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RAM now represents 35 percent of bill of materials for HP PCs

arstechnica.com

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Re: RAM now represents 35 percent of bill of materials for HP PCs

#151

Post by nirui »

malshe wrote: post #53
Aerroon wrote: post #9

I think Europe should invest into manufacturing RAM. RAM isn't going anywhere, all of modern compute uses it. This would be an opportunity to create domestic supply of it.

Aren’t Chinese manufacturers already expanding their capacity? Given that Samsung and SK Hynix have left that market in the pursuit of HBM4 chips, China is going to rule this market. At least that’s what analysts are saying.

In this market, CXMT is more likely to also move to HBM production rather than consumer grade RAMs. After all China is also doing an AI push in a competition with the US, and the domestic Chinese companies are "recommended/guided" by the government to help, while consumers are pushed to lower priorities.

The situation I'm worrying about is that these PC manufacturers could use this opportunity to push for a more locked-down design, such as soldered RAM or even SSD. My current ThinkPad already got soldered LPDDR5 RAM chips on it with no user-end RAM upgrade possible, so there's a reason to suspect they'll take more pagers from Apple's book if they can get away doing it, just like what they did when they pushed out those internally mounted unswappable batteries.

My personal guess is that the RAM price will fall down after this period of AI expansion is over and major players starts to consolidate. But it will not fall as much as we're hopping for, because the manufacturers could just reduce production to control the price.

Re: RAM now represents 35 percent of bill of materials for HP PCs

#152

Post by adornKey »

cyanydeez wrote: post #95
thfuran wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is coming from an insane demand spike, not some nefarious plot by the RAM manufacturers.

Yes, it's a nefarious plot of AI producers to attempt a monopoly with a product that no one seems capable of demonstrating has the exponential value they're betting on.

Once everybody has a decent amount of VRAM they can just run local AIs and the need to mess with Ad-laden search results will fizzle. So of course they are desperate to grab a new monopoly. People haven't realised yet, that local AIs are fast and produce good results - on pretty average hardware. If they don't manage to grab a new monopoly Google will be history.

But it doesn't really need a nefarious plot for the price spikes. There is a serious lack of VRAM deployed out there. Filling that gap will take quite some time. Add to that the nefarious plot and the situation will most likely get even worse....

Re: RAM now represents 35 percent of bill of materials for HP PCs

#153

Post by roenxi »

alephnerd wrote: post #69
Ygg2 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then those countries that didn't will have an advantage at selling their electronics to the world. Or their consumers will enjoy cheap PC part prices. With possible gray zone re-export market. Of course we could see retreat from global markets to mercantilism, but that has yet to fully happen.

Or China could stop antagonizing blocs like the EU through actions like solidifying ties with Russia [0][1][2], imposing rare earth export restrictions on the EU [3], and undermining EU institutions [4]. [0] - https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/xi-putin-hail-tie... [1] - https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chinas-president-xi-meet... [2] - https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-calls-closer-defen... [3] -…

And Asia is mostly peaceful right now while war has returned to Europe on a scale not seen in 50 years. Those crazy Chinese, eh? Massive failure of their foreign policy establishment. Total inability to engage with Russia.

> and undermining EU institutions

If the Europeans had any common sense they'd be undermining EU institutions as well, those institutions have been disasters. They aren't doing a good job of keeping the peace, they aren't doing a good job of promoting prosperity and they've had successes like forcing Apple to switch from Lightening to USB ports. The CCP on the other hand have been so successful in the last few decades that they're making authoritarianism look good. If the EU focused on figuring out what good policy looked like then they that wouldn't be the case. Although I assume sooner or later the ideological issues will catch up with China.

Re: RAM now represents 35 percent of bill of materials for HP PCs

#154

Post by stephen_g »

kazinator wrote: post #40

"Bill of materials" (BOM) is not a monetary invoice, only an itemization of constituent parts. :)

Yes the normal term I’ve always heard and used for what they’re talking about is “BOM cost”, i.e. the combined cost of every item on the BOM to make a single unit.

Re: RAM now represents 35 percent of bill of materials for HP PCs

#155

Post by crakenzak »

lou1306 wrote: post #129
makapuf wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAIK, you can't explicitly allocate cache like you allocate RAM however. A bit like if you could only work on files and ram was used for cache. Maybe I am mistaken ? (Edit: typo)

You can't explicitly allocate cache, but you can lay things out in memory to minimize cache misses.

Out of curiosity, why has there not been a slight paradigm shift in modern system programming languages to expose more control over the caches?

Re: RAM now represents 35 percent of bill of materials for HP PCs

#156

Post by GCUMstlyHarmls »

bilekas wrote: post #138
noosphr wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI demand isn't going away. It will just move from the data center to the local machine. On device AI is much better for the customer than it being in the cloud. Expecting people to stick with a few dozen gb of hbm is going to be the 'no one needs more than 640kb' of the 2030s.

It's being delayed by ai companies from running on local consumer grade machines specifically by making the cost of entry too expensive. OpenAi buys 40% of wafers to ensure the price of memory stays high.

Hmm, never considered a targeted squeeze at consumer run models by way of slowing hardware proliferation. It "made sense" to try and box out other AI companies but I guess they also have a pretty strong vested interest in keeping VRAM low or preventing some kind of high-memory PCIe ASIC from getting cheap broad adoption.

Another thread suggested that OpenAIs primary play is to get big enough that it's too big to fail, funny to think that it's not a funding runway or algorithmic moat, just a hardware vault and the longer you can stop boats crossing it the more chance you get your fingers in all the pies.

Re: RAM now represents 35 percent of bill of materials for HP PCs

#157

Post by close04 »

cyberrock wrote: post #148
travisgriggs wrote: post #50

I had my formative years in programming when memory usage was something you still worried about as a programmer. And then memory expanded so much that all kinds of “optimal” patterns for programming just become nearly irrelevant. Will we start to actually consider this in software solutions again as a result?

It's not like most developers are wasting memory for fun by using Electron etc. It's just the simplest way to deploy applications that require frequent multiplatform changes. Until you get Apple to approve native app changes faster and Linux users to agree on framework, app distribution, etc., it's the most optimal way to ship a product and not just a program.

> for fun

Not for fun but for convenience (laziness occasionally?). Someone needed to "pay" for the app being available on all platforms. Either the programmer by coding and optimizing multiple times, or the user by using a bloated unoptimized piece of software. The choice was made to have the user pay. It's been so long I doubt recent generations of coders could even do it differently.

Re: RAM now represents 35 percent of bill of materials for HP PCs

#158

Post by mrob »

adornKey wrote: post #152
cyanydeez wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it's a nefarious plot of AI producers to attempt a monopoly with a product that no one seems capable of demonstrating has the exponential value they're betting on.

Once everybody has a decent amount of VRAM they can just run local AIs and the need to mess with Ad-laden search results will fizzle. So of course they are desperate to grab a new monopoly. People haven't realised yet, that local AIs are fast and produce good results - on pretty average hardware. If they don't manage to grab a new monopoly Google will be history. But it doesn't really need a nefarious plot for the pr…

LLM inference is mostly read only, so high-bandwidth flash looks like it could provide huge cost savings over VRAM. It's not yet in commercial products but there are working prototypes already. Previous HN discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46700384

Re: RAM now represents 35 percent of bill of materials for HP PCs

#159

Post by lmcd »

travisgriggs wrote: post #50

I had my formative years in programming when memory usage was something you still worried about as a programmer. And then memory expanded so much that all kinds of “optimal” patterns for programming just become nearly irrelevant. Will we start to actually consider this in software solutions again as a result?

I've recently started a side project for the N64, and this is very relatable! Working within such tight constraints is most of the fun.

Re: RAM now represents 35 percent of bill of materials for HP PCs

#160

Post by joe_mamba »

josephg wrote: post #73
dijit wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a few things to note here: 1) Prices aren't returning to "normal". The only way they will is if the hyperscalers and AI companies start to implode -- which will kill a huge portion of the US economy and lead to global recession, so, cheap RAM but nobody can afford it 2) By building up capacity you influence the outcome. If someone else enters the DRAM space, the duopoly has to actually start thinking about co…

> The only way they will is if the hyperscalers and AI companies start to implode -- which will kill a huge portion of the US economy and lead to global recession, so, cheap RAM but nobody can afford it I disagree. Modern RAM is made in fabs, which are ridiculously expensive to manufacture. Modern EUV lithography machines cost around 500M each. They're manufactured by hand. Only one company in the world knows how to…

>Modern RAM is made in fabs, which are ridiculously expensive to manufacture. Modern EUV lithography machines cost around 500M each. They're manufactured by hand. Only one company in the world knows how to manufacture them right now.

You're wrong here. You don't need the most cutting edge ASML EUV machines to make RAM. Most RAM fabs still use standard DUV.

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