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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

#91

Post by yoyohello13 »

kortilla wrote: post #73
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

That’s not scalping. These companies are not selling nor renting back the memory.

Azure/GCP/AWS and all the AI companies are selling compute. That’s renting back hardware.

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

#92

Post by caconym_ »

cglan wrote: post #41

At this current pace, if "the electorate" doesn't see real benefits to any of this. 2028 is going to be referendum on AI unfortunately. Whether you like it or not, AI right now is mostly - high electricity prices - crazy computer part prices - phasing out of a lot of formerly high paying jobs and the benefits are mostly - slop and chatgpt Unless OpenAI and co produce the machine god, which genuinely is possible. If m…

> they'll quickly be wondering if ChatGPT is worth this cost

They should be, and the answer is obviously no—at least to them. No political or business leader has outlined a concrete, plausible path to the sort of vague UBI utopia that's been promised for "regular folks" in the bullish scenario (AGI, ASI, etc.), nor have they convincingly argued that this isn't an insane bubble that's going to cripple our economy when AGI doesn't happen—a scenario that's looking more and more likely every day.

There is no upside and only downside; whether we're heading for sci-fi apocalypse or economic catastrophe, the malignant lunatics pushing this technology expect to be insulated from consequences whether they end up owning the future light-cone of humanity or simply enjoying the cushion of their vast wealth while the majority suffers the consequences of an economic crash a few rich men caused by betting it all, even what wasn't theirs to bet.

Everybody should be fighting this tooth and nail. Even if these technologies are useful (I believe they are), and even if they can be made into profitable products and sustainable businesses, what's happening now isn't related to any of that.

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

#93

Post by 999900000999 »

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.,…

Or, we can expect better from software. Maybe someone can fork Firefox and make it run better, hard cap how much a browser window can use.

The pattern of lazy almost non existent optimization combined with blaming consumers for having weak hardware, needs to stop.

On my 16GB ram lunar lake budget laptop CachyOS( Arch) runs so much smoother than Windows.

This is very unscientific, but using htop , running Chrome/YouTube playing music, 2 browser games and VS code having Git Copilot review a small project, I was only using 6GBs of ram.

For the most part I suspect I could do normal consumer stuff( filing paperwork and watching cat videos) on an 8GB laptop just fine. Assuming I'm using Linux.

All this Windows 11 bloat makes computers slower than they should be. A part of me hopes this pushes Microsoft to at least create a low ram mode that just runs the OS and display manager. Then let's me use my computer as I see fit instead of constantly doing a million other weird things.

We don't *need* more ram. We need better software.

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

#94

Post by greesil »

piskov wrote: post #14
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?

Apple secured at least a year-worth supply of memory (not in actual chips but in prices). The bigger the company = longer the contract. However it will eventually catch up even to Apple. It is not prices alone due to demand but the manufacturing redirection from something like lpddr in iphones to hbm and what have you for servers and gpu

Apparently Google fucked up

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.indiatoday.in/amp/technolog...

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

#95

Post by mips_avatar »

nrp wrote: post #31
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?

We’ve been able to hold the same price we had at launch because we had buffered enough component inventory before prices reached their latest highs. We will need to increase pricing to cover supplier cost increases though, as we recently did on DDR5 modules. Note that the memory is on the board for Ryzen AI Max, not on the package (as it is for Intel’s Lunar Lake and Apple’s M-series processors) or on die (which woul…

How do suppliers communicate these changes? Are they just like yep now it’s 3x higher? Im surprised you don’t have longer contracts

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

#96

Post by heavyset_go »

compounding_it wrote: post #85

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 q…

Firefox is set to allocate memory until a certain absolute limit or memory pressure is reached. It will eat memory whether you have 4GB of RAM of 40GB.

Set this to something you find reasonable: `browser.low_commit_space_threshold_percent`

And make sure tab unloading is enabled.

Also, you can achieve the same thing with cgroups by giving Firefox a slice of memory it can grow into.

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

#97

Post by arjie »

DRAM spot prices are something like what they were 4 years ago. Having RAM for cheap is nice. But it doesn't cost an extraordinary amount. I recently needed some RAM and was able to pick up 16x32 DDR4 for $1600. That's about twice as expensive as it used to be but $1600 is pretty cheap for 512 GiB of RAM.

A 16 GiB M4 Mac Mini is $400 right now. That covers any essential use-case which means this is mostly hitting hobbyists or niche users.

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

#99

Post by OGEnthusiast »

cglan wrote: post #41

At this current pace, if "the electorate" doesn't see real benefits to any of this. 2028 is going to be referendum on AI unfortunately. Whether you like it or not, AI right now is mostly - high electricity prices - crazy computer part prices - phasing out of a lot of formerly high paying jobs and the benefits are mostly - slop and chatgpt Unless OpenAI and co produce the machine god, which genuinely is possible. If m…

> At this current pace, if "the electorate" doesn't see real benefits to any of this. 2028 is going to be referendum on AI unfortunately.

Not saying this is necessarily a bad prediction for 2028, but I'm old enough to remember when the 2020 election was going to be a referendum on billionaires and big tech monopolies.

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

#100

Post by OGEnthusiast »

callc wrote: post #58
zahlman wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

A $999 MacBook Air today is vastly better than the same $999 MacBook Air 5 years ago (and even more so once you count inflation).

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