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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

#231

Post by sehansen »

Animats wrote: post #170
joe_mamba wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

> 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. Ah. Please check that. Which types of DRAM can be made in a DUV fab? Obviously the older ones, but are those obsolete for new computers. This really matters.

From Micron, everything up to their 1-beta node is DUV. Their 1-gamma node they debuted last year is the only EUV node they have. If you bought a Micron-based DDR5 RAM stick a year ago it would have been DUV and you could get those up to DDR5-8000. 1-gamma increases that to DDR5-9200, so if you can live with ~15% less performance DUV is good enough.

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

#232

Post by QuadmasterXLII »

zozbot234 wrote: post #221
zeta0134 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The need to use optimal patterns didn't go away, but the techniques certainly did. Just as a quick example, it's usually a bad idea now to use lookup tables to accelerate small math workloads. The lookup table creates memory pressure on the cache, which ends up degrading performance on modern systems. Back in the 1980s, lookup tables were by far the dominant technique because math was *slow.*

> Back in the 1980s, lookup tables were by far the dominant technique because math was slow. This actually generalizes in a rather clean way: compared to the 1980s, you now want to cheaply compress data in memory and use succinct representations as much as practicable, since the extra compute involved in translating a more succinct representation into real data is practically free compared to even one extra cacheline…

It’s a mad word where ultimate performance in one problem can require compressing data in ram and in another storing it uncompressed on disc.

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

#233

Post by password4321 »

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.

Back in the day if you could find a deal on defective RAM (that wasn't going to degrade further?), Linux could be configured to avoid the defects. Unfortunately this isn't allowed with secure/UEFI boot.

https://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/grub/html_node/badr...

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

#234

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

AdamN wrote: post #200
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Those bugs don’t come from using the wrong algorithm, they come from not understanding the business case of what you’re writing. Most performance issues in the real world for most cases don’t have anything to do with the code. It’s networking, databases, etc.

Your login isn’t slow because the developer couldn’t do leetcode

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

#235

Post by inigyou »

pipes wrote: post #166
thfuran wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I can never understand why so many people resort conspiracy theories when the obvious answer is supply and demand. I know well educated people, who do this when they talk about the resential property market. (Including an accountant).

Supply and demand can be caused by a conspiracy. OpenAI secretly bought 40% of the world's RAM on purpose. It's only a conspiracy if Anthropic and Google did something similar, though.

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

#236

Post by creatonez »

fredoralive wrote: post #193
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.

> No fiddling with setting needed either.

It's since become the default in several distributions, including Fedora.

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

#237

Post by bonesss »

QuadmasterXLII wrote: post #232
zozbot234 wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Back in the 1980s, lookup tables were by far the dominant technique because math was slow. This actually generalizes in a rather clean way: compared to the 1980s, you now want to cheaply compress data in memory and use succinct representations as much as practicable, since the extra compute involved in translating a more succinct representation into real data is practically free compared to even one extra cacheline…

It’s a mad word where ultimate performance in one problem can require compressing data in ram and in another storing it uncompressed on disc.

The same atmosphere that makes bread hard makes crackers soft.

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

#238

Post by majewsky »

ponector wrote: post #222
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.

It mattered to pass through the interview, but not for the job itself. With all leetcode geniuses in Microsoft why Teams and Windows are so shitty?

Because they are only allowed to review what the LLM has come up with.

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

#240

Post by sehansen »

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…

Youth unemployment is actually somewhat low in the EU at the moment. It's at around 15%, which is the level as back in 2008 before the great recession.
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