> the average fixed contract price of PC DRAM DDR4 8Gb stood at $11.50
If that's the case, then why are the cheapest options I can find online multiple times that much?
CXMT has been offering DDR4 chips at about half the prevailing market rate
101–110 of 274 posts
Re: CXMT has been offering DDR4 chips at about half the prevailing market rate
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not really a blunder though. Given that total capacity is tightly constrained, Samsung and SK Hynix are happy to focus on what they do at their best and with the highest margins. Why shouldn't they supply the HBM market?
It's putting all eggs in one basket. If/when the higher-margin category collapses, they'll have no fallback. Imagine Chevrolet had discontinued Impalas and other low-margin cars, and switched to Corvettes during the pandemic
Even if there's a collapse in the high-margin market (I don't think anyone is expecting this right now), it will be slow and telegraphed in advance, giving them plenty of time to refocus on lower-margin products.
Re: CXMT has been offering DDR4 chips at about half the prevailing market rate
#103> the average fixed contract price of PC DRAM DDR4 8Gb stood at $11.50 If that's the case, then why are the cheapest options I can find online multiple times that much?
Brent crude is $71 a barrel, but you can't buy gas for $1.69. Why's that?
Re: CXMT has been offering DDR4 chips at about half the prevailing market rate
#104> the average fixed contract price of PC DRAM DDR4 8Gb stood at $11.50 If that's the case, then why are the cheapest options I can find online multiple times that much?
Because that’s just the price for the dies, still need packaging, integration and then retail distribution. Also raw BOM is like 1/5th of the retail price usually.
Re: CXMT has been offering DDR4 chips at about half the prevailing market rate
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
Western European countries got dominant, then got arrogant, letting the USA eat their lunch. USA got dominant, got arrogant, letting China eat their lunch. China is indeed getting dominant. They will get arrogant one day. Meanwhile, Western Europe and the USA are still very good places to live.
The pertinent question, then, is who's gonna eat China's lunch? My guess would be south/southeast Asia (India and Vietnam seem especially promising), but if the US was smart it'd put its efforts fully toward as many infrastructure investments and trade agreements and immigration agreements as possible to create a pan-American economic union. We have the resources and technology to turn every country in North and Sout…
China's big. It has a long way to go before all of it becomes developed enough that they have to worry about someone else eating their lunch.
And Latin American nations can't get started on economic development because their governance sucks. It's actually a decades-old problem, and not one that the U.S. can do much about. The one country that probably has the best shot right now is Argentina, let's see how they do.
Re: CXMT has been offering DDR4 chips at about half the prevailing market rate
#106> the average fixed contract price of PC DRAM DDR4 8Gb stood at $11.50 If that's the case, then why are the cheapest options I can find online multiple times that much?
That's a small b, that's gigabit.
And that matches e.g. a "crucial pro udimm 64GB kit ddr4-3200 cl22-22-22 2Rx8" being at about 100$ a year ago.
Currently they sell here in Germany for 409€ each, that's 6.25€ for half of each of the 16Gbit chips on that kit.
Re: CXMT has been offering DDR4 chips at about half the prevailing market rate
#107> the average fixed contract price of PC DRAM DDR4 8Gb stood at $11.50 If that's the case, then why are the cheapest options I can find online multiple times that much?
Brent crude is $71 a barrel, but you can't buy gas for $1.69. Why's that?
Are you able to buy crude by the gallon and refine it yourself? That would bring the cost down a bit.
Re: CXMT has been offering DDR4 chips at about half the prevailing market rate
#108> the average fixed contract price of PC DRAM DDR4 8Gb stood at $11.50 If that's the case, then why are the cheapest options I can find online multiple times that much?
Because that’s just the price for the dies, still need packaging, integration and then retail distribution. Also raw BOM is like 1/5th of the retail price usually.
Raw BOM is much higher than 1/5th of retail price for ram. Some industries have higher margins than others.
11.5*8 = 92. I'm seeing plenty of DDR4 sticks below that price.
Re: CXMT has been offering DDR4 chips at about half the prevailing market rate
#109Is there a reason GPU's don't use insane "blocks" of sdcard slots (for massively parallel io) so the model weights don't need to pass through a limited PCI bus?
The next gen inference chips will use High Bandwidth Flash (HBF) to store model weights.
These are made similarly to HBM but are lower power and much higher capacity. They can also be used for caching to reduce costs when processing long chat sessions.
Re: CXMT has been offering DDR4 chips at about half the prevailing market rate
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. Let's do the math. The fastest sd cards can read at around 300 MB/s ( https://havecamerawilltravel.com/fastest-sd-cards/ ). Modern GPUs use 16 lanes of PCIe gen 5, which is 16x32Gb/s = 512Gb/s = 64 GB/s. Meaning you'd need over 200 of the fastest SD cards. So what you're asking is: is there a reason GPUs don't use 200 SD cards? And I can't think of any way that would work
SD is obviously the wrong interface for this but "High Bandwidth Flash" (stacked flash akin to HBM) is in development for exactly this kind of problem. AMD actually made a GPU with onboard flash maybe a decade ago but I think it was a bit early. Today I would love to have a pool of 50GB/s storage attached to the GPU.
First gen HBF is targeting something like 1.2 TB/s!