher prices with lower RAM (just 8GB) and lower-end CPUs (and no dedicated GPUs). Industry mandate should have become 16GB RAM for PCs and 8GB for mobile, since years ago, but instead it is as if computing/IT industry is regressing. New budget mobiles are being launched with lower-end specs as well (e.g.,…

I think it will be a good thing actually. Engineers, no longer having the luxury of assuming that users have high end system specs, will be forced to actually write fast and efficient software. No more bloated programs eating up RAM for no reason.
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