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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

#451

Post by MichaelZuo »

state_less wrote: post #432
Analemma_ wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's a bit surprising many here are referencing the memory supply cycles without mentioning this revolutionary new application for memory people call AI. It'd be like talking about weather cycles and climate without mentioning global warming. Just like the planet is not going to get colder on average than it was for the foreseeable future, we're not going to need less memory for the foreseeable future. China is tryin…

If this future is so certain… where are the customers (non HBM) willing to sign a 10 year contract paying up front?

Even taking bank loans at a 10% rate to pay (maybe even 15%) upfront would still make sense.

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

#452

Post by fredoralive »

aurareturn wrote: post #7

The MacBook Pro on which I’m writing this piece needs memory that can keep up with a powerful processor running many programs at once: so it uses a standard called DDR, “double data rate,” which runs at a reasonably high voltage and offers high bandwidth. The processor on my iPhone is less powerful, so it needs less data at any given moment; but voltage matters enormously, since every milliwatt allocated to memory is…

The early 2005 PowerBook G4 was the last pro notebook with DDR surely, as the MacBook Pro your referring to seems to use DDR4.

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

#453

Post by xbmcuser »

s08148692 wrote: post #228
xbmcuser wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of this is a lie high prices for equipment has a lot to do with monopolies in the whole supply chain and one of the major reason I am rooting for China to get parity on node as that would mean it would have been able to break all the monopolies and we get competition on the whole production from uv machines, wafer, on equipment for storing etc. Renewables are rapidly taking the world to very cheap or free energy…

China becoming self sufficient in chip fab could be the trigger point for WW3 so lets not root too hard

no we already are going to a world war with the pedophile president and parliament (for some reason people like to pretend he is the only one in the epstein files) being controlled by a mass child murdering prime minister of a racist apartheid country they will attack Iran again and start the world war.

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

#454

Post by mjh2539 »

gib444 wrote: post #397
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 AI causing electricity infrastructure price rises for domestic consumers - aka forced indirect investment in AI companies. Oops, sorry, wrongthink, I mean "due to the war in the Middle East", even though a large majority of gas in the UK comes from elsewhere (gas and electricity prices in the UK are supposedly very tightly coupled ?)

If Malaysia can't obtain 30% of its fuel because of the Hormuz closure, they don't just reduce their consumption of fuel by 30%, but make up for most of the deficit by buying it for a higher price somewhere else. But the fuel they buy to make up for the deficit simply means there's less fuel for other folks buying in that market to purchase, which drives up prices. This process repeats until prices stabilize worldwide, which ultimately results in higher prices for fuel in the UK.

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

#455

Post by crote »

strangegecko wrote: post #442
d3rockk wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Except the "profit that is mathematically impossible" part. That's just made up and false. It's entirely possible that we are actually underestimating demand, and there is going to be tons of profit. JP Morgan says $650 billion in annual revenue required to deliver mere 10% return on AI buildout is equivalent to $35 payment from every iPhone user, or $180 from every Netflix subscriber 'in perpetuity.' Very, very, ve…

Did they consider that profits on the build out won't be uniform, i. e. there will be some companies that go under but the rest of them will capture the profit?

Some companies going under doesn't change anything about the market as a whole.

If the demand is real and the company just sucked, their users and infrastructure will end up at a competitor: the value for that one company is bigger, but the overall per-user bill remains about the same.

If the demand is fake the infrastructure will be sold off at a big loss, allowing new companies to enter the market with far smaller investment costs, allowing them to undercut the competition, driving down the price users expect to pay for compute, resulting in a race to the bottom between the remaining AI companies in an attempt to attract enough users that their hardware won't sit idle - which in turn makes it far less likely that they'll be able to hit those revenue figures. And a bunch of investors just lost a few billion dollars, of course.

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

#456

Post by Shog9 »

crazygringo wrote: post #436
pjdesno wrote: post #427

Jatin Malek on Twitter had perhaps the best explanation of the DRAM crunch: "The reason why RAM has become four times more expensive is that a huge amount of RAM that has not yet been produced was purchased with non-existent money to be installed in GPUs that also have not yet been produced, in order to place them in data centers that have not yet been built, powered by infrastructure that may never appear, to satisf…

That's just a snarky way to describe all business investment that requires purchasing things made in the future. It's entirely normal. You could literally rewrite the quote to be about iron and about building railroads for trains and passengers that don't exist yet. See how silly that would be? Except the "profit that is mathematically impossible" part. That's just made up and false. It's entirely possible that we ar…

Uh... The history of railroads is littered with folks losing their investments for exactly this reason.

Was your point that owning the steel companies is the path to riches even when most of the railroads fail?

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

#457

Post by croes »

crazygringo wrote: post #436
pjdesno wrote: post #427

Jatin Malek on Twitter had perhaps the best explanation of the DRAM crunch: "The reason why RAM has become four times more expensive is that a huge amount of RAM that has not yet been produced was purchased with non-existent money to be installed in GPUs that also have not yet been produced, in order to place them in data centers that have not yet been built, powered by infrastructure that may never appear, to satisf…

That's just a snarky way to describe all business investment that requires purchasing things made in the future. It's entirely normal. You could literally rewrite the quote to be about iron and about building railroads for trains and passengers that don't exist yet. See how silly that would be? Except the "profit that is mathematically impossible" part. That's just made up and false. It's entirely possible that we ar…

Where does the money for that profit come from?

Who buys anything made by AI if he could do it by AI themselves?

Who can afford AI if their customers do with AI what they do?

Who creates the next man made code needed as training data to prevent model collapse?

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

#458

Post by ajb »

twoodfin wrote: post #259
ajb wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's true that the current pension provision depends on this. But if pensions are mainly funded by companies which extract monopoly rent, then it would actually be more efficient and be less distortionary to the competitive market to fund them directly out of taxation - one big, simple rent instead of 100,000 different ones clogging everything up.

Are US retirement accounts largely growing on the back of “companies which extract monopoly rent”? That seems outlandish. My iPhone isn’t “rent”, neither is an Nvidia GPU, or an Instagram ad.

The argument works at the margin as well, though. Suppose companies deliver value X and also extract rent Y, and defend Y on the basis that it would threaten the value of pensions to prevent it - this is rebutted in the same way.

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

#459

Post by croes »

strangegecko wrote: post #442
d3rockk wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Except the "profit that is mathematically impossible" part. That's just made up and false. It's entirely possible that we are actually underestimating demand, and there is going to be tons of profit. JP Morgan says $650 billion in annual revenue required to deliver mere 10% return on AI buildout is equivalent to $35 payment from every iPhone user, or $180 from every Netflix subscriber 'in perpetuity.' Very, very, ve…

Did they consider that profits on the build out won't be uniform, i. e. there will be some companies that go under but the rest of them will capture the profit?

And the rest still bought RAM, GPU and datacenters.

What a giant waste of resources that are missing elsewhere

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

#460

Post by twoodfin »

ajb wrote: post #458
twoodfin wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are US retirement accounts largely growing on the back of “companies which extract monopoly rent”? That seems outlandish. My iPhone isn’t “rent”, neither is an Nvidia GPU, or an Instagram ad.

The argument works at the margin as well, though. Suppose companies deliver value X and also extract rent Y, and defend Y on the basis that it would threaten the value of pensions to prevent it - this is rebutted in the same way.

I don’t get the point you’re trying to make.

What if X >> Y? Why should we think otherwise?

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