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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

#161

Post by marcyb5st »

jstanley wrote: post #155
torginus wrote: post #133

It's somewhat alarming to see that companies (owned by a very small slice of society) producing these AI thingies (whose current economic is questionable value and actual future potential is up to hot debate), can easily price the rest of humanity out of computing goods.

You don't think that as prices go up, the supply might also go up, and the equilibrium price will be maintained? And possibly even a lower equilibrium will be reached due to greater economies of scale.

That assumes that supply production means can scale up instantly. Fabs for high end chips don't and usually take years from foundations being laid to First chip out of the production line.

In the interim, yeah, they will force prices up.

Additionally those fabs cost billions. Given the lead time I mentioned a lot of companies won't start building them right away since the risk of demand going away is high and the ROI in those cases might become unreachable

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

#162

Post by nice_byte »

elthor89 wrote: post #146

If all manufacturers jump into serving the ai market segment. Can this not be a opportunity for new entrants to start serving the other market segments? How hard is it to start and manufacture memory for embedded systems in cars, or pc?

No, because if you have the capacity to make e.g. ram chips it makes more economic sense to sell them for ai bucks. Serving the other market segment is an opportunity cost unless you're selling to them at same prices. In the long run though if enough players emerge the price will eventually come down just due to oversupply.

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

#163

Post by kasabali »

MangoToupe wrote: post #136
999900000999 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/YouTu…

> I was only using 6GBs of ram. Insane that this is seen as "better software". I could do basically the same functionality in 2000 with 512mb. I assume this is because everything runs through chrome with dozens more layers of abstraction but

More like 128MB.

512MB in 2000 was like HEDT level (though I'm not sure that acronym existed back then)

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

#164

Post by dandanua »

UltraSane wrote: post #158
torginus wrote: post #133

It's somewhat alarming to see that companies (owned by a very small slice of society) producing these AI thingies (whose current economic is questionable value and actual future potential is up to hot debate), can easily price the rest of humanity out of computing goods.

Supply should increase as a response to higher prices, this bringing prices down.

in a fairy world

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

#165

Post by kasabali »

anigbrowl wrote: post #107
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.

Have the laws of supply and demand been suspended? Capital is gonna pour into memory fabrication over the next year or two, and there will probably be a glut 2-3 years from now, followed by retrenchment and wails that innovation has come to a halt because demand has stalled.

We're not talking about growing tomatoes in your backyard.

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

#166

Post by charcircuit »

DeepSeaTortoise wrote: post #122
charcircuit wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If "performant" devices are not widespread then telemetry will reveal that the app is performing poorly for most users. If a new festure uses more memory and sugnificantly increases the crash rate, it will be disabled. Apps are optimized for the install base, not for the engineer's own hardware.

What is the point of telemetry if your IDE launching in under 10s is considered the pinnacle of optimization? That's like 100B+ instructions on a single core of your average superscalar CPU. I can't wait for maps loading times being measured in percentage of trip time.

Because you don't want to regress any of the substeps of such a loading progress to turn it back into 10+ seconds of loading.

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

#167

Post by lexicality »

elthor89 wrote: post #146

If all manufacturers jump into serving the ai market segment. Can this not be a opportunity for new entrants to start serving the other market segments? How hard is it to start and manufacture memory for embedded systems in cars, or pc?

If it was easy there would be more memory manufacturers, rather than 2-3 wholesalers who sell to the people who put badges & rgb on it

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

#168

Post by SXX »

trinsic2 wrote: post #128
SXX wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yea mid-tier is a stretch. Maybe low-end gaming

Low end gaming ia 2d indie titles and they now run on toasters.

All the popular mass matket games work on iGPU: fortnite, roblox, mmos, arena shooters, battlen royales. Good chunk of cross platform console titles also work just fine.

You can play Cyberpunk or BG3 on damn Steam Deck. I wont call this low end.

Number of games that dont run to some extent without dGPU is limited to heavy AAA titles and niche PC only genres.

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

#169

Post by ggm »

bdangubic wrote: post #79
ggm wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they collude on pricing and restrict new entrants, that's what the Sherman anti trust laws are about.

the fines that would be levied via potential sherman law violations would negligible so that is for sure not a deterrent

It would be understood that any action under the sherman act is unlikely and as you say, the financial penalties are tokenistic.

The non financial parts, which include mandated restructuring and penalties to directors including incarceration however, are not tokenistic. They'd be appealed and delayed, but at some point the shareholders would seek redress from the board. Ignoring judicial mandated instructions isn't really a good idea, current WH behaviour aside. If the defence here is "courts don't matter any more" that's very unhelpful, if true. At some point, a country which cannot enforce judicial outcomes has stopped being civil society.

My personal hope the EU tears holes in the FAANG aside, the collusive pricing of chips has been a problem for some time. The cost/price disjunction here is strong.

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

#170

Post by testbjjl »

torginus wrote: post #133

It's somewhat alarming to see that companies (owned by a very small slice of society) producing these AI thingies (whose current economic is questionable value and actual future potential is up to hot debate), can easily price the rest of humanity out of computing goods.

> It's somewhat alarming to see that companies (owned by a very small slice of society) producing these AI thingies (whose current economic is questionable value and actual future potential is up to hot debate)

Some might conclude the same for funds (hedge funds/private equity) and housing.

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