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The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

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

#301

Post by stasomatic »

mrandish wrote: post #65
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…

> it seems they'd be a prime candidate to spin up their own memory fab. While Apple et al certainly have the money to tilt up their own fab, they're savvy enough to understand the memory market's long history of constant boom/bust cycles. I still remember the huge DRAM shortage in late 80s forcing my startup at the time to delay launching our new product for a year. People assume Apple cares about vertically integrat…

And yet, Apple had to drop base configs from their lineup. They weren't selling $599 Minis at cost. They could take someone over and inflict damage on competition.

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

#302

Post by hagbard_c »

coldtea wrote: post #187
tick_tock_tick wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They pivoted away from that quite a while ago now they just disappear people for a week or two and randomly completely crush a business here and there to make sure they understand their place.

[flagged]

1920's: Hard times create strong men.

1950's: Strong men create good times.

1980's: Good times create weak men.

2010's: Weak men create hard times. There you are, wishing for hard times. May I suggest finding yourself the socialist paradise where they do as you wish and move there? You should be happier and we will be as well as long as your wishes don't come true.

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

#303

Post by Schlagbohrer »

threecheese wrote: post #99
mr_toad wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Meanwhile the AI fad is seeing huge layoffs. This is really the only point I disagree with. Layoffs are being blamed on AI, but they are really a hangover of the covid hiring boom, and subsequent bust. All the tech money is going into building data centres (and the gas turbines that power data centres), and it turns out that programmers don’t have the relevant skills to build gas turbines.

A few months ago I’d have been right there with you; however recently there have been a number of high profile multi-thousand-head layoffs attributed to budget pressure of deploying AI - and so technically it’s more of an indirect rather than “a robot stole my job” replacement, but still causal. Those tokens will be “doing” labor, rather than the human.

Workers at many of these companies are being required to use AI each day, not because AI is such vaporware that it has to be pushed, but because making employees use it creates trainable datasets to further improve it, further automate work, further put pressure on headcount. A very worrying cycle on top of the already rapidly improving real capabilities of AI.

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

#304

Post by JrProgrammer »

stasomatic wrote: post #297

"and then it’ll take you a few years of producing substandard and defective memory chips before your yields start to look competitive." As a complete know nothing about the fab industry, I am always puzzled by this. Do the fabs need to be seasoned like an iron cast skillet or something?

I can imagine that the process of fabrication relies on tweaking a tremendous amount of parameters. In a sense seasoning a skillet and perfecting it to the max

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

#305

Post by Schlagbohrer »

autoexec wrote: post #214
Gareth321 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let us hope this results in farms offering Americans better wages for working on farms. Only 1% of the retail cost of produce is due to labour. Farms could double wages to workers and it would barely move the needle on inflation.

I agree, but the farmers aren't pulling in massive amounts of cash either. There are record profits being siphoned from the wages of the workers, and from the profits of the farmers, and from the pockets of the consumer at the register. We'd all be better off if we tracked the money down and took it back.

Put Wall Street out of work and have the bankers work the farms out there in rural Conneticut and NJ and NY. It'll be good for them, put some hair on their chest and give them Real World Experience (tm)

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

#306

Post by Schlagbohrer »

fakedang wrote: post #122
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #46

It's impressive that somehow, as if by coincidence, we're seeing the biggest inflationary drivers for decades, perhaps for centuries, all happening simultaneously. The Iran war is spiking the price of oil and will likely cause shortages of pretty much everything if it isn't ended. The Ukraine war is helping with that by destroying Russian refining capacity. The memory shortage is set to do the same to consumer electr…

> And farms are failing. Climate change will accelerate that, so there will be food shortages within a few years. This is the key one to watch out for. Prior food-based conflicts have sparked revolutions and civil wars. People can tolerate not having electricity, people can tolerate not having internet, people can tolerate not having gas. But a lack of food, due to a wheat shortage which in turn was sparked by Siberi…

Coffee crops have already been failing the last few years due to global warming, and now with the fertilizer crisis that is hitting major coffee producers hard this year (Kenya, Ethiopia, Indonesia, all famous for coffee and all dependent on Gulf fertilizer).

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

#307

Post by ksec »

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…

$20B a single Fab. And you don't just have one Fab. You need multiple. And again I have to state this every time, the most expensive Fab is empty Fab. You need to fill it, and you need to fill constant and consistently for years.

>but it seems they'd be a prime candidate to spin up their own memory fab.

They will be the prime candidate to work with memory makers for additional capacity. Not to start their own one. Here is a $20B cheque and 5 years guarantee of orders. Go and make me some memory for his price.

I mean this is the same story for iPod and NAND. It seems we are repeating what we should have learned.

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

#308

Post by Schlagbohrer »

Havoc wrote: post #239

Amused by all the comments about optimisation. If anything the vibe coding era will lead to the opposite

Dude I will just include a skills.md for optimisation, and include a line in my prompt saying "also make the code really well optimized". Problem Solved sunglasses emoji

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

#309

Post by tw04 »

ksec wrote: post #307
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…

$20B a single Fab. And you don't just have one Fab. You need multiple. And again I have to state this every time, the most expensive Fab is empty Fab. You need to fill it, and you need to fill constant and consistently for years. >but it seems they'd be a prime candidate to spin up their own memory fab. They will be the prime candidate to work with memory makers for additional capacity. Not to start their own one. He…

You needed to fill it constantly in the “old times” when memory was ubiquitous and cheap to justify the finance payments on the debt you incurred to build it.

When you’re Apple and can build it with cash, and ram is currently so insane it saves you a decade of memory price gouging in a single year, the math changes quickly.

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

#310

Post by Schlagbohrer »

LatencyKills wrote: post #291
sokoloff wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would have happened five years ago? I suspect this VP would have gone entirely without analysis tools for these datasets or would have a department of people slowly grinding away at his long list of tickets, tickets that were poorly specified and hard to get clarity on because by the time they were worked on, he’d lost some of the context of his original request. Now, he makes small apps that scratch his own itc…

He didn't even know that there was a solution to the performance issues. He simply assumed that processing data took that long. I think it is great that he now has this capability, but a total ignorance of software engineering is going to continually bite this type of user. Instead of questioning Claude's solution, my friend thought he just needed a faster computer. He was also using very sketchy Python imports when…

Finding out that one's boss cannot estimate work time is a blessing if an engineer is wise enough to use that. "Yes boss, this task will take me all of June to do" (finish it in two days, enjoy a relaxing June)
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