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DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market

jeffgeerling.com

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Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market

#451

Post by aryonoco »

Grosvenor wrote: post #263
jaggederest wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is my theory: we're going to see a lot of languages with straightforward and obvious semantics, high guard rails, terrible dx, and great memory allocation and performance behavior out of the box. Assembler or worse, but with extremely strong typing bolted on in a way that no human would ever tolerate, basically, something in that vibe.

So Pascal and Delphi are coming back? I'm actually cool with that.

I vibe coded a library in Nim the other day (a language I view very much as a spiritual continuation of the Pascal/Modula line), complete with a C ABI.

The language has well defined syntax, strong types, and I turned up the compiler strictness to the max, treat all warnings as errors etc. After a few hours I put the agent aside, committed to git then deleted everything and hand coded some parts from scratch.

I then compared the results. Found one or two bugs in the AI code but honestly, the rest of our differences were “maters of taste” (is a helper function actually justified here or not kind of things).

Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market

#452

Post by aryonoco »

jaggederest wrote: post #358
Grosvenor wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So Pascal and Delphi are coming back? I'm actually cool with that.

Yeah actually I worked with Pascal early in my career and that's kinda the vibes I am thinking about, with maybe a stronger type system more ada-esque though (composite, partial and range-and-domain types, all that jazz)

Have a look at Nim

Pascal inspired syntax

Ada inspired type system

Lisp inspired templating and Macros

Compiles to C

Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market

#453

Post by imtringued »

dghlsakjg wrote: post #258
bluescrn wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An already-ageing population living even longer while nobody wants kids anymore?

Am I correctly reading your argument that you are pro cancer for the purposes of demographic balance?

I think his broader point is that life preservation doesn't seem like such a big win if overall quality of life is dropping to the point where people decide to not subject their potential children with the burden of living.

Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market

#454

Post by znpy »

reenorap wrote: post #314
nl wrote: post #165

In the Dwarkesh podcast with Semi-Analysis's Dylan Patel they forecast the phone market will shrink by 50% this year because of RAM prices: But that’s the high end of the market, which is only a few hundred million phones a year. Apple sells two or three hundred million phones annually. The bulk of the market is mid-range and low-end. It used to be that 1.4 billion smartphones were sold a year. Now we’re at about 1.1…

This is an extinction event for the low-cost cell phone companies. How are they going to survive if they can't sell their $100 phones profitably for 2 years? I think many of the low-end companies will simply sell their allocations of RAM and close up shop.

> This is an extinction event for the low-cost cell phone companies. How are they going to survive if they can't sell their $100 phones profitably for 2 years?

This is a great thing to happen, actually. Those phones are all essentially trash that ends up in a landfill within a year or so. They should not exist at all.

Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market

#455

Post by MSFT_Edging »

Hendrikto wrote: post #421
leptons wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering helium is a finite resource on earth, it should be made illegal to put it in a party balloon.

It’s not illegal to put gas in your car. That is a finite resource too.

Is it illegal to pull the ladder up behind you in a flood?

Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market

#456

Post by megous »

JollySharp0 wrote: post #144
megous wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can just as well not run docker. 1GiB machine can run a lot of server software, if RAM is not wasted on having duplicate OSes on one machine.

Containers are not Virtual Machines. 1GB cannot run a lot of server software. If stuff is written in .NET, Java or JavaScript. Hosting a non-trivial web app can use several hundred megabytes of memory.

Any node server app will be ~50-100 MiB (because that's roughly the size of node binary + shared deps + some runtime state for your app). If you failed to optimize things correctly, and you're storing and working with lots of data in the node process itself, instead of it serving as a thin intermediary between http service and a database/other backend services, you may get spikes of memory use well above that, but that should be avoided in any case, for multiple reasons.

And most of this 50-100 MiB will be shared if you run multiple node services on the same machine the old way. So you can run 6 node app servers this way, and they'll consume eg. 150MiB of RAM total.

With docker, it's anyone guess how much running 6 node backend apps will consume, because it depends on how many things can be shared in RAM, and usually it will be nothing.

Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market

#457

Post by Macha »

IncreasePosts wrote: post #49
zozbot234 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just rewrite your biggest memory hogs in Rust, it routinely slashes RAM footprint and demand for RAM throughput. The effect is even bigger than the typical reduction in CPU use. You can even ask AI to help you with the task, it will use a lot less RAM for it than the rewrite will save down the road.

Why would we need rust, if the AI can just write really good code in C that doesn't exhibit any of the issues that rust protects you from?

AI can produce code that is about 70% as good as median quality code found on the internet.

I would not describe median quality C code as free from these issues

Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market

#458

Post by zozbot234 »

djhworld wrote: post #448

this whole saga is having ripple effects even in the second hand market. in 2020-2022 there was a glut of those 1L mini pcs on ebay and other resellers which were WAY better value than the RPi4 at the time which was in short supply due to COVID. these mini PCs were pretty affordable and could be upgraded with extra RAM, new SSD/NVMe drive etc to make perfectly good little home servers. I still have mine which has bee…

If you can't find mini pc's at a resaonable price, there's always old enterprise SFF desktops or even thin clients, which have very low specs (and are usually not upgradable) but can be loaded with a custom lightweight OS.

Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market

#459

Post by twobitshifter »

nl wrote: post #165

In the Dwarkesh podcast with Semi-Analysis's Dylan Patel they forecast the phone market will shrink by 50% this year because of RAM prices: But that’s the high end of the market, which is only a few hundred million phones a year. Apple sells two or three hundred million phones annually. The bulk of the market is mid-range and low-end. It used to be that 1.4 billion smartphones were sold a year. Now we’re at about 1.1…

When it becomes clear that the insanely expensive AI data center orders are not going to be filled, we can expect a huge reversal in the price of RAM and GPUs. There are 241 GW of orders on the pipeline but only a third of that is under construction and of that third, even less is being quickly finished and brought online, It’s estimated that just 3GW came online last year.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-ai-industry-is-lying-to-you/

Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market

#460

Post by heraldgeezer »

cnd78A wrote: post #435
heraldgeezer wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Many countries would develop much faster if there weren't bombed nor maintain by puppet dictactors from (economically) developped nations (USA and france keep doing this intensively, while countries like Germany dont mind supporting fascist states). (PS: I'm not woke, not even Marxist).

[flagged]
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