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2027 memory capacity is reportedly sold out

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Re: 2027 memory capacity is reportedly sold out

#171

Post by zahlman »

ZoomZoomZoom wrote: post #57
amelius wrote: post #17

How am I going to buy a computer that connects to AI datacenters now?

Don't worry. Sooner or later this stuff will be mandatory and you'll be obligated to get your state-issued terminal. Social credits will do, if you have no money. For the skeptical ones: Somewhere people are already being cut off from state and financial institutions without proprietary software with bundled security certificates, applications are bound to collect data on the environment they are used in (other apps)…

> For the skeptical ones

The words after this point make you less convincing, not more, as they only serve to confirm the egregious slippery slope of your reasoning.

Re: 2027 memory capacity is reportedly sold out

#173

Post by zahlman »

gaigalas wrote: post #50
AdamN wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lines that would have made consumer-level stuff are being reduced in favor of the higher profit margin/demand products. That means more supply of those other products (but still not enough) and lower supply of the consumer-level stuff (driving up prices).

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…

> Isn't DDR4 like, old and obsolete?

I'm posting this from a machine that uses DDR3 and is still perfectly capable of meeting my needs.

Re: 2027 memory capacity is reportedly sold out

#174

Post by odo1242 »

inigyou wrote: post #109
ghtbircshotbe wrote: post #80

The 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).

CXMT is now producing as much as one of the big three. Only for China, of course.

They are producing about a third of what Micron (smallest of big three) produces, and plan on being on par with them in ~4 years.

Re: 2027 memory capacity is reportedly sold out

#175

Post by vannevar »

bob1029 wrote: post #141

One unit of HBM capacity consumes roughly the wafer capacity that could have produced three units of DDR5 capacity. HBM dies need to be larger than ordinary DRAM dies because of how the final packaging works. > As discussed previously, the ramp of HBM production will constrain industry supply growth in non-HBM products. Industrywide, HBM3E consumes approximately three times the wafer supply as D5 to produce a given n…

>As the memory industry is still recovering from the challenging environment in 2023, this tight supply environment will help drive the considerable improvements in profitability and ROI (return on investment) that are needed to enable the investments required to support future growth.

The problem is that they need actual chips tomorrow. I fear we are reaching the point in the semiconductor industry where, in order to sustain the revenue growth propping up their valuations, they're going to have to start selling future chips that cannot possibly be physically produced.

Re: 2027 memory capacity is reportedly sold out

#176

Post by eek2121 »

1970-01-01 wrote: post #158

Seems like we need a USB equivalent standard to RAM sticks. I have lots and lots of old (1-2GB), intercompatible sticks sitting. Sometimes you just need the space and not the speed.

No, we absolutely do not: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB

For starters, The slowest sticks of DDR(x) are often slower than DDR(x-1). The issue is never capacity, but rather, performance.

The real nonsense? USB? It's a mess. Pick a USB cable and buy it from ANY retailer, let's make it easier, buy a USB-C cable. What is the data rate (depends on cable quality and length), Does it support power delivery? If so, how many watts? (~5W requires a very different cable from ~230W), how do you know from simply looking at the cable? If you buy a cable, how can you tell what it supports by simply looking at the connector? Imagine having a box full of USB-C cables. Could you tell me how fast each of those cables are? (The cables themselves don't! Many don't have any markngs at all, and if they do, the markings could be fraudulent)

RAM does not have that issue. A stick fits or it doesn't. Sure, there are a huge range of speeds, however, that range has a ballpark (JEDEC defines the ballpark, the "cartels" make the memory and push out some faster stuff).

While there are definite exceptions (I was bitten by one recently), you can generally plug in a DDR5 DIMM and expect it to work in the system.

The same cannot be said for USB. Some USB cables ONLY deliver power. Some only work with certain devices. I've USB-C (!!!) cables that only work with the devices they are shipped with, and even more annoyingly, the both may be true! ASUS (!!!) ships MOTHERBOARDS that can only pair with vital hardware via very specific USB-C cables (Strix Hive) and "GLORIOUS" ain't so glorious. Their mouses warn you not to use other USB-C cables, and they are right, depending on the make/model/generation, you can brick your "glorious" peripheral.

No, USB nonsense needs to stay far away from anything else.

Also, the reason this is a huge issue is because the memory makers are cartels. Only a few of them exist, they gang up and bully EVERYONE and nobody has ever invested money to create a competitor due to this, except China, which of course means that the U.S. and portions of the E.U. are insta-banning/trying to insta-ban, even though it is really freaking hard to install spyware on a memory module.

Re: 2027 memory capacity is reportedly sold out

#177

Post by odo1242 »

Pavilion2095 wrote: post #113
pessimizer wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They were supposed to optimize for the situation in which they weren't the only program running on a computer, and they failed to do it.

Can you blame them? Users didn't care. Heck, developers didn't care - look at how popular vscode is.

Honestly, despite being Electron VSCode manages to outspeed every other editor on my machine (by qualitative metrics), even stuff like Zed (which manages to lag on stuff VSCode doesn’t despite performance being its main selling point)

Re: 2027 memory capacity is reportedly sold out

#178

Post by Aurornis »

rickydroll wrote: post #99
apple4ever wrote: post #92

This is why I'm so hesitant to use AI. There are other reasons (for example: the journey is the fun part, not the destination; and I want to learn not have something done for me), but the pressure AI puts on memory and storage is too much for me. I do use it occasionally, mostly to keep tabs on it and for small problem solving (how do I do this one piece of a query in MySQL, since I'm not a MySQL DBA), but that's it…

Unfortunately, I can't not use AI because it provides the best speech recognition I've ever used and, going along with hand problems, it now allows me to write code after a three-year absence from that skill. I do miss it. I'd never do it again professionally in the large, but I have missed writing code a lot. My solution is to see what four or five-year-old equipment I can buy that will let me run local LLMs. I may…

> IMO, Migrating to small-scale local LLMs would be a significant improvement over using data centers.

LLM serving is most efficient when you batch a lot of parallel requests together. Data center solutions also have the advantage of collecting queries from around the globe, so the hardware can be utilized around the clock.

Having everyone serve their own local LLMs would produce a lot more memory demand. Not less. The same memory would be idle most of the time, and when it was used it would be used for 1 person instead of a batch of requests.

There are other reasons to run local LLMs, but solving hardware demand problems is not one of them.

Re: 2027 memory capacity is reportedly sold out

#179

Post by [deleted] »

beloch wrote: post #60

AI companies would do well to realize that civil disobedience is a thing. Take what's currently happening to Flock cameras as an object lesson. People are so fed up with Flock that they're cutting their cameras down en masse, sometimes wiping them clean from entire jurisdictions. Tens of thousands of other people in those jurisdictions are cheering them on, even offering alibis for them before they've been caught. La…

[deleted]

Re: 2027 memory capacity is reportedly sold out

#180

Post by IncreasePosts »

compiler-devel wrote: post #106
shepherdjerred wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK I’ll take the bait. Were devs supposed to optimize RAM for a shortage that might come? I’m guessing you had enough foresight to stockpile RAM?

What’s implied here is that devs were supposed to optimize for user resources, not for developer convenience.

Maybe we can have AI rewrite those programs and optimize for low ram usage
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