My own PC died and now I’m locked out of my entire Steam library for the foreseeable future. A $2000 PC is literally a downgrade from what I bought 10 freaking years ago.
What the freaking hell.
2027 memory capacity is reportedly sold out
211–220 of 484 posts
Re: 2027 memory capacity is reportedly sold out
#212We are hammering our foot by investing in AI at this point.
AI grows and grows and becomes god and kills us all.
How did it all start? Oh we invested all our money in AI.
Re: 2027 memory capacity is reportedly sold out
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Migrating to small-scale local LLMs would be a significant improvement over using data centers. This shift is probably inevitable, but it will vary significantly by region depending on prices for electricity. Look at, for example, the difference in fundamental homelab build recommendations between Germans and just about anyone else. Electricity prices in Germany are so high that even a now expensive Raspberry Pi or…
No-Load losses on the power conversion seems to be the real issue and is rarely mentioned and understood even less often. Plus the conversion eff. curve. Eg: I shaved ~40W off the idle load on a server (250->210W) by doung nothing more than removing the redundant supply
You just reminded me of a funny story about redundant power supply.
A college buddy used to work at Motorola (I'm naming the company because they wouldn't mind this story being shared) back in the late 90's or early 2000's. They had redundant power to their campus, bought from two different companies, coming in on opposite sides of the campus, so that even if some backhoe operator cut a ground-based power line somewhere, they wouldn't lose power.
And yet, one morning, the power went off all across their campus. After a little investigation, they sent pretty much all their employees home at noon and told them "take the afternoon off, don't come back until tomorrow, you wouldn't be able to do any work anyway". Turns out that although the power lines came in at opposite sides of their campus, somewhere a few miles away both of the power lines feeding their campus ended up running through the same underground conduit. And yes, a backhoe had managed to cut that conduit and break both of the lines they depended on at the same time. They had a single, VERY non-obvious, point of failure, and the backhoe had unerringly homed in on that SPoF.
Re: 2027 memory capacity is reportedly sold out
#214Queue the blog posts:
We rewrote all our Python code in Go because the RAMs too damn high!
Re: 2027 memory capacity is reportedly sold out
#215One 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…
> HBM3E consumes approximately three times the wafer supply as D5 to produce a given number of bits in the same technology node That's really interesting, and I wonder why? I believe HBM has redundant ECC bits by default, which would add a few %, but other than that, is it just that the yield is much lower due to die stacking? Of course, this is a 2024 document so things may have changed a bit since.
HBM requires stacking the chips. So they need to shave the layers, glue, stack more, shave again. They also require a substrate what is even more wafers. The issue is that a error in the stack means a lot of losses.
In order to get high bandwidth, you want memory as close as possible to the GPU. The more trace lane length = signal loss, bandwidth loss.. HBM is compact, and so you can stack 24GB modules, 8 around a GPU die.
If you tried to do that with normal memory, you need like 64 modules. So a a TON of traces more that all need to be equal length, and because so many = far away from the GPU = less bandwidth.
The issue is like stated above, its a process that waste a ton of wafers. Wafers that can make easily 3x more normal memory.
Intel with "Crescent Island" is trying to make a 160GB card using LPDDR5x memory but the bandwidth is only ~700GB/s.
Re: 2027 memory capacity is reportedly sold out
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Do you call any negative prognosis based on extrapolation of an observable downward trend a slippery slope?
Re: 2027 memory capacity is reportedly sold out
#217Seems 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.
Thats like saying I need a car with hotswappable engines. Sure. But you wouldn't want that car anymore.
Re: 2027 memory capacity is reportedly sold out
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem isn't the price. No matter how much you pay, you can't take delivery of a chip that doesn't exist. Now, you could raise prices to the point where you destroy demand. But that's a tricky window to maneuver through.
> The problem isn't the price. No matter how much you pay, you can't take delivery of a chip that doesn't exist I’m confused because this reads like a denial of basic economics. If the price is high enough, the chip will be produced for you. Do you mean because of the production lead time, higher prices won’t result in increased production? Commodities like corn have been managing this for a long time… what’s special…
Corn is heavily subsidized,also has (in the US) federally prvided insurance programs against plunging prices, has paid uselessness(ethanol). Despite all of this corn has caused massive agriculture bankruptcy/takeover when it has failed anyway.
So it's more "what's special about corn". It is also fairly hilarious to claim the parent is denying basic economics and then bring up corn as an example of having successfully managed economics. If the scales were not being thumbed, and "basic economics" were in play, corn would be in very very bad shape.
In the case of DRAM, there is an incredibly long history of these gloom/glut cycles, and they have stayed roughly the same timeframes (~3 years) since the 1990's.
Almost all the ones who have survived this long are either in the same kind of boat as corn - protected in various forms from the downside - or don't increase production and get caught out until they are absoultely forced.
The very temporarily increased profit is not worth going bankrupt for - they make more money long term by being very cautious and know this.
There are a near infinite number of economic studies you could look at (and several sibling comments cite some) - DRAM manufactuers don't chase the price and probably couldn't anymore if they want to.
None of this denies basic economic theory, of course, since economic theory is not exactly "rigorous", even to the degree it could be (IE even the parts that are pure analysis of data rarely reproduce!).
Re: 2027 memory capacity is reportedly sold out
#219Re: 2027 memory capacity is reportedly sold out
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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 t…
The alternative is they could charge more. They could. And people would pay it.
This is what consumers are always told. Prices go up as demand goes up or scarcity increases.