The fact that consumer-level DDR4 is getting more expensive makes absolutely no market sense to me.
If memory makers can fill their order books with only a single type of memory (whatever that is), then that would be preferable to them, I suppose.
2027 memory capacity is reportedly sold out
71–80 of 493 posts
Re: 2027 memory capacity is reportedly sold out
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bad times for the two-space copying garbage collectors.
Are there any of those left? The popular VMs for Java, Javascript and dotnet are all very mature heavily tuned designs.
They're heavily tuned but I think having the generational hypothesis and copying longer-lived objects is still standard? As is allowing a fair amount of garbage to accumulate to increase throughput and reduce copying at the cost of memory footprint?
Posting instead of researching in hopes someone smarter can chime in, because I'm lazy.
Re: 2027 memory capacity is reportedly sold out
#73All those devs who were saying "ram is cheap" BTFO.
https://dam.stanford.edu/memory-prices.html Pretty sure those devs were saying the same thing way before 2017 as well, which seems to be ~ the last time RAM was this expensive. Now RAM in the cloud , now you're really paying the Java premium.
According to your link, DDR5 today has the same price in real US $ as DDR3 was in 2014, during a brief spike towards high prices.
Since that peak in 2014 until today, the prices were lower than now. The peak in 2017 was more than 10% lower than today.
To reach permanently higher prices than today, we must go backwards until 2011.
So we have already regressed at least 12 years into the past, but more likely 15 years, and it is unknown how much more we will regress.
Re: 2027 memory capacity is reportedly sold out
#74[dead]
Re: 2027 memory capacity is reportedly sold out
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
True - but what is happening now is very destructive to a lot of important companies.
Indeed. There's a reason the US government has historically stopped air traffic / railroad / longshore strikes: cascading effects. If memory is now upstream of so many companies, then maybe a higher regulatory involvement would be appropriate (like power companies). Specifically, and it could fix all of this, capping the max % of their supply they're allowed to sell into the AI space.
I hear what you're saying but memory ultimately is not infrastructure, it's a commodity that's shipped over infrastructure.
The arguments for infrastructure being managed more tightly by the government is because it's a natural monopoly that everything depends on. Memory isn't a natural monopoly, if we found ourselves in a spot where we all depend on 3 companies then that's not a law of nature, we need more companies.
Re: 2027 memory capacity is reportedly sold out
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't DDR4 like, old and obsolete? From my knowledge, you can't just take a fab that produces DDR4 and make it produce DDR5 or higher. It's kind of a leap that requires replacing a lot of stuff. I would expect that old DDR4 machinery to end up somewhere else, still chugging along. Maybe someone buys the old production and keeps chugging low quality DDR4 or something. To me, it sounds like that didn't happened. Fabs t…
There is some overlap. The last DDR4 fabs were typically on a 16nm process, the first DDR5 fabs were also on a 16nm process. There shouldn't be much issue converting those 16nm DDR4 fabs to DDR5, it's really just an issue of swapping out the masks. That's assuming they haven't all already been converted years ago. Even when there isn't an overlap, moving to the next process node usually isn't so much about replacing…
[not an expert so I could be totally wrong] I was also just talking about the physical space. Even if the machines on the entire line have to be replaced it still probably makes sense for a company to transition in situ - displacing the old line. There's the lease for the land and building, people's commutes are structured around a certain physical location, air conditioning and electricity are already there, etc... It's not just the big expensive machines that make up the fabrication - it's also the entire structure that makes that production happen.
Re: 2027 memory capacity is reportedly sold out
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those are good points, but some arguments are weak: - Chatbot usage in $20 plans is likely nowhere close to a $200 cost. Inference cost has come down rapidly, with reports from July claiming OpenAI can now serve all of the logged out ChatGPT traffic on just a few hundred GPUs. - Measurable benefit: I doubt anything of value is being measured. MS Copilot with GPT 5.5 Instant processing SharePoint files? Developers usi…
>I am developing a mobile app, competing with companies with millions in revenue and entire dev teams. I know it is viable. Others lag in effective adoption, their opinion is likely to change soon with even more capable models. To add to that, as an ex-software dev that mostly works in a semi-unrelated field now (and can only code as a small part of my job): I think a lot of software devs are underestimating what som…
On a tangent, because you mentioned five years for widely used software being implemented by domain experts rather than software engineers: this seems like a very conservative timeline.
I have little doubt that a competent potato farmer could possibly implement and sell such software today using Opus 5, Fable, or 5.6 Sol.
Now what I am going to say next may sound a bit crazy, and it is outside of my area of expertise. I hear the recent mathematical breakthroughs made by GPT-6/Astra are field medal worthy discoveries.
What if the current trajectory of improvement holds for another year or two?
Is it impossible that LLMs gain superhuman ability to reason over a large number of constraints so that they can make novel breakthroughs unimaginable to us today?
What I hope to see in five years is not potato farmers writing software, but programmable immune cells that safely kill cancer.
Perhaps I am an optimist.
Re: 2027 memory capacity is reportedly sold out
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Its a way to make sure the delivery takes place. A code is sent to recipient and recipient only gives it to the delivery person once item is handed over. Delivery person cant mark item as 'done' without the code. I've seen Uber Eats do the same thing sometimes.
What’s wrong with a signature?
Sometimes I wonder if true reason behind them is not any sort of verification but to maybe increase potential punishment if caught... So effectively nothing...
Re: 2027 memory capacity is reportedly sold out
#79Amazon has implemented a password system for RAM delivery. You're supposed to give a password to the deliverer before taking delivery of the RAM, and you're not supposed to send the password over the phone at all (although the Amazon delivery guy still called me and asked for it over the phone).
can u provide some context? what is this trying to solve and how does it solve it? very curious.
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Re: 2027 memory capacity is reportedly sold out
#80The boom cycle looks like it's going to last a while, but it never lasts forever. If the current memory manufacturers all conspire to not build more capacity, I'm sure someone else will (eg China).