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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

#251

Post by HexPhantom »

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 a lot of this rings true, but what makes it especially frustrating is that none of it feels technically necessary

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

#252

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

torginus wrote: post #244
Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really agree with your statement and people forget, but the reason third world countries are able to buy devices is because they are cheap, increase the ram price and thus every computing device and I think it will impact everyone of us but disproportionately due to power purchasing capacity and other constraints in an economy I genuinely hope that this ram/chips crisis gets solved ASAP by any party. The implicatio…

Old devices work just fine. I've upgraded my old iPhone XS last year to the latest and greatest 16 to see what changed (not much), the old one was still fast (in fact faster than a most upper-midrange Androids, its insane how much of a lead Apple has) and the battery was good. I considered selling it, but quickly had to realize it was worth almost nothing. Also, when treated right, computers almost never break. There…

Well the industries the most impacted by it are homelabbing/datacenters imo.

Like in current circumstances, its hard to get a homelab/datacenter so its better to postpone these plans for sometime

I agree with your statement overall but I feel like till the years that these ram shortages occur, there is a freeze of all companies providing vps's etc. ie. no new player can enter so I am a bit worried about those raising their prices as well honestly which will impact everyone of us as well for these few years in another form of AI tax

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

#253

Post by HexPhantom »

SunlitCat wrote: post #220

I really wonder when the point will be reached at which the South Korean government steps in and starts to take a closer look at the growing long-term supply commitments that companies like OpenAI are indirectly driving with major memory manufacturers such as SK hynix and Samsung Electronics. Allocating a very large share of advanced memory production, especially HBM and high-end DRAM, which are critical for almost a…

If Samsung's own MX division can't count on predictable access because internal transfer pricing loses to hyperscaler demand, that's a red flag

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

#254

Post by HexPhantom »

motbus3 wrote: post #226

For me, there is concerning a flag about all of this. I know this is not always true, but on this case, crucial folks say the margins for end user are too low and they have demand for AI. I suppose they do not intend to bring a new AI focused unit because it is not worth it or they believe the hype might be gone before it they are done. But what intrigues me is why they would allow other competitors to step up in a s…

Building a dedicated AI-focused consumer line is risky: long development cycles, uncertain demand, and the chance that today's hype cools before the product ships

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

#255

Post by wickedsight »

torginus wrote: post #152
palmotea wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's somewhat alarming to see that companies (owned by a very small slice of society) ... can easily price the rest of humanity out of computing goods. If AI lives up to the hype, it's a portent of how things will feel to the common man. Not only will unemployment be a problem, but prices of any resources desired by the AI companies or their founders will rise to unaffordability.

I think living up to the hype needs to be defined. A lot of AI 'influencers' love wild speculation, but lets ignore the most fantastical claims of techno-singularity, and let's focus on what I would consider a very optimistic scenario for AI companies - that AI capable of replacing knowledge workers can be developed using the current batch of hardware, in the span of a year or two. Even in this scenario, the capital…

> a very optimistic scenario for AI companies - that AI capable of replacing knowledge workers can be developed using the current batch of hardware, in the span of a year or two.

I'm really interested in what will happen to the economy/society in this case. Knowledge workers are the market for much that money is being made on.

Facebook and Google make most of their money from ads. Those ads are shown to billions of people who have money to spend on things the advertisers sell. Massive unemployment would mean these companies lose their main revenue stream.

Apple and Amazon make most of their money from selling stuff to millions of consumers and are this big because so many people now have a ton of disposable income.

Teslas entire market cap is dependent on there being a huge market for robo taxis to drive people to work.

Microsoft exists because they sell an OS that knowledge workers use to work on and tools they use within that OS to do the majority of their work with. If the future of knowledge work is just AI running on Linux communicating through API calls, that means MS is gone.

All these companies that currently drive stock markets and are a huge part of the value of the SP500 seem to be actively working against their own interests for some reason. Maybe they're all banking on being the sole supplier of the tech that will then run the world, but the moat doesn't seem to exist, so that feels like a bad bet.

But maybe I'm just too dumb to understand the world that these big players exist in and am missing some big detail.

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

#256

Post by tazjin »

999900000999 wrote: post #93
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/YouTu…

> 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.

You can already do this. For example, I use `systemd-run` to run browsers with CPU quotas applied. Firefox gets 400% CPU (i.e. up to 4 cores), and no more.

Example command: systemd-run --user --scope -p CPUQuota=400% firefox

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

#258

Post by tirant »

lysace wrote: post #193
goku12 wrote: post #185

I understand the issue with all the devices. But what about the rest of the things that depend on these electronics, especially DRAMs? Automotive, Aircraft, Marine vessels, ATC, Shipping coordination, traffic signalling, rail signalling, industrial control systems, public utility (power, water, sewage, etc) control systems, transmission grid control systems, HVAC and environment control systems, weather monitoring ne…

A $100k EV has roughly the same amount of DRAM as a $1k phone. The EV is a therefore, on a whole, a lot less sensitive to DRAM price increases.

That is factually wrong.

That might be the case only for the infotainment system, but there’s usually many other ECUs in an EV. The ADAS ECUs are carrying similar amounts as an iPhone or the infotainment system. Telematics is also usually also a relatively complex one, but more towards lower sized amounts.

Then you have around 3-5 other midsized ECUs with relatively high memory sizes, or at least enough to require MMUs and to run more complex operating systems supporting typical AUTOSAR stacks.

And then you have all the small size ECUs controlling all small individual actuators.

But also all complex sensors like radars, cameras, lidars carry some amounts of relevant memory.

I still think your point is valid, though. There’s no difference in orders of magnitude when it comes to expensive RAM compared to an iPhone. But there’s cars also carried lots of low-speed, automotive grade memory in all the ECUs distributed throughout the vehicle.

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

#259

Post by compounding_it »

Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #227
elorant wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Affordable computing is what created the economy. If you take that away people in poorer countries can no longer afford a phone. Without a phone a lot things that we consider a given will not be functional anymore. The gaming industry alone including phones is a whooping $300bn. This will take a significant hit if people have to pay a fortune to build a rig, or if their phones are so under-powered that they can't eve…

I really agree with your statement and people forget, but the reason third world countries are able to buy devices is because they are cheap, increase the ram price and thus every computing device and I think it will impact everyone of us but disproportionately due to power purchasing capacity and other constraints in an economy I genuinely hope that this ram/chips crisis gets solved ASAP by any party. The implicatio…

Based on the article, demand exceeds supply by 10%. It seems that companies are taking advantage of this gap nothing else. I won't be surprised if the demand is kept this way for a while to extract profits. GPUs saw a similar trend during crypto. Then there were affordable GPUs at one point.
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