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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

#191

Post by tonyedgecombe »

rafaelmn wrote: post #15
locusofself wrote: post #2

Jeez. I'm glad I "splurged" for the 24gb RAM in my macbook air. Should last me a few more years..

The joke is that Apple RAM pricing is now close to market level, they still have margin in there even at market prices, and they are notorious for supply chain management and locking in contracts/prices ahead of time. So doubt Apple will change anything here short term. On the flip side if you're buying a new computer in 2026 - it's going to be even harder to justify not getting a MacBook, the chips are already 2 yea…

Apple is releasing new devices next week, I wonder if they will take the opportunity to increase memory prices.

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

#192

Post by _fizz_buzz_ »

jacquesm wrote: post #78
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?

> And then memory expanded so much that all kinds of “optimal” patterns for programming just become nearly irrelevant. I don't think that ever happened. Using relatively sparse amount of memory turns into better cache management which in turn usually improves performance drastically. And in embedded stuff being good with memory management can make the difference between 'works' and 'fail'.

It obviously never became completely irrelevant. But I think programmers spend a lot less time thinking about memory than they used to. People used to do a lot of gymnastics and crazy optimizations to fit stuff into memory. I do quite a bit of embedded programming and most of the time it seems easier for me to simply upgrade the MCU and spend 10cents more (or whatever) than to make any crazy optimimzations. But of course there are still cases where it makes sense.

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

#193

Post by fredoralive »

coppsilgold wrote: post #121

If you are on Linux you can 'download' some RAM. Enable zram, configure sysctl variables to make good use of it. Note that it won't help you if your workload makes use of all your RAM at once. If you have a bunch of stuff running in the background it will help a lot. I get 2 to 3 compression factor at all times with zstd. I calculated the utility to be as if I had 20GB extra RAM for what I do.

That’s not particularly unique, Mac OS and Windows have had compressed memory for years. No fiddling with setting needed either.

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

#195

Post by CodesInChaos »

jorvi wrote: post #90
alephnerd wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chinese manufacturers like CXMT face the same kinds of issues that Huawei faced in entering the EU market - the EU is clamping down on Chinese suppliers across their supply chain [0]. Where can CXMT and other Chinese players export when Japan, South Korea, much of ASEAN, India, much of North America, the EU, the UK, Australia, NZ, and parts of the Gulf have enacted or begun enacting trade barriers against Chinese exp…

RAM isn't a critical security category like 5G base stations. Also, I don't think you've seen true consumer rage until the opposition in the EU would start pointing out the current parties are making the smartphones, laptops, TVs and whatnot consumers wanna buy much more expensive (or more crappy). Large parts of the EU are currently being crushed by one of the worst housing crises in the world, the economy seems to…

> RAM isn't a critical security category like 5G base stations.

Those base stations are only security critical because mobile networks are deliberately insecure to enable government surveillance.

And I can image backdooring RAM. At least the controller part.

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

#196

Post by ozgrakkurt »

Fr0styMatt88 wrote: post #51

I asked ChatGPT directly how it was fair that OpenAI bought 40% of the world’s RAM supply. It denied this saying that the figures quoted were estimates only, that such massive RAM contracts would be easily obtainable public knowledge and that primarily the recent price increases were mostly cyclical in nature. Any truth to this? Edit to add: I am actually curious; I was under the impression that this 40% story going…

Please, just search for it and read some articles. It would take 10 mins

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

#197

Post by josephg »

joe_mamba wrote: post #160
josephg wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Are DUV machines cheap and easy to manufacture? I suspect if they were, we'd see a lot of cheap RAM hit the market.

Maybe some RAM chips don't need EUV lithography. but I suspect I'm still right about the economics.

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

#198

Post by whosegotit »

mrob wrote: post #158
adornKey wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Are you saying that intel’s optane product was just ahead of its time? Is optane the answer to LLM’s ever increasing appetite?

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

#199

Post by pjc50 »

crakenzak wrote: post #155
lou1306 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Same as the failure of Itanium VLIW instructions: you don't actually want to force the decision of what is in the cache back to compile time, when the relevant information is better available at runtime.

Also, additional information on instructions costs instruction bandwidth and I-cache.

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

#200

Post by AdamN »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #107
rTX5CMRXIfFG wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never really bought in to the anti-Leetcode crowd’s sentiment that it’s irrelevant. It has always mattered as a competitive edge, against other job candidates if you’re an employee or the competition of you’re a company. It only looked irrelevant because opportunities were everywhere during ZIRP, but good times never last.

Most developers work at banks, insurance companies and other “enterprise” jobs. Even most developers at BigTech and who are working “at scale” are building on top of scalable infrastructure and aren’t worrying about reversing a btree on a whiteboard.

Agree that the whiteboard thing is often not applicable but it's so nice when a developer has efficient code if only because it indicates that they know what's going on and also that there are fewer bugs and other bottlenecks in the system.
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