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2027 memory capacity is reportedly sold out

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Re: 2027 memory capacity is reportedly sold out

#251

Post by SR2Z »

DannyBee wrote: post #218
fn-mote wrote: post #202

Earlier 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 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…

I don't think that anything you said is wrong but I also don't think that memory consumption is going back to the old baseline... well, ever.

Memory is just too useful now that you can use it to drive cars and write code.

Re: 2027 memory capacity is reportedly sold out

#252

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

rock_artist wrote: post #10
tosti wrote: post #7

All those devs who were saying "ram is cheap" BTFO.

That's tech... Moore Law was steadily going until raw CPU got stuck for a few years, switching from single core to multicore then heterogeneous cpus, all those requiring to rewrite software in a scalable manner and then consider newer schedulers switching between performance/efficiency cores and changing CPU freqs. Also, you have Meta and Google investing in simplified performant versions of their stack for developin…

Moore's "Law" is not a law, it's just an observation of market forces at a particular time.

Re: 2027 memory capacity is reportedly sold out

#253

Post by doubletwoyou »

daishi55 wrote: post #241
vannevar wrote: post #190

Earlier 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.

I don’t understand how there being essentially unlimited demand for their products that far exceeds supply and is driving up prices accordingly is somehow a bad sign for the industry? > Now, you could raise prices to the point where you destroy demand. You know supply and demand is like a curve right, you can find an optimal equilibrium? It’s not a cliff that you can fall off.

It’s ideally modeled as a curve, but things are never that simple in real life.

Re: 2027 memory capacity is reportedly sold out

#254

Post by starkrights »

throwatdem12311 wrote: post #238
pdimitar wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why don't you just get a MB only for now? What mandates an entire new batch of hardware?

I’ve been pricing out my various options but the notion of replacing a 10 year old motherboard with another 10 year old motherboard is kinda lousy. The PC I replaced when I bought this one was such a huge improvement. My options basically boils down to fixing trash that’s falling apart or a sidegrade at best for the same price as what I bought a beast of a PC for 10 freaking years ago. Depressing.

10 year old is still DDR4, and ddr4 is still plenty fine for gaming workloads. AM4 still has some solid options out there, the 5800x3d has 3d vcache and would be an insane upgrade over any… quad core? 6th gen intel? Not sure what the AMD at the time was. 14th gen intel supports both ddr4/5 if you wanted the ram upgrade potential, but it… well, I remember it being pretty sketchy perf/degradation wise for a while, so maybe don’t go with them. I understand the sucky feeling that you’re sidegrading instead of investing in a new beastly rig for a reasonable price- believe me I’ve been in the same boat since all this GPU bullshit started. I got lucky choosing to upgrade to ddr5 years ago, but I elected not to get a GPU out of a lack of clairvoyance :(. Still though- I upgraded from an i7 6700k in 2023. The 5800x3d released a year prior to the CPU I picked up. Granted I went to zen 5, but holy shit I didn’t not realize how fucking old that 6700k was haha. The 3dvcache on AMD CPUs is a crazy, crazy boost- in addition to the fact that modern CPUs are already bounds and leagues ahead of 2016, and I would go to bet that even if it’s technically a sidegrade, you probably wouldn’t feel too horrible about the money spent. (I really want to say that you’d feel pretty satisfied with it it, but I can’t discount that I also jumped up to a higher tier zen 5 cpu, and don’t have explicit experience with the 5800x or other AM4 stuff. ymmv!)

Re: 2027 memory capacity is reportedly sold out

#255

Post by cortesoft »

docjay wrote: post #236
HumblyTossed wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can only make X number of widgets, you must increase the price until demand stabilizes at X.

Why must you increase the price?

The alternative is to have shortages.

If there is demand for N chips at $X price, but you only have N/2 chips, then half the people aren't going to be able to buy them. The people who really need the chips, and would be willing to pay a lot more than $X for them, will be competing with people who are only willing to pay $X for them. You will end up getting scalping and shortages and hoarding. Since people know that there are enough people willing to pay a higher price, everyone will try to buy them at $X, even if they don't need them at all. Just buy them at $X, and immediately sell it to one of those companies willing to pay a lot more.

The market is extremely inefficient... since the manufacturer isn't charging enough, you get way too many people trying to buy them from the manufacturer.

So you find the price where the demand is N/2 chips, and everyone who is willing to pay that much will get one, and there is no profit for scalpers so the only people who will buy them will be actual companies that need them.

Re: 2027 memory capacity is reportedly sold out

#256

Post by wtallis »

benjiro29 wrote: post #215
tverbeure wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 GP…

None of what you said actually explains how HBM could require 3x the wafers.

The base interface die has eight or 12 memory dies stacked on top of it. The wafer cost of that interface die is therefore small.

If the process of die thinning and TSV stacking reduced yields by a factor of three, nobody would consider HBM mature enough to put into production, and especially not mature enough to be increasing stack height from one generation to the next.

Trace length has approximately nothing to do with die size. If anything, designing for shorter traces means you can get away with smaller PHYs at either end.

What might go some ways toward explaining such a huge difference in die size is that the TSVs themselves take up significant die area and must be fairly numerous to carry both a large number of signal wires and all the power and ground required by the stack. But it's wildly implausible that the die area consumed by the TSVs would be significantly larger than the die area consumed by the memory arrays themselves, or that anyone would build a memory die where the memory array was not a large majority of the total die area.

If there's any truth to that ~3x higher wafer requirement for the same number of bits as compared to DDR5, it must be a combination of several factors and probably includes something non-obvious and dubious, like counting all the area of the passive interposers that go between HBM stacks and GPUs (those interposers aren't competing for the same fab space).

Re: 2027 memory capacity is reportedly sold out

#257

Post by haroldp »

OJFord wrote: post #196
haroldp wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sometimes you just need the space and not the speed. Your computer already supports that. It's called "swap".

Yeah but DDR3 was faster then and still is now - I can't imagine my M4 Mac having a slightly older version RAM would meaningfully affect me, but another 24GB of it (or whatever I have) would certainly be an improvement. CPUs have L1, L2, L3+ caches too after all.

> Yeah but DDR3 was faster then and still is now

USB would be the limiter for both.

Re: 2027 memory capacity is reportedly sold out

#258

Post by scrtm »

dismalaf wrote: post #247
sandworm101 wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But once you get past econ101, you are taught how markets react to percieved bubbles, how those with near monopolies would rather pocket a windfall now than risk investing in future expansions.

Well, look at AI. It sure looks like a bubble, why wouldn't every fab just profiteer now?

micron is up to like 85% gross margin this year

Re: 2027 memory capacity is reportedly sold out

#259

Post by undersuit »

Melatonic wrote: post #244
undersuit wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Grab the cheapest Intel Optane M10 drive from eBay with a 1x PCI-E adapter from them too. 16GB of Swap for less than $20. The M10 are over produced and only PCI-E 3.0 2x lane devices but 16GB of DDR5 is going to cost over $200. You can do the same with USB-C M.2 adapters but the adapters cost more and eww USB for Swap, hope the device never drops.

Is that really competitive with just doing a pciexpress card with faster M2 SSD ?

Optane on a cheap adapter is superior in just this Swap application because the 16GB M.2 are very cheap, the 2x lanes aren't under utilizing your 4x motherboard M.2 slot when used with an adapter, and Optane has better write endurance and latency then even the newest flash.

Re: 2027 memory capacity is reportedly sold out

#260

Post by nemothekid »

SR2Z wrote: post #251
DannyBee wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't think that anything you said is wrong but I also don't think that memory consumption is going back to the old baseline... well, ever. Memory is just too useful now that you can use it to drive cars and write code.

The problem is that is speculation and the market barriers are currently too high for losing business to be a threat. The two outcomes are (1) you overbuild, you end being wrong, you go bankrupt and lose everything or (2) you are right, but since you didn't overbuild, you lost out on some revenue, but demand still exists 3 years later and you didn't lose everything.

In any other business choosing (2) would mean someone else swoops in and steals all your business. It doesn't look like this is at all possible for memory fabs.

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