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The RAM shortage could last years

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Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#111

Post by occamofsandwich »

jonas21 wrote: post #87
shevy-java wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good point. I think both AI companies and hardware makers should pay for the damage they caused to us here. They act as a de-facto monopoly and milk us. Why is this allowed?

It's a business with huge up-front capital expenses and typically very low margins. Supply is scaling up slowly because it's hard, and if you overshoot, you go out of business. Nobody is "allowing" this. It's a natural property of being both advanced technology and a commodity at the same time.

The strange deals on the entire future output are what was allowed. Try to do the same thing with onions and the government understands you are a criminal.

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

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#112

Post by XorNot »

ahartmetz wrote: post #80
mschuster91 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Soo ... how sure are we that the memory makers themselves are not going to be the ones holding the bag? We aren't. The remaining memory manufacturers fear getting caught in a "pork cycle" yet again - that is why there's only the three large ones left anyway.

If they don't expand capacity much, the only negative consequences I foresee happening for them is that they might lose spending discipline, and that systems will be set up to make do with a little less memory. Apart from that, it's just very high profits followed by more or less regular profits.

They could wind up losing all their business to China though.

China has memory makers who are creeping up through the stages of production maturity, and once they hit then there's no going back.

If the existing makers can't meet supply such that Chinese exports get their foot in the door, they may find they never get ahead again due to volume - that domestic market is huge so they have scale, and the gaming market isn't going to care because they get anything at the moment, which is all you'll need for enterprise to say "are we really afraid of memory in this business?"

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#114

Post by zdw »

christkv wrote: post #108
daemonologist wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AMD has built some consumer GPUs in the recent past with HBM - RX Vega and Radeon VII (although I assume not all "HBM" is created equal).

My vega 56 still has 400gb/s of memory which is still insane for how old the card is.

AMD's Hawaii architecture had 320GB/s on a 512b GDDR5 bus in 2013.

The Fiji XT architecture after it had 512GB/S on a 4096b HBM bus in 2015.

The Vega architecture did have 400GB/s or so in 2017, which was a bit of a downgrade.

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#115

Post by nslsm »

estimator7292 wrote: post #82
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the Dutch power grid is at capacity and its managing company is now telling companies that planned to build a datacenter that they can't be connected to the grid until 2030, even though said companies already paid for and got guarantees about that connection. Are the Netherlands a large proportion of global datacenters?

Is that relevant? The grid in every country is getting ridiculously stressed by datacenters.

>The grid in every country is getting ridiculously stressed by datacenters.

In every country? Citation needed.

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#116

Post by RajT88 »

roughly wrote: post #77
RajT88 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China is 10 years into what you describe, no?

> the way our system operates They have the other system.

This bit, I mean:

> A wealthy nation-state with a sufficiently motivated voter base could certainly build up a meaningful competitor to TSMC over the course of, say, a decade or two (or three...).

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#117

Post by zamadatix »

pron wrote: post #104
cbdevidal wrote: post #96

I’m a bit of an optimist. I think this will smack the hands of developers who don’t manage RAM well and future apps will necessarily be more memory-efficient.

Using a lot less RAM often implies using more CPU, so even with inflated RAM prices, it's not a good tradeoff (at least not in general).

The tradeoff has almost exclusively been development time vs resource efficiency. Very few devs are graced with enough time to optimize something to the point of dealing with theoretical tradeoff balances of near optimal implementations.

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#118

Post by AnthonyMouse »

toast0 wrote: post #88
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the Dutch power grid is at capacity and its managing company is now telling companies that planned to build a datacenter that they can't be connected to the grid until 2030, even though said companies already paid for and got guarantees about that connection. Are the Netherlands a large proportion of global datacenters?

Amsterdam hosts a major internet exchange. It's not a bad place to build a datacenter and there are many. Northern latitude brings free air cooling, but also additional distance to clients. Lots of peers in AMS-IX, but not a lot of oceananic cable landings (one with two paths to the US, but most of the submarine cables land nearby in Europe)

Whether it's generally a reasonable place to build them isn't the percentage. The number seems to be ~3%.

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#119

Post by zozbot234 »

pron wrote: post #104
cbdevidal wrote: post #96

I’m a bit of an optimist. I think this will smack the hands of developers who don’t manage RAM well and future apps will necessarily be more memory-efficient.

Using a lot less RAM often implies using more CPU, so even with inflated RAM prices, it's not a good tradeoff (at least not in general).

In practice, you generally see the opposite. The "CPU" is in fact limited by memory throughput. (The exception is intense number crunching or similar compute-heavy code, where thermal and power limits come into play. But much of that code can be shifted to the GPU.)

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#120

Post by zozbot234 »

stuxnet79 wrote: post #11

Ok so Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron do not have the capacity to meet demand. Also, what little capacity they do have they are allocating to HBM over DRAM. Based on my limited knowledge HBM can not be easily repurposed for consumer electronics. Translation: main street is cooked for the next 3-4 years. It doesn't stop there though. OpenAI is currently mired in a capital crunch. Their last round just about sucked all th…

There's actually plenty of demand for LPDDR even in the AI datacenter, because HBM is quite wasteful of area for any given memory capacity.
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