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The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

davidoks.blog

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Re: The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

#171

Post by WalterBright »

richforrester wrote: post #34
mhb wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Courtesy of TFA and capitalism: "In 1985, if you were a reasonably affluent American, the best computer that you could afford was the IBM PC AT. The PC AT would cost you about $6,000—$19,400 in 2026 dollars—and thus represented about a quarter of the median American’s annual income; and it ran on an Intel 80286 processor, capable of something like 900,000 instructions per second. Today, if you find yourself in a mark…

That has little to do with what I said. A third of the world lives in poverty. That's the fault of capitalism.

About 90% of the world lived in poverty before capitalism.

Besides, America's poor have a higher standard of living than medieval kings.

Re: The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

#172

Post by gblargg »

simonw wrote: post #2

The headline here under-serves the article in my opinion: this is a fascinating, deep explanation of how the memory market works and why increased demand for HBM (used by big GPU racks) hurts the availability of wafers for DDR and LPDDR (used by laptops and phones).

This also put a lot into perspective:

> these memory makers have learned a very particular lesson from the unforgiving history [deep drops in demand] of their industry: always leave demand unmet

I can't blame them for keeping some reserve demand ready so they keep having customers over the years.

Re: The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

#173

Post by joe_mamba »

WalterBright wrote: post #163
hackyhacky wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But you struggling with rent is entirely your problem... Who said anything about struggling with rent? Sounds like you a grasping for a straw man. > I hope that India too can emulate this in my lifetime I, too, hope the best things for the people of China and of India. But India, by any metric, is already a capitalist economy, where its wealth is concentrated in the hands of a very few. To the extent that China has…

> capitalism is the driver of equality? Nope. It is the driver of opportunity, though. It's up to individuals to take advantage of the opportunity, or not.

>It's up to individuals to take advantage of the opportunity, or not.

The problem is that after decades monopolies consolidated and you have massive offshoring of labor to cheap countries and offshoring of profits to tax havens, there's not much opportunities the working class individuals can take, as all the opportunities are now geared towards the asset owning rent seeking class.

Re: The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

#174

Post by WalterBright »

joe_mamba wrote: post #173
WalterBright wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> capitalism is the driver of equality? Nope. It is the driver of opportunity, though. It's up to individuals to take advantage of the opportunity, or not.

>It's up to individuals to take advantage of the opportunity, or not. The problem is that after decades monopolies consolidated and you have massive offshoring of labor to cheap countries and offshoring of profits to tax havens, there's not much opportunities the working class individuals can take, as all the opportunities are now geared towards the asset owning rent seeking class.

There are endless businesses you can start with little to no capital.

Re: The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

#175

Post by einpoklum »

I work in healthcare imaging. The DRAM crunch is translating into significant increases in costs - because reconstructing images from raw scans is a compute-itensive process; and that gradually translates into product price increases. And then, healthcare providers may well opt for cheaper, lower-tier medical scanners, since they can't afford the better ones; and then finally you get less accurate scans if you're suspected to have cancer or whatever.

So, that's another way we are financing the LLM machine and the trillion-dollar valuations of those corporate behemoths.

Re: The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

#176

Post by einpoklum »

So, if you were wondering how come LLM services are cheap or gratis - now you know another group of people bearing the costs: The poorer half of humanity, who will now not be able to afford a smartphone, i.e. not having access to a computer. Sure, that doesn't kill you, but it is quite significant personally and socially.

Re: The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

#177

Post by Curosinono »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #15

What was most surprising about all this to me was this line: > So modern DRAM manufacturing is an extraordinarily complex and expensive process. Building a single state-of-the-art DRAM fabrication facility, a “fab,” will cost you about $15 to $20 billion; acquiring all the necessary equipment, like lithography tools and etching machines, will cost you another few billion; and then it’ll take you a few years of produc…

They are not just shuffling money around though.

Nvidia sells all the stock, prices for GPUs moved up not down.

Companies like Apple don't want to be in every industry. Its risk, its cost, its expertise you need.

And sure you can throw money at it but you need people. Alone hiring all the experts is probalby not that easy. Who knows how to setup a DRam Factory?

It takes years to build this up

Re: The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

#178

Post by coldtea »

WalterBright wrote: post #149
shimman wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should society care about people making profits? Society would greatly benefit from cheap abundant ram than FAANG shares going up. I'm kinda sick about only caring that some billionaire makes more money and would rather you know... actually improve conditions to better society. This is why China is eating the West. Quite easy to start an electronics company when you have such an abundance of suppliers, compare th…

> Why should society care about people making profits? The people making profits are the ones providing food, shelter, and phones to you.

Nope. They're the ones making those more expensive, via collusion, rent-seeking, monopoly capture, and lots of other ways.

Re: The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

#179

Post by Linosaurus »

richforrester wrote: post #20
LeifCarrotson wrote: post #15

What was most surprising about all this to me was this line: > So modern DRAM manufacturing is an extraordinarily complex and expensive process. Building a single state-of-the-art DRAM fabrication facility, a “fab,” will cost you about $15 to $20 billion; acquiring all the necessary equipment, like lithography tools and etching machines, will cost you another few billion; and then it’ll take you a few years of produc…

Literally the most overwhelming thought, reading this, is "man, capitalism is a mistake" The amounts of money circulating whilst some of us struggle to make rent ... Nothing fair, or just, about this world we live in

> , is "man, capitalism is a mistake"

Man, we need a better term for this criticism.

The US right now is more harsh to live in than the US pre-Reagan, which was more harsh than many countries with a strong welfare state, but all of them are capitalistic.

Re: The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

#180

Post by nuancebydefault »

So the availability of cheap phones is going down because of the cost of RAM.

What about the RAM consumption trend of the last 10 years? I think it is very feasible to produce phones with the same amount of RAM as was the norm 10 years ago. The only compromise would be using older algorithms and features that consume less of it, and to take a bit of effort on keeping an eye on memory consumption in the development phase. There's a lot of opportunity. We can even leverage AI these days to optimize existing software for RAM usage.

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