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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

#401

Post by ethbr1 »

sokoloff wrote: post #345
ethbr1 wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If 256GB of RAM enables them to run on-device AI models that (for reasons) are a key feature differentiator? Personally, I think there's no way memory heavy inference moves on-device (vs cloud) due to the economics, but it's not impossible technology + platforms go that way for currently unforeseeable reasons.

Right. I’m not arguing that Apple wouldn’t offer a 256GB model if they could make money doing it; I’m puzzled as to why they wouldn’t offer several lower-spec models as the entry-level into and then progressive upgrades within that line, since only some people need that 256GB feature differentiator of running frontier-level models on their MacBook Pro.

And I'm saying, if 256GB of memory is a requirement for running customer-expected local models (and local models are preferred for some reason).

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

#402

Post by lmz »

galangalalgol wrote: post #357
sarchertech wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The solution to threats to global economic integration is to address the threats to global economic integration. So permanent world peace. That sounds much easier.

Amd it isn't only geopolitical threats we have to worry about. The world's hard disk supply disappeared with a tsunami in Thailand. Taiwan is vulnerable to those and earthquakes. Efficiency and robustness are at odds and we are leaning too far towards efficiency. Even if China hadn't been so large it could absorb the costs of capturing the world's entire manufacturing base with subsidies, centralizing that much has r…

Thailand was flooding, not tsunamis.

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

#403

Post by ethbr1 »

everforward wrote: post #396
ethbr1 wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If 256GB of RAM enables them to run on-device AI models that (for reasons) are a key feature differentiator? Personally, I think there's no way memory heavy inference moves on-device (vs cloud) due to the economics, but it's not impossible technology + platforms go that way for currently unforeseeable reasons.

I think there’s a realistic chance consumer inference moves on-device. I think it really depends on marketing. My non-tech friends and family would probably be served perfectly fine by local models today, if they had a working web search tool. Their queries are often “soft” and don’t have an exact answer. My mom and aunt used it to pick a hairstyle, my mom used it to get an image of what a room would look like with p…

The economic argument in favor of cloud inference: higher utilization is always going to have a ROI for inference hardware.

But maybe that hardware becomes so commoditized that it's not difficult to obtain / stuff in a box.

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

#404

Post by everforward »

Aerroon wrote: post #391
hackyhacky wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The people making profits are the ones providing food, shelter, and phones to you. I'm not worried about the guy making my sandwich at the corner deli. He's entitled to my money because he provides a valuable service. I am worried about the owner of FoodCo, who plays golf all day while his employees run the company. He provides literally no service to anyone at all, but makes more money than any employee. He then u…

Why doesn't a small village have a supermarket? If it's small enough then it won't have any store at all. Why? Because the business doesn't make enough money to justify it and the consequence of this is that none of the inhabitants of that village can "just go to the store to buy some milk". They either need to plan weeks or months worth of shopping in advance or have access to transport that can take them to a town…

> The owner of FoodCo put in a lot of their money upfront to make the company happen in the first place. Your deli guy wouldn't have a job if the FoodCo guy hadn't done what he did.

This is blatantly untrue in the face of even a cursory thought. If the deli didn’t exist, that worker would have done any number of other jobs. Subsistence farming, doing deli stuff out of his house, maybe even community funding a coop grocery store.

That was how things worked at many points in human history. Instead of “private citizen makes $thing and collects rent” it was some variety of “municipality funds $thing for the community”. That just doesn’t extrapolate to a global economy well, for better or worse.

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

#405

Post by j45 »

Aerroon wrote: post #376
gblargg wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Lots of people have bought baseline 32/64 GB ram in their laptops for a long time (the last few laptops).

Applications can be lazy and grow to the amount of resources using, but the real need for maximum ram is using it for these new purposes.

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

#406

Post by everforward »

Linosaurus wrote: post #179
richforrester wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

“Late-stage capitalism” is the normal term for expressing a belief that capitalism tends to eat itself over a long enough time horizon.

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

#407

Post by Analemma_ »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #265
officialchicken wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, except no DRAM maker is taking this as a signal to go deep... Incorrect. CXMT is taking this as a signal to open new fabs, create new products, develop new silicon manufacturing techniques, and enter the consumer market worldwide (except USA).

Isn’t that the point? Everyone knows the commodity market (outside HBM) is going to be margin crushed within a few years… by CXMT, demand swings, and so on. So nobody cares to fully meet the demand today. They are perfectly happy telling customers (those not willing to sign a 10 year contract paying up front at least) to go pound sand. They don’t even need an OPEC like arrangement. They are effectively perfectly coor…

Yes, there are a bunch of bizarre comments in here. "Why aren't they rushing to make more fabs? Don't they know China is using this moment to the enter the market in a big way?" Yes, they do! And building more fabs would make that worse. The last thing you want to do before a state-backed player enters the market in a boom cycle is load up on debt to produce more capacity just before the bust.

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

#408

Post by trollbridge »

sokoloff wrote: post #261
spockz wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only reason I can see Apple do this is if it enables them to sell entry level devices with vastly more ram than the competition can afford. Say entry level MacBook Pro with 256GiB ram to facilitate running frontier level local models. If that is an edge they want to have.

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

The same world where a MacBook Pro G4 12" came base level with 256MB of RAM.

The same world where a classic Mac came with 128KB of RAM.

We might someday live in a world where entry-level is 256TB of RAM.

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

#409

Post by bitmasher9 »

ponector wrote: post #287
nuancebydefault wrote: post #180

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 ph…

Unless you can use apps created 10 years ago the is no sense to produce phones with old specs. Think of desktop, browser and electron applications. No way one can comfortable run modern software on 2015 machine. Maybe Linux could help, but anyway

My initial reaction was that old compute levels are probably good enough for modern applications, but after thinking through all of the common use cases you’re probably right.

I think it’s AV that makes the difference. The modern smartphone does a ton of processing on the image sensor, and the modern laptop is expected to output multiple 4k video signals (zoom camera + desktop sharing) while accepting multiple video signals, without dropping below 120hz.

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

#410

Post by trollbridge »

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.

The first computer I ever used had 512K, which was a great deal back then, and by the time I was old enough to learn to type it had 10MB disk too.

My childhood best friend and neighbour had the same kind of computer except they only had something like 384K of memory and I tried to convince them their computer was broken when it didn't count up all the way.

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