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Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

tomshardware.com

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Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

"Fiduciary duty" of TSMC execs? And can Taiwan government compel them not to build out in the US?

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#562
post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, "quickly" is obviously industry-dependent. If they were fabricating something extremely easy to manufacture, "quickly" might mean months-to-a-year. Fabricating something very complicated like memory "quickly" might mean years.

That said, even though we might have to wait years for new supply to hit there market, we probably don't have to wait years to see signals of that. We will likely know that manufacturers are starting to build new supply long before we see the chips hit the market.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#563
post #539
post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why plus margin? the floor is cost

Floor is below cost if you think you can put one of your competitors out of business before you run out of money, and you'll make the money back after doing so. And this includes even after fines.

that's true, also see "loss leaders" like milk in supermarkets

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#564
post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Power supplies - regardless of quality - die pretty regularly at scale. Only disks fail more often. They are the #2 component we replace in the datacenter.

Are data-center power supplies comparable to higher-end desktop power supplies? And how much do you oversize them compared to the load they will actually handle? E.g. for a desktop buying even double the power supply capacity you need won't really affect the overall PC price that much but I somehow doubt data center operators are willing to not optimize away that cost.

They typically are made by the same OEMs and I would say at par or better quality in general. I’ve had (percentage wise) more consumer grade PSUs fail on me over the past 20 years, and I don’t buy cheap stuff. Although the sample size of failure is low single digits vs thousands on the datacenter end.

I’d say on average DC PSUs are vastly overspeced for most machines. Most machines we work with are not sitting at peak load 24x7, and might be drawing half or so of their max rated power draw. Plus every server is redundant - so the modules themselves are operating at around 20-40% of full rated capacity most of their life. The only time they ever spin up past 50% is during power maintenance or a power failure of some sort that brings one of the redundant power sides down.

They do probably operate in slightly hotter conditions on average, but in much more stabilized temperature environments. Plus of course 24x7x365. But that goes for all components.

I’d say other than fans, failure rates in the PC world vs datacenter world are relatively comparable it terms of what fails most. Dust and temp swings are the large variables the average PC needs to contend with vs the datacenter.

Storage of course is the one that stands out the most - everything else is kind of a rounding error. Here though, datacenter work really does beat on the hardware more than most consumer gear so that’s expected. For every 100 disk swaps we do, I figure we do about 2 or 3 power supply modules. And maybe 1 fan swap.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple is still paying out the 500 million dollars they lost in a lawsuit about this exact practice. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-67911517

Apple admitted to slowing down iPhones to keep the batteries from failing, and agreed to stop doing it and created a new battery replacement plan. I’ve personally experienced the benefit of getting the battery on Apple devices replaced which made them behave like new again. There’s a reason old Apple devices hold their value a lot better than competing manufacturers.

They hold value now. They didn’t if we go back to before those lawsuits. Apple can blow smoke wherever it wants, but that 500 million loss isn’t about battery health.

As an aside, I have this lovely tower from France, barely used, scrap price should be very high. Priced to sell?

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#566
post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Memory in the cloud isn't free either.

it's cheaper considering they buy in bulk and can expense it against their taxes

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#567
post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I wonder if the computing requirements of windows scale exponentially? It looks like it.

I suspect if we graphed them, they’d pretty perfectly match the computers that were available. Ie, I think windows is optimised just enough to run on the low end hardware of each generation.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#568

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An admin upset about inflation driven negative economic sentiment and a country that is slow rolling a couple hundred billion in investments. Current events.

What else do you know about the inner workings of the current administration… and seriously reflect on why your answer isn’t “lol what? Absolutely nothing!”

You can stick your head up a cows ass but I think I’ll just take the butchers word.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But are the memory chip producers acting like a cartel? In the past they have not. When there was a shortage, they increased production as rapidly as they could build the new fabs, crashing the price of memory.

>In the past they have not. Well guess what :) They've done it before, they will do it again. "To date, five manufacturers have pleaded guilty to their involvement in an international price-fixing conspiracy between July 1, 1998, and June 15, 2002, including Hynix, Infineon, Micron Technology, Samsung, and Elpida.[1]" [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_industry_price_fixing

That was 24 years ago. Half the people commenting on this board aren't even that old. How many of the shareholders on the boards or executives at the helms of those companies do you think are still there?

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#570

Earlier quoted context omitted.

llms make it trivial writing code in rust, without even knowing rust. There is hope…

When even the large AI labs that supposedly sit on (/with) the best of the best can't even ship native cross-platform desktop applications and instead ship some bloated Electron monsters, I'm not sure what kind of hope there is. The ones who were publishing lightweight apps continue to do so, the ones who didn't care, still don't care.

writing native gui code is atrocious, add to that llms being horrible with ui dev and you end up with with what you describe. but at least if we get more non-ui stuff written in more efficient languages there is going to be some benefit.
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