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

631–640 of 682 posts

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

#631

Post by pseudohadamard »

Aurornis wrote: post #607
Aerroon wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

We already had that. Memory prices got really low for a while. If there are too many companies with too much capacity they’re forced to race to the bottom until one of them collapses and reduces supply.

Yup, see my previous boom-and-bust comment. In particular vendors will remember the price crash in 2022/23, the industry only recovered once the AI mania set in. There'd been another boom around 2020/21 when supply-chain panics meant hyperscalers bought up huge inventories, and just before that another low around 2019. So the current situation is standard pre-bust behaviour.

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

#632

Post by lmz »

try-working wrote: post #603
lmz wrote: post #602

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article has examples from history of overexpansion and crashes. Would rapidly expanding (or keeping profits lower(??)) be beneficial long term for the Big 3? I bet they think it's better to bank the surplus now. The Chinese will have to get their investment back somehow too after the expansion spend.

Well, they're about to lose massive market share to CXMT and YMTC.

If they're screwed either way then the rational solution is to bank the extra cash. Then at least they would have cash at the end of it. If they are production constrained how would reducing profits help in any way?

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

#633

Post by illiac786 »

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.

How does that work in practice though? There’s a central “RAM Oversight Council” that checks that no one sells too much?

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

#634

Post by jech »

mrandish wrote: post #474
trollbridge wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> The first computer I ever used had 512K Mine had 4K of RAM and an 800 KHz CPU - and I was living in the future , man. No way I could use that much memory. After all I had to type in whatever program I wanted to run every time I turned it on. Then I got a manual audio cassette recorder and thought "Woah, I don't think it gets better than this!"

> Then I got a manual audio cassette recorder and thought "Woah, I don't think it gets better than this!"

That's not how I remember it. By the time we got data cassettes, we knew very well that floppies were the future.

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

#636

Post by handle584 »

xbmcuser wrote: post #609
handle584 wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t get the example, any payment in China is basically a duopoly between WeChat and Alipay, meanwhile in US there are visa, mastercard, American Express and discover counting credit card payment only.

In the US, Visa and Mastercard control the backend infrastructure, giving them the power to decide who can use their services. This is why we see them blocking legal platforms or creators simply because a corporate board disagrees with what they are selling. In China, this kind of corporate driven censorship doesn't happen. Tech corporations like WeChat and Alipay don't control the payment routing that is run by the…

Exactly as the other comment pointed out, in China you would not run such a business to begin with, let alone to be blocked later by payment processors.

By legal platforms or creators I suppose you mean the dispute between card processors and platforms like steam, pixiv, dslite, etc about nsfw contents like anime child porn? Those stuff are already banned in China long time ago.

To give a real example of how China bans stuff, take ByteDance as an example. It used to run a joke sharing app roughly translates into Subtle Jokes that is on par with TikTok in terms of popularity. Then one day CCP decided it did not like it, then poof it's gone overnight. The founder issued a public apology and promised to almost double their censorship department in the future. Comparing to the TikTok case in the US, we got what? The funny-yet-pathetic legal tic-tac-toeing of Singaporean-not-Chinese nonsense. There is just fundamental difference in the scale and efficiency of censorship.

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

#637

Post by ksec »

tw04 wrote: post #309
ksec wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$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.

>and ram is currently so insane it saves you a decade of memory price gouging in a single year, the math changes quickly.

Apple is not paying the same insane price most people / other players are paying.

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

#638

Post by zargon »

illiac786 wrote: post #633
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.

How does that work in practice though? There’s a central “RAM Oversight Council” that checks that no one sells too much?

There are only 3 memory manufacturers. They just quietly follow the same strategy. They learned not to talk about it from the last time they were fined for antitrust price fixing in the 2000s.

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

#639

Post by illiac786 »

zargon wrote: post #638
illiac786 wrote: post #633

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does that work in practice though? There’s a central “RAM Oversight Council” that checks that no one sells too much?

There are only 3 memory manufacturers. They just quietly follow the same strategy. They learned not to talk about it from the last time they were fined for antitrust price fixing in the 2000s.

ouch. That’s indeed a problem.

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

#640

Post by zargon »

lmz wrote: post #632
try-working wrote: post #603

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, they're about to lose massive market share to CXMT and YMTC.

If they're screwed either way then the rational solution is to bank the extra cash. Then at least they would have cash at the end of it. If they are production constrained how would reducing profits help in any way?

We wouldn't be switching to Chinese manufactured memory if Korean & US memory wasn't exorbitantly priced. They're forcing the switch.
Post reply on HN