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Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

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Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#71

Post by cyanydeez »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #3

The situation is absolutely awful for anybody who needs significant memory or storage (or devices incorporating such). Even people who think they have enough for the next few years already could end up with an unpleasant surprise if they e.g. have a stick or two of RAM go bad or a GPU fry. I have a few machines with aging sticks that I'm hoping will manage to hold out until when/if things improve.

before the memory cartel, I was automatically putting in 64 or 128GB for my work flow as the prices just seems absurd not to.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#72

Post by stuxnet79 »

matt-p wrote: post #64
stuxnet79 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I share your optimism, I still don't fully understand why a crash will necessarily lead to an oversupply and lower prices for regular consumers. The components / RAM you are referencing are for enterprise use / data centers which in my limited understanding is not a 1:1 swap for the kind of components that your smartphone / car / fridge / gaming rig use. I would love for someone more informed than me to spell o…

Datacentre NVMe disk is still usable in a standard desktop. Sever memory less so, but essentially if there were no 'new' server market whatsoever then you could redirect 100% of memory production to consumer chips without enormous upheaval. By the way I personally think this scenario is very unlikely to happen.

> If there were no 'new' server market whatsoever then you could redirect 100% of memory production to consumer chips without enormous upheaval.

> By the way I personally think this scenario is very unlikely to happen.

Can you explain why? I imagine pivoting to a much less lucrative consumer market when the time comes would lead to financial ruin?

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#73

Post by AngryData »

Aditya_Garg wrote: post #47
seanp2k2 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There also seems to have been a major shift in strategy from AMD / Intel / Apple / NVidia due to this, as I was used to CPU / GPU / chipset upgrades coming out more regularly with double-digit percentage improvements each year, but that seems to be basically over for the consumer space now that everyone is just trying to build as much AI hardware as fast as possible for enterprise markets. I also used to rebuild my d…

Are you willing to short anthropic and openai on your beliefs? Would love to be on the other side of this trade.

"Sometime in the next few years" is not anywhere near narrow enough of a window to start putting shorts on stock prices.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#74

Post by nickjj »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #70
nickjj wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm running a 12 year old i5 3.2ghz CPU with 16 GB of memory, an SSD and an AMD RX 480 (8 GB) GPU. Currently using a 100% scaled 4k monitor and a 2nd 1440p monitor. I keep the machine on 24 / 7. It's great for software development along with video + image editing and casual gaming. Everything feels fast and snappy. I will use this until the hardware stops. There's a 0% chance I'd buy hardware at the current prices.

It really depends on what the task at hand is. I have a baseline iMac Pro and custom built tower with similar specs (3.2Ghz Xeon W-2140B, 32GB RAM, Vega Pro 56 and i7-6700K, 32GB, 5700XT respectively) and they're both perfectly responsive. For many day to day things the difference between them and newer machines is negligible. For other things, my 5950X tower and M5 Max MBP run circles around them. Both the 5950X tow…

Yep, I have an M4 MBP company issued laptop for work and in my day to day there's not a enough of a performance win to feel like I'm missing out for most tasks.

Sure, the Slack web app might initially load half a second faster since there's a lot of CPU bound JS executing but generally speaking I never feel like "wow this sucks" on my main machine. It's kind of the opposite, for a number of things my desktop machine feels faster than the MBP for overall "using the computer", with development heavy tasks (running Docker based web apps, browser tabs, various tools open, streaming music, etc.). It was like that when I ran Windows 10 Pro with WSL 2 and now native Linux with Arch + niri.

Even CPU bound tasks on my 12 year old box that I do a lot, such as editing a blog post on a static site with Hugo takes ~100ms to get live reloading with over 1,000 posts and drafts. I'm sure if I were constantly doing huge CPU bound tasks I'd have issues but I don't have that use case.

After recording 500+ videos, encoding isn't a problem too. If I record a 30 min video, it takes ~20 minutes to render but it's so easy to fit that into other areas of my life, like I'll record + edit a video and then render it while I walk.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#75

Post by matt-p »

stuxnet79 wrote: post #72
matt-p wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Datacentre NVMe disk is still usable in a standard desktop. Sever memory less so, but essentially if there were no 'new' server market whatsoever then you could redirect 100% of memory production to consumer chips without enormous upheaval. By the way I personally think this scenario is very unlikely to happen.

> If there were no 'new' server market whatsoever then you could redirect 100% of memory production to consumer chips without enormous upheaval. > By the way I personally think this scenario is very unlikely to happen. Can you explain why? I imagine pivoting to a much less lucrative consumer market when the time comes would lead to financial ruin?

We are starting from a frankly completely unimaginable hypothetical that there's 0 new "datacentre demand".

In that scenario producing consumer chips is still profitable, much less profitable but still much better than giving up and going home.

You will also unlock latent demand by the mere fact that consumer prices are reasonable again. Those who may have postponed a new MacBook or gaming PC will likely buy as soon as lower prices return.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#76

Post by palmotea »

OutOfHere wrote: post #43
dijit wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm quite sure he's being sarcastic. "The best good ever is to maximise shareholder profits" is a tired and cliched caricature that some people unfortunately take seriously. But this is too on the nose.

I have the innate right to take what is said literally. Moreover, his preceding statements attempt to legitimize his concluding statement.

You also have the innate right to be off base, btw.

It's sarcasm, and the main tell is I'm not even bothering with pretense; just serving up the dystopia straight and acting like that's good.

But one of the "fun" things about HN is SV is so fucked up you can't even be sure someone doesn't actually sincerely believe that shit. And most of them are probably dumbasses with nothing to gain.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#77

Post by OutOfHere »

palmotea wrote: post #76
OutOfHere wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have the innate right to take what is said literally. Moreover, his preceding statements attempt to legitimize his concluding statement.

You also have the innate right to be off base, btw. It's sarcasm, and the main tell is I'm not even bothering with pretense; just serving up the dystopia straight and acting like that's good. But one of the "fun" things about HN is SV is so fucked up you can't even be sure someone doesn't actually sincerely believe that shit. And most of them are probably dumbasses with nothing to gain.

I appreciate sarcasm when it's clear. Marking it as "/s" prevents this whole line of discussion. As you noted in your last paragraph, it's hard to be sure without a marking.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#78

Post by atiedebee »

plqbfbv wrote: post #68
seanp2k2 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There also seems to have been a major shift in strategy from AMD / Intel / Apple / NVidia due to this, as I was used to CPU / GPU / chipset upgrades coming out more regularly with double-digit percentage improvements each year, but that seems to be basically over for the consumer space now that everyone is just trying to build as much AI hardware as fast as possible for enterprise markets. I also used to rebuild my d…

> There also seems to have been a major shift in strategy from AMD / Intel / Apple / NVidia due to this, as I was used to CPU / GPU / chipset upgrades coming out more regularly with double-digit percentage improvements each year, but that seems to be basically over for the consumer space now that everyone is just trying to build as much AI hardware as fast as possible for enterprise markets. I believe all of them rea…

The biggest changes across generations in the last ~5 years were the introduction of specialized instructions for wider vectors (AVX512/AVX2, and even then you need specialized workloads to use them), [...]

AVX2 is actually 13 years (!) old already (first appearing in Intel's Haswell architecture).

AVX512 is also nearly 10 years old right now, but not many CPUs actually support it (none of the devices I own support it)

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#79

Post by dietr1ch »

Aditya_Garg wrote: post #47
seanp2k2 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There also seems to have been a major shift in strategy from AMD / Intel / Apple / NVidia due to this, as I was used to CPU / GPU / chipset upgrades coming out more regularly with double-digit percentage improvements each year, but that seems to be basically over for the consumer space now that everyone is just trying to build as much AI hardware as fast as possible for enterprise markets. I also used to rebuild my d…

Are you willing to short anthropic and openai on your beliefs? Would love to be on the other side of this trade.

People think that shorting is an easy way of getting rich when you think a stock will go down, but even if you know it will, getting the timing wrong on it is catastrophic as you'll get unbounded loses while the market fails to correct the issues you are betting against

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#80

Post by greggoB »

matt-p wrote: post #65
greggoB wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that it's fundamentally a fab capacity limit. At a given node size/technology (think 7nm, etc) they can only output so many wafers. If AI data centers are generating enormous demand for memory, then that's what those wafers are going to be used to for, unless they can be outcompeted, hence higher prices. I'm not actually sure if enterprise designated memory is equivalent or not to consumer designa…

Typically (not always!) server memory is 'registered' so won't work with consumer CPUs which run on un-registered.

Does 'registration' introduce anything physically different? Or could they be completely interoperable?
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