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Memory has grown to nearly two-thirds of AI chip component costs
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Re: Memory has grown to nearly two-thirds of AI chip component costs
#82Bought a second hand Dell server a week ago. The entire rig with a 12-core CPU and 32GB DDR4 ecc RAM cost as much as I'd pay to buy 64 GB of DDR RAM alone. I hope there's an end to this absurdity soon enough otherwise the pain will affect other markets too. I read the other day that PC case sales have collapsed by more than 40%.
I feel like by the time the AI bubble bursts the PC market will be irreparably damaged. Manufactures who have been making "enterprise" parts aren't going to go back to making consumer parts because there will be no market for it. And with a glut of datacenters not making any money on slop, they are going to be repurposed for saas, stuff like OnShape but for every application. Most users don't seem to care about stori…
They’re going to pivot to you renting desktop cloud compute instead of owning anything.
Re: Memory has grown to nearly two-thirds of AI chip component costs
#83Why did this happen so suddenly? Why were tech savy investors unable to figure this out when the datacenter craze had already started? How to explain this lag between quickly rising demand for all datacenter components besides memory?
The same reason they didn’t all sell everything to buy NVIDIA the day chatGPT came out
Re: Memory has grown to nearly two-thirds of AI chip component costs
#84Awful time for gamers and PC hobbyists not fully into AI.
This is 100% going to kill the home built pc market. When I started building gaming pcs, the top top card was 750$ (NZD). Now they’re 10,000 just for the gpu and another 1-2000 for ram. People used to get into gaming pcs as an affordable hobby, now it’s making general aviation look like plan B.
Indeed, Gamers Nexus is doing interviews with PC component manufacturers, and some are hurting bad right now. The PC market is no longer in competition, but rather survival mode. =3
Re: Memory has grown to nearly two-thirds of AI chip component costs
#85It's still unclear to me: the shortage is semiconductor boules / wafers? or the shortage is semiconductor fab process step availability? As long as the discussion seems focused on memory, I'd suspect the latter, but if its really the semiconductor boules/wafers, then I'd expect the boule growers to profit, not the memory makers, who just pass on the cost. So which is it?
There is a good article (featured on HN a couple of days ago) that explains the issue: https://davidoks.blog/p/ai-is-killing-the-cheap-smartphone
Re: Memory has grown to nearly two-thirds of AI chip component costs
#86Why did this happen so suddenly? Why were tech savy investors unable to figure this out when the datacenter craze had already started? How to explain this lag between quickly rising demand for all datacenter components besides memory?
Nine years after Google's seminal paper lit the fuse on AI, a total lack of manufacturing foresight has trapped over a trillion dollars of incoming capital in a hardware bottleneck. The entire sector is now facing a critical RAM starvation crisis where memory manufacturers are actively slow-rolling supply just to keep prices high and avoid running out entirely. This has created an unprecedented supply-and-demand dist…
A lot of words to say that Sam Altman bought up the worlds total supply of ram chips for the next few years.
Re: Memory has grown to nearly two-thirds of AI chip component costs
#87It's still unclear to me: the shortage is semiconductor boules / wafers? or the shortage is semiconductor fab process step availability? As long as the discussion seems focused on memory, I'd suspect the latter, but if its really the semiconductor boules/wafers, then I'd expect the boule growers to profit, not the memory makers, who just pass on the cost. So which is it?
There is a good article (featured on HN a couple of days ago) that explains the issue: https://davidoks.blog/p/ai-is-killing-the-cheap-smartphone
And that article is contradicting other voices. If that article were correctly identifying the bottleneck as wafer shortage due to switching to HBM, why is everybody discussing the memory makers instead of the boule growers. Memory makers can expand operations all they can, which makes no sense if wafer supply doesn't follow, and the article is suspicously light on semiconductor boule / wafer mfr's.
So which is the bottleneck: fabs or boule growing?
also consider how most solar panels are monocrystalline silicon, how credible is silicon wafer shortage ... really? there is so much disinformation in this market...
Re: Memory has grown to nearly two-thirds of AI chip component costs
#88Awful time for gamers and PC hobbyists not fully into AI.
This is 100% going to kill the home built pc market. When I started building gaming pcs, the top top card was 750$ (NZD). Now they’re 10,000 just for the gpu and another 1-2000 for ram. People used to get into gaming pcs as an affordable hobby, now it’s making general aviation look like plan B.
It's more likely to kill the AI market. They're overbuilding capacity and most of it is going unused. The upcoming haircut is going to kill a lot of the major players.
They've intentionally crafted an unsustainable business model in an effort to get users in the front door and raise their MAUs. We've seen this story before. We should know precisely where it's headed.
Re: Memory has grown to nearly two-thirds of AI chip component costs
#89Bought a second hand Dell server a week ago. The entire rig with a 12-core CPU and 32GB DDR4 ecc RAM cost as much as I'd pay to buy 64 GB of DDR RAM alone. I hope there's an end to this absurdity soon enough otherwise the pain will affect other markets too. I read the other day that PC case sales have collapsed by more than 40%.
Poor people are already being priced out of cheap phones due to rise in RAM-related unit costs. https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/smartphone-sales-to-plummet...
Re: Memory has grown to nearly two-thirds of AI chip component costs
#90I wonder why the hyperscalers aren't vertically integrating more and building their own fabs. Sure, a fab costs a billion dollars, but they're currently spending hundreds of billions of dollars purchasing chips from NVidia and others.
A fab takes years to build even when you have the necessary know-how. If you don't it'll take some additional experimenting before you can compete with the established manufacturers. By the time you can produce a usable chip the shortage might be over.