Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

davidoks.blog

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

371–380 of 682 posts

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

#371

Post by deltoidmaximus »

ngcazz wrote: post #245
21asdffdsa12 wrote: post #243

I find this deeply ironic, the revolutionary product is eating the devices the consumer who where supposed to use it on. Saturn is hungry!

I feel like this has just accelerated what was the ideal scenario all along: high hardware prices push more people to rent

From an outside view OpenAI buying all that raw RAM certainly looked like they were buying it mostly to prevent anyone else from using it more than that they had an immediate need. I recall a Microsoft exec complaining that many of the GPUs they purchased were just sitting in a warehouse as they didn't have the power supply to actually do anything with them.

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

#372

Post by mmmlinux »

ceejayoz wrote: post #353
sokoloff wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what world would 256GB of RAM be “entry level”?

In the same world 8GB used to be unfathomably huge not that long ago? Hell, an 8GB hard drive was unfathomable when I was a kid in the 90s. I remember getting a 30 megabyte drive for our Mac LC.

And that Mac LC only had a max of 10MB of ram.

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

#373

Post by CamperBob2 »

hackyhacky wrote: post #51
CamperBob2 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? What other systems are better at lifting people out of poverty (without killing a few tens of millions in the process?) There are so many other places where this sort of low-effort high-school edgelording fits in better than here.

> There are so many other places where this sort of low-effort high-school edgelording fits in better than here. A good sign of low-effort edgelording is championing an obviously broken system by using a straw man to disparage the alternatives.

[dead]

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

#374

Post by dyauspitr »

mr_toad wrote: post #75
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…

> This is why China is eating the West. Nothing to do with cheap labour.

No, we’re past the cheap labor. They’ve already taken the lead on 3-D printing, drones, robotics, are very close to making their own CPUs and GPUs, their lead on EV cars is pretty much unassailable, they’re in the process of building an electrostate with 100% redundancy and dirt cheap electricity, their bullet trains are on par with Japan’s, they are supplying the entire world with everything solar. I could go on and on. China has arrived and all our geriatric government cares about is creating a white ethnostate and propping up oil and gas companies.

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

#375

Post by hackyhacky »

sophrosyne42 wrote: post #370
hackyhacky wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But "capitalism" in its historical and practical meaning means nothing other than commerce, i.e. the society based exchange, the system of production based on exchange Completely wrong. Many of my comments here distinguish commerce from capitalism. Commerce, ie the exchange of goods and services, has existed longer than civilization. Even some animals do it. Capitalism is specifically the substitution of labor with…

Every socialist tries to make this distinction and falls to their own guillotine. You do realize that "substitute with" is merely a synonym for "exchange"? The exchange of labor, to be sure, has existed nearly as long as civilization itself, perhaps longer, as all people cooperate by exchange through the division of labor right down to the family, and it is exchange whether the articles to be exchanged are money or p…

This argument does not make any sense.

I have no problem with the concept of money. Commerce always the exchange of good and services, including on a symbolic level: as you point out, affection, money, etc. "Money" is not the distinguishing factor between commerce and capitalism.

At the risk of repeating myself: the distinction is how wealth is acquired. Capitalism allows one to acquire wealth merely by possessing capital, which in turn engenders unlimited capacity to acquire more capital. Capital is unique among all those systems for that reason.

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

#376

Post by Aerroon »

gblargg wrote: post #172
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.

I wonder if this is actually true in the long-term though. If they were to flood the market with lots of high capacity memory, then I think our programs would start using more memory too. As a result we might end up needing more memory faster compared to if they keep demand unmet.

Just consider that a chat application today takes more memory than a full 3D game with thousands of users (including chat) + the operating system used to ~20 years ago. If 128 GB of RAM were the norm then there's a chance we might expect to buy 128 GB of RAM too.

But I suppose it's really a question of how many dollars we expect to spend on memory rather than the specific amounts of memory.

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

#377

Post by CamperBob2 »

hackyhacky wrote: post #118
ivewonyoung wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A country where production, wages, and ownership are decided centrally can hardly be said to be unfettered capitalism. The reforms in China I listed heavily cut down on that. Are you claiming that China is somehow less capitalistic now compared to 1976? By your metric the US isn't capitalistic because NASA and various govt agencies and entitlements worth trillions of dollars a year of taxes exist.

Please avoid straw man arguments. I didn't say that China didn't use capitalism: I said that it didn't use unfettered capitalism. Its capitalism is strongly tinged by its authoritarian rule with the explicit goal of reducing poverty. The US, like China, continues to use a mixed approach to economic management in the form of regulated capitalism . The degree of regulation in the US has been declining since the 1950s,…

On the subject of straw men, there is no such thing as "unfettered capitalism." That is something you invented to support your argument.

Put another way, capitalism, like communism, is one of those pure ideologies that has never really been given a fair shake. In fact, human nature rules out the possibility of a fair trial for any pure ideology. We are political creatures, not ideological ones. If you really are beyond your high-school years, as your account age suggests, this should be obvious.

Unsurprisingly, the most successful systems are those that have proven to be better at meeting human nature on its own terms. Hence the triumph of capitalism as it is practiced today, which for all its flaws has the advantage that you don't have threaten people at gunpoint to force them to engage in it.

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

#378

Post by frm88 »

JuniperMesos wrote: post #127
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…

I own FAANG stock because I own the S&P 500 in my retirement accounts, and so do managed pension funds. There's a lot more than billionaires who benefit from FAANG shares going up in value.

Aren't you worried about the circle-funding these companies indulge in when your pnsion depends on it? For example Nvidias's dubious deals with Huangs charity? If something goes sideways there, $5T are at stake: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUbJDrL6ZfM

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

#379

Post by nickpp »

yuriks wrote: post #289
inglor_cz wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Staffing problems are absolutely everywhere, regardless of the particular healthcare system or even political system. Czechia, the UK, China, Japan. It seems to be a global trend, much like falling birthrates.

I mean, yeah, that was the point of my original reply: health care, education and housing have been getting less accessible in general, not just that poster's country. (Or wherever they're from. I checked the comment history and it seems to be 90% talking back to people criticizing capitalism/markets. Wouldn't be my preferred hobby of choice, personally.)

Not a hobby, but a duty. I lived under both systems and I do not wish the horrors I’ve seen in my youth onto my children. Although at this point, it’s probably unavoidable. It seems that some lessons can only be learned by experiencing them, no warning is ever enough: Russia, communism.

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

#380

Post by hackyhacky »

sokoloff wrote: post #358
hackyhacky wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment does not address the (imho reasonable) criticism that the described system incentivizes gambling as the key to wealth, rather than labor. There are many problems with a gambling based economy, not least among them that over a long enough time line, all the money ends in very few hands.

I don’t view long-term investing in productive companies as anything close to gambling.

Which is fine, except that one can't know in advance which companies will continue to be productive..that's why it's gambling.
Post reply on HN