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Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

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Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#411

Post by mikestorrent »

stephen_cagle wrote: post #398
Schnitz wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or it’ll accelerate the push to the cloud even more making the client even thinner.

Concidently, I asked Claude yesterday whether we have crossed the point that there is more compute and memory in the cloud or in personal computers. It claims fp8 and fp16 has had higher throughput in the cloud since 2023. fp32 and general computing still has more compute than personal computers. And that memory is at the crossover point, but at this point only 10% of memory is going to personal computers, so the nex…

> It is the gradual end of general purpose computing you own, and the start of everything just being cloud compute that someone else owns and you rent.

A few thoughts...

(a) There've never been more general purpose computers than there are right now. Spec progress may stall for consumer products due to the price increases, but the demand for workstations is not going to go down that much; they're critical items to get work done. Many are hoping this means a return to memory efficiency; the 8GB Macbook Neo is a good sign that this is something Apple believes to some extent also.

(b) We've arguably been doing this since the 90s. A website (especially in the days of the heavy backend and more passive client) is cloud compute that someone else owns. You rent it by paying them in the form of looking at ads...

(c) There are a lot of companies and people working on making sure you have every chance to run your AI locally. It's surprisingly good now and keeps getting better. At some point we'll see the same oscillation that we always do from thin client to fat client as the latency advantage of working at the edge starts to win out. How long until I have a laptop with a Talaas chip in it running a basic local model at 16000 tok/sec that is just good enough to use A2A to reach a more powerful agent running elsewhere if I need it?

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#412

Post by wizzwizz4 »

api wrote: post #407
stephen_cagle wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Concidently, I asked Claude yesterday whether we have crossed the point that there is more compute and memory in the cloud or in personal computers. It claims fp8 and fp16 has had higher throughput in the cloud since 2023. fp32 and general computing still has more compute than personal computers. And that memory is at the crossover point, but at this point only 10% of memory is going to personal computers, so the nex…

I agree with the sentiment, but there is a devils' advocate argument: Most compute loads are bursty. Most PCs and phones sit idle almost all the time. It's an inefficient use of capital. In the cloud you can be idle and then suddenly command 1000X more power than any affordable PC could ever have... for 10 seconds... then be idle again. Those kinds of work loads aren't possible to realize on a PC without massively ov…

Generative AI is definitely creating political will for simpler, more purposely-designed computer systems, but it's certainly not going to directly create help them in any meaningful way. AI-generated codebases are the posterchild of rat's nests of complexity.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#413

Post by jodrellblank »

whattheheckheck wrote: post #334
mschild wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would they? Cartels aren't known for massively increasing production to satisfy all demand. Far from it I'd say, they're more likely to expand supply to such a level that they can still reap massive profits. Very few countries/companies have the knowhow and willingness to be able to build more. OPEC is a perfect example of this behaviour. They set hearly production goals to keep prices high. Or the Quebec Maple Syrup…

Can you list out the precise "cartel" company, their supply chains and the board of directors, their financial and political ties? Lot of unsubstantiated claims with low fidelity meme evidence

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_industry_price_fixing

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#414

Post by XorNot »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #318
XorNot wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes everyone took Econ 101. Now what do you think happens when developing new supply is substantially constrained by lead times? Coz a whole lot less of you have ever dealt with manufacturing logistics.

Prices go up, until new supply comes online or demand wanes. Econ 101 is not invalidated just because you are having to go without due to high prices. Some supply and demand curves move in days, some in months, some on years.

Yes that would be my exact point.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#415

Post by api »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #412
api wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with the sentiment, but there is a devils' advocate argument: Most compute loads are bursty. Most PCs and phones sit idle almost all the time. It's an inefficient use of capital. In the cloud you can be idle and then suddenly command 1000X more power than any affordable PC could ever have... for 10 seconds... then be idle again. Those kinds of work loads aren't possible to realize on a PC without massively ov…

Generative AI is definitely creating political will for simpler, more purposely-designed computer systems, but it's certainly not going to directly create help them in any meaningful way. AI-generated codebases are the posterchild of rat's nests of complexity.

I'd say the code I see coming out of leading models today is okay. Not great, but not terrible. It's also easy to get LLMs to code in more efficient languages, and you can also goad them via prompts and CLAUDE.md type stuff into prioritizing performance and simplicity.

It's sort of like what I say about self driving cars. Are they better than good human drivers? Not yet. Are they better than bad, drunk, or texting drivers? Yes.

LLMs are already better than bad coders and honestly most coders are bad coders.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#416

Post by odo1242 »

Noaidi wrote: post #121
preg_match wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's probably for the best, the hyperconsumerism around electronics was getting out of hand. Computers are fast and have been fast for a while now. An iPhone 12 is probably more than fine to do iPhone things, if Apple didn't sabotage their old phones with poorly-written poor-performance software.

I have a MacBook M1 and I recently had to downgrade from Tahoe to Sequoia. Why? First of all they force you to download 7 GB of AI training when you’re not even using their AI. And secondly on Tahoe just watching a video with nothing else running off-line my MacBook was asking for 7 W of power. On Sequoia that drops down to 2 W maybe three. It’s sad to think they think of themselves as an environmental company, I don…

They don’t force you to download Apple Intelligence, disabling it deletes the model files

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#417

Post by porcoda »

abeppu wrote: post #375

So the 1970s oil crisis caused a shift that included fuel efficiency rules. For like, the whole time I've been a software engineer, memory footprints of a lot of software have crept up, even when they aren't really doing more. The memory situation currently is a mess. But ... is it bad enough to get us to _change_ how we build?

That would be a great outcome of this situation. I doubt it will happen though: unlike fuel efficiency rules, there aren’t likely to be external pressures like that on software. Outside developer circles most users likely are unaware of memory usage and often just accept that computers are slow and unreliable sometimes. That’s different from drivers who see their fuel gauge and the corresponding cost of fuel, and are thus very aware of what fuel efficiency means.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#418

Post by wizzwizz4 »

api wrote: post #415
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generative AI is definitely creating political will for simpler, more purposely-designed computer systems, but it's certainly not going to directly create help them in any meaningful way. AI-generated codebases are the posterchild of rat's nests of complexity.

I'd say the code I see coming out of leading models today is okay. Not great, but not terrible. It's also easy to get LLMs to code in more efficient languages, and you can also goad them via prompts and CLAUDE.md type stuff into prioritizing performance and simplicity. It's sort of like what I say about self driving cars. Are they better than good human drivers? Not yet. Are they better than bad, drunk, or texting dr…

In a world where we no longer have the rat's nest of complexity, we pretty much no longer need to produce code. All the software we will ever need for the next century could fit on books in one, single-floor library, if we exclude art projects like video games. An operating system with full driver support for every I/O peripheral (if those devices use standard protocols, allowing for a https://xkcd.com/927/ constant of 5), and support for every standard document format (again, assuming 5 bitmap image formats, 5 vector image formats, 5 kinds of print-ready document, 5 kinds of hypertext document…), could easily fit in 2GiB, and that would be done: everything anyone could possibly need out of a computer, apart from art, mathematics and science, for… I don't even know how long. We're still using the Latin alphabet, more or less unchanged since the late 15th century. Working technology doesn't need to change.

Being able to automatically generate large quantities of code that is worse than a good human programmer can produce is not helpful in this world you're envisioning.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#419

Post by ikiris »

david422 wrote: post #211
naet wrote: post #127

I almost upgraded my computer a year or two ago, but decided to hold off for a bit longer. I've always been fine with being "behind" on the latest and greatest. I don't mind watching a movie, playing a game, buying a cell phone, etc, that was released a few years prior. If it was really all that great when it came out it should still be good later on. Buying slow usually saves a.good bit of money when prices go down…

I upgraded a year ago and I bought a bunch of extra RAM because it was "so cheap", why not. Man did I get lucky, I got it right before the price hikes started.

Same, my desktop is a top end full of ram beast that I thought I overpaid for because motherboards had gone up. Bought everything before the surge. Past me was damn lucky. Wish I had bought some stock tho.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#420

Post by ikiris »

jmward01 wrote: post #329

If this was a competitive market some suppliers would be ramping up pc memory and avoiding the AI buildout. But instead we see all of them diverting to GPU memory and cutting production of PC related parts universally. This sure looks like a coordinated move. I think there is a real point people are missing here. Memory is going sky high because most of it is being shifted to GPU specific ram for server build out. Th…

It is a competitive market, all the market is selling to the most competitive bid price.

When there are massive costs to entry, then this is what happens on a huge demand surge that can pay 10x more than everyone else.

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