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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

#81

Post by amiga-workbench »

SXX wrote: post #80
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.,…

No dedicated GPU is certainly unrelated to whatever been happening for last two years. It's just in last 5 years integrated GPUs become good enough even for mid-tier gaming let alone running browser and hw accel in few work apps. And even before 5 years ago majority of dedicated GPUs in relatively cheap laptops was garbage barely better than intrgrated one. Manufacturers mostly put them in there for marketing of havi…

A dedicated GPU is a red flag for me in a laptop. I do not want the extra power draw or the hybrid graphics sillyness. The Radeon Vega in my ThinkPad is surprisingly capable.

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

#82

Post by Groxx »

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.)

I've been enjoying running Mint on my terrible spec chromebook - it only has 3GB of RAM, but it rarely exceeds 2GB used with random additions and heavy firefox use. The battery life is obscenely good too, I easily break 20 hours on it as long as I'm not doing something obviously taxing.

Modern software is fine for the most part. People look at browsers using tens of gigabytes on systems with 32GB+ and complain about waste rather than being thrilled that it's doing a fantastic job caching stuff to run quickly.

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

#83

Post by incompatible »

rurp wrote: post #66
deadbabe wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The problem is that higher performing devices will still exist. Those engineers will probably keep using performant devices and their managers will certainly keep buying them. We'll probably end up in an even more bifurcated world where the well off have access to lot of great products and services that most of humanity is increasingly unable to access.

How many "great products and services" even need a lot of RAM, assuming that we can live without graphics-intensive games?

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

#84

Post by TheDong »

deadbabe wrote: post #60
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.

At the same time, AI has made it easier than ever to produce inefficient code, so I expect to rather see an explosion of less efficient software.

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

#85

Post by compounding_it »

Software has gotten bad over the last decade. Electron apps were the start but these days everything seems to be so bloated, right from the operating systems to browsers.

There was a time when apple was hesitant to add more ram to its iPhones and app developers would have to work hard to make apps efficient. Last few years have shown Apple going from 6gb to 12gb so easily for their 'AI' while I consistently see the quality of apps deteriorating on the App Store. iOS 26 and macOS 26 are so aggressive towards memory swapping that loading settings can take time on devices with 6gb ram (absurd). I wonder what else they have added that apps need purging so frequently. 6gb iphone and 8gb M1 felt incredibly fast for the couple of years. Now apparently they are slow like they are really old.

Windows 11 and Chrome are a completely different story. Windows 10 ran just fine on my 8th gen pc for years. Windows 11 is very slow and chrome is a bad experience. Firefox doesn't make it better.

I also find that gnome and cosmic de are not exactly great at memory. A bare minimum desktop still takes up 1.5-1.6gb ram on a 1080p display and with some tabs open, terminal and vscode (again electron) I easily hit 8gb. Sway is better in this regard. I find alacrity sway and Firefox together make it a good experience.

I wonder where we are heading on personal computer software. The processors have gotten really fast and storage and memory even more so, but the software still feels slow and glitchy. If this is the industry's idea of justifying new hardware each year we are probably investing in the wrong people.

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

#86

Post by dehrmann »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #12

Question: are SoCs with on die memory be effected by this? Looks like the frame.work desktop with Ryzen 128GB is shipping now at same price it was on release, Apple is offering 512GB Mac studios Are snapdragon chips the same way?

I would think so because fab capacity is constrained, and if you make an on-die SoC with less memory, it uses fewer transistors, so you can fit more on a wafer.

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

#88

Post by TheDong »

incompatible wrote: post #83
rurp wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that higher performing devices will still exist. Those engineers will probably keep using performant devices and their managers will certainly keep buying them. We'll probably end up in an even more bifurcated world where the well off have access to lot of great products and services that most of humanity is increasingly unable to access.

How many "great products and services" even need a lot of RAM, assuming that we can live without graphics-intensive games?

Some open source projects use Slack to communicate, which is a real ram hog. Github, especially for viewing large PR discussions, takes a huge amount of memory.

If someone with a low-memory laptop wants to get into coding, modern software-development-related services are incredible memory hogs.

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

#89

Post by dehrmann »

appreciatorBus wrote: post #46

[flagged]

I remember the HDD shortage after flooding in Thailand. There was a price surge for a year or so, capacity came back online, and the price slowly eased. If AI crashes, prices might quickly collapse this time. If it doesn't, it'll take time, but new capacity will come online.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullwhip_effect

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

#90

Post by jghn »

deadbabe wrote: post #60
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.

Good luck with that.
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