Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

tomshardware.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

541–550 of 587 posts

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#541

Post by 15155 »

josephg wrote: post #433
BobbyTables2 wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That may be true but it did get slower. Maybe new fancy UI effects, etc. Apple also seems hellbent on fully utilizing all available space on the low end model. IOS+ System Data is about 30GB. The original iPhone had a 4GB model and had space left over for the user to use!

> That may be true but it did get slower. Yes. Microsoft is scrambling at the moment because the macbook neo only has 8gb of ram and runs great. Windows 11 can't compete on that hardware because it's so bloated. I find it strange given microsoft made windows 3.11, which ran fine on computers with just 4mb of ram. Windows 11 is of course more complex than windows 3.11. But not so much that it should need literally 200…

Windows XP (NT lineage) was easily stripped down to less than 50-100MB of both memory and disk space.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#542

Post by shimman »

true_religion wrote: post #260
shimman wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably for the best. No hosting nation of imperialism has ever benefited and now we see what the US is willing to throw away because their corporations are upset.

If there is something Korea doesn’t lack, it’s manpower. The US troops are more likely there as a political shield. Indiscriminate bombing would kill them too, hence drag the US into war so any enemies of S Korea have to act judiciously.

If you think the US public has any appetite for more wars you're straight up delusional. Iran War is going to cost the GOP the house + senate, something that wasn't really a sure then say even 7 months ago.

If anything more foreign bases will be closed in the upcoming years to reign in the reckless spending + endangerment by the DoW. It's not only politically easy, foreign bases don't have representation in Congress, but it's a great to sell alternative governing visions (less on foreign imperialism vs more domestic spending).

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#543

Post by Synaesthesia »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #497
Pxtl wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On a macro level you're correct. On a micro level, I miss the pre-pandemic, pre-AI era before stuff got expensive, before Russia invaded Ukraine, before the Israel/Palestine strife went into overdrive, and before the US declared war on Iran, Canada, Greenland, and Minnesota.

Almost everything that is upsetting is you, is being intentionally shoved in front of your face to make you feel mad. You are being played. Your great-grandparents had like a 40% child mortality rate. You’ll be ok that some people around the world are fighting which has been a human constant throughout all of history.

At the same time hundreds of thousands of children die annually from diseases which would cost pennies to treat. From starvation.

The world is still a horrible place for many people, and there's no real reason why it has to be that way.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#544

Post by pfdietz »

carlosjobim wrote: post #474
HDBaseT wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A Windows 11 machine with 8GB of memory is borderline unusable. We can go in circles about how developers need to optimize their applications, etc but truth of the matter is that 8GB is considered pretty low for a lot of "average" use cases. MacOS is an exception to the rule and even 8GB on MacOS is limited with multiple Electron apps.

And why should the government and the tax payers be held responsible and be forced to pay for the bad decisions of Microsoft and their customers? MacOS is not limited in any way for the needs an average citizen has from computers. The average citizen is even fine with an iPad. 8GB is considered "low" by people here, just like a 170 horse power hatchback is considered "low" by muscle car enthusiasts and mining compani…

> And why should the government and the tax payers be held responsible and be forced to pay for the bad decisions of Microsoft and their customers?

Ah, a motte and bailey argument! I always love those.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#545

Post by m4rtink »

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…

Sure, scale of cloud systems has some interesting properties, that can be sometimes beneficial.

At the same time you are at the mercy of whoever runs the cloud, they can spy on your data or even manipulate your workloads, they can renegotiate the terms of use at any time - including price hikes or booting your from their cloud at any time.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#546

Post by m4rtink »

account42 wrote: post #519
greenavocado wrote: post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The party's over when the CXMT freight train will pull up and unload insane amount of volume on global markets

What stopped them before the current demand spike?

Western sanctions & the simple need to catch up to the capacity of the current memory manufacturing cartel.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#547

Post by m4rtink »

UberFly wrote: post #498
zmmmmm wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TSMC in the US is a bit of a special case .... wouldn't surprise me at all if they were virtue signalling to the Trump admin more than anything with what they are doing there.

How so? They are diversifying their production chain so that all their eggs aren't in one basket. Taiwan might be threatened one day but their US, Japan, and German plants will much less likely be in the same danger.

That seems wrong to me - the idea of the "Silicon shield of Taiwain" is that alle the critical cutting edge production is all physically in Taiwan & rigged to be destroyed if Taiwan is ever attacked.

If they do diversify, they are compromising a key policy protecting their homeland, it makes no sense!

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#548

Post by m4rtink »

incrudible wrote: post #478
zmmmmm wrote: post #463

I wonder if supply chain constraints currently represent an inherent scepticism of manufacturers that demand will last. It feels to me like a side effect of the self-dealing / incestuous financing that is going on is that manufacturers are not willing to bet on it all materialising and therefore are not scaling up capacity nearly as much as they would if they thought it was certain.

Manufacturers know demand will last to the extent that big companies are willing to commit to purchases over a given period of time, but supply today is still constrained by capacity built for the pre LLM era. The 500 billion put in by Samsung/SKHynix will increase modern DRAM by roughly 50% but it wont be fully online until 2030.

It might be fully online by 2030 if the current demand lasts. IMHO the demand is unsustainable & build on circular financing deals and hidden debt with no way to be ever profitable.

The memory cartel would be crazy to actually invest into new capacity at this point.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#549

Post by m4rtink »

dietr1ch wrote: post #79
Aditya_Garg wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'm still not sure how shorting is even legal or what useful purpose it serves in the stock market.

Wasn't the whole idea that people can invest arbitrary amounts to companies by buying their stock, making investing more efficient?

How the hell did we get from that to people using it for outright gambling with shorting ??

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#550

Post by m4rtink »

TSiege wrote: post #321
atleastoptimal wrote: post #253

Is the end result of this is that anything that is useful to AI going to be permanently more expensive, as the value a human hobbyist can get out of a certain amount of RAM will always be far less than the value a frontier AI model can get out of it?

If demand remains as elevated as it is you will definitely see new fabs breaking ground to meet it. China is expanding a lot as well. Even if AI doesn’t go anywhere there is no way prices remain this elevated or climb forever

More likely AI companies go bankrupt and market is flooded by repurposed hardware sold for pennies by creditors AND Chinese memory from their new fabs, hopefully also killing the existing memory manufacturing cartel.

So basically utopia. ;-)

Post reply on HN