101–110 of 158 posts
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> Right now demand for DRAM is extremely high bordering on endless Why is demand extremely high right now when it wasn't a couple of months ago? What changed since then that caused it to triple overnight?
I've heard it was Sam Altman and OpenAI basically buying every wafer available from both Samsung and SKHynix at the start of October. Neither company know of the other purchase until it was a done deal.
"For context, these increases have even outpaced the surge in gold prices over the same period" And you can't just manufacture or not the gold supply into scarcity
yes you can. It's called mining
Yep, it doubled in the last 4 months https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5Zc-FsUDCM I upgraded my PC by adding 64GB.. two Fridays ago I sold the 32 GB I took out for the same amount of what I paid for the 64 GB in July... insane
I bought a refurbished laptop with 64gb ddr4 (so-dimm) last week. It was just slightly more expensive than the 32gb variant with same specs. I guess the seller was not yet aware of the high memory prices. In a week or two I might be able to make a profit by just selling the memory.
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Fundamentally because demand and supply curves are lagged. This drives DRAM flood and drought cycles. Right now high DRAM prices are driving fab investment up and demand down. In 3-5 years new fabs will cause DRAM glut that will drive prices down. Lower prices will stimulate demand via things like doubling DRAM size in consumer electronics as companies compete on getting the number bigger. Eventually demand curve wil…
This isn't true. It used to be, as a new fab would appreciably add quantity. At 1M wspm in 2015, a new 100k fab at the most modern node would add effectively 20-30% capacity, and usually multiple.players at once, since all had cash. Now, the relative shrink is tiny, so capacity adds are just wspm, in effect, and that gives 5%. Put differently, you cannot invest your way out of the shortage, or into meaningful share..…
guess I'm interpretting "1million wspm; add 10%; was effectively a 20-30% capacity increase" in 2015.
Not sure where 5% then comes from. Guessing "relative shrink" is referring to process size (5, 4, 2 nm, whatever) not linearly corresponding to density of transistors, etc.
This was my last respite for intellectual argumentation.
Now, every day there’s multiple stories where you have to be caught up on this cinematic universe where AI is fake and doesn’t work and no one uses it and anyone who does is a grifter and or amateur and or embarrassing and any data centers they build will be a waste and they’re probably not even being built and OpenAI is JUST like pets.com so this is basically the web bubble from 1999…so therefore, $X! (In this case, X = RAM supply shortage is fake and actually just coordinated price gouging)
As my MD friend noted wisely a couple weeks ago: it’s noteworthy how this became a culture after LLMs became ubiquitous and user friendly. It was tons of fun and happy times when we were going to reduce # of radiologists, not software engineers.
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The biggest issue here is that it hurts smaller consumers. Scaling up a fab to produce ram takes 5+ years, people generally buy new hardware ~5 years so this lifecycle of hardware for some people is now locked out. Let's say you was due for an upgrade this year you now might be priced out of the market for the next 5 years and basically due to poor business practices There is a similar issue happening in the manufact…
Do people really still upgrade so often? I mean it made sense pre 2015 for desktops, and pre 2020 for laptops... But since... Not much has changed from a performance standpoint. Even gpus hardly advanced since 2022 (4090) and the next generation is at least 1++ years off. Likely 2-3... And it's unclear wherever it will actually be an upgrade or more of the AI shenanigans they released with the 50 generation.
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Fundamentally because demand and supply curves are lagged. This drives DRAM flood and drought cycles. Right now high DRAM prices are driving fab investment up and demand down. In 3-5 years new fabs will cause DRAM glut that will drive prices down. Lower prices will stimulate demand via things like doubling DRAM size in consumer electronics as companies compete on getting the number bigger. Eventually demand curve wil…
> in hopes of building a god which will convert the rest of the world into data centers I'm as pro AI as it comes, and I love your way of putting it. Very poignant.
which company achieve AGI first would be a quadrillion company
I’m sad the mid to late 2010s alt reality era has come for HN the last 6 months, after 16 years here. This was my last respite for intellectual argumentation. Now, every day there’s multiple stories where you have to be caught up on this cinematic universe where AI is fake and doesn’t work and no one uses it and anyone who does is a grifter and or amateur and or embarrassing and any data centers they build will be a…
the aftermath for tax payer and your 401k would be devastating
What's happening right now is very different than what happened back during the dot com crash. When they were doing price fixing it was because there was a glut of supply and demand was tanking. Prices were falling and they coordinated to keep prices from falling less. Right now demand for DRAM is extremely high bordering on endless. Prices are going up . The incentive for one of the big players to undercut the other…
> The incentive for one of the big players to undercut the other on cost even just a little bit to pick up market share is extremely lucrative. I would argue that the DRAM price fixing scandal actually demonstrates that the industry operates like a cartel. During times of low demand and high supply, they will coordinate to protect prices, and then during spikes in demand (or alleged spikes in demand) they coordinate…
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> The incentive for one of the big players to undercut the other on cost even just a little bit to pick up market share is extremely lucrative. I would argue that the DRAM price fixing scandal actually demonstrates that the industry operates like a cartel. During times of low demand and high supply, they will coordinate to protect prices, and then during spikes in demand (or alleged spikes in demand) they coordinate…
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