141–150 of 158 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But if you make something that's as smart as a sloppy intern and costs even a small amount less, you're making an unbelievable amount of money off it.
Are you sure you wouldn't just lower the market price for an intern and the intern would still be at least at the same price? Also an intern gains experience, while it's wage doesn't automatically.
It's gonna be the same as what you see with food prices nowadays, even fast food - they just increased a whole bunch and nobody can really do anything about it. It's not like there's that many widespread food chains popping up to replace McDonald's, given that most new players in the market are more likely to go bankrupt than anything.
And when it comes to stuff that's actually hard to manufacture, like GPUs and RAM and other components? The corporations will just lie, or in some cases set the MSRP pretty low (e.g. Intel Arc release) and watch the retailers crank up the prices anyways. Even the one case where it did matter a lot was the Intel Core Ultra release where they didn't move units, but only because of AMD CPUs being cheaper, even those prices were known before release. But even so, who's to say that you're not picking the least bad option which still happens to be bad, how close to BOM pricing are those CPUs? And in that BOM, how many middle men are also pushing their own markup?
What are you gonna do about it, since you can't ever look at their books and validate their claims NOR really buy the product elsewhere because like 3 or 4 corps have an oligopoly over the entire planet's supply? Nothing.
Every 3-4 years RAM prices spike. There is always an excuse like a fire in a factory. I believe the truth is 1) we have little amount of suppliers, and 2) supply is very near the limit of what can be sold.
Here's some basic analysis it did (AI, so take with grain of salt): https://shottr.cc/s/2zv5/SCR-20251127-fm6p.png
2016–2018 price spike
DRAM prices nearly tripled.
Driven by smartphone demand + server build-out + constrained supply expansion.
Resulted in the 2018 antitrust lawsuit accusing Samsung, Micron, SK hynix of coordinated output limits.
2019 oversupply crash
After the spike, memory makers over-invested capacity.
Demand softened; inventories built up.
Prices fell sharply — ~35–40% decline.
2020 mild recovery
COVID WFH / remote boom → PC sales up → DRAM demand rose slightly.
Prices recovered modestly.
2021 rebound
Data-center and cloud expansion returned.
DDR5 ramping begins.
Market in recovery — but not frothy.
2022–2023 bottom
Smartphone shipments declined globally.
PC demand dropped post-COVID.
OEMs had too much inventory → massive price declines.
Some DRAM sold below production cost.
2024–2025 AI/HBM super-cycle
AI training systems (NVIDIA, AMD, etc.) require large HBM arrays.
Fab capacity reallocated from commodity DRAM → HBM.
AI hyperscalers (OpenAI, Microsoft, Meta, Tesla) created enormous DRAM draw.
Commodity DRAM restricted → price spike ≥170% YoY.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
HBM is independent of the DDR revision being used. HBM how the DRAM attaches to the chip. Really not sure what you’re trying to say.
HBM stacks multiple DRAM dies vertically on top of each other (typically 4-12 layers). It’s very different from DDR, especially during manufacturing because it has to be integrated with custom chips. Afaik, this isn’t available to Chinese foundries.. yet. Thus, they have DDR available. Specifically, theyre using LPDDR5 so far.
Hey, at least a fab didn't have to burn down this time. That's progress. I've maxed out the RAM on every (consumer mobo) build I've ever done, and have always ended up appreciating it. I did a Ryzen build with 192GB back in January, so despite the questionable signal integrity of DDR5 especially on AM5 (more than one DIMM on each channel means lower speed) this time turned out to be no exception. I also stocked up on…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you sure you wouldn't just lower the market price for an intern and the intern would still be at least at the same price? Also an intern gains experience, while it's wage doesn't automatically.
Intern needs breaks and vacation days. AGI don’t
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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…
The problem with citing cartels and greed is...when prices are low, is it because the industry is momentarily altruistic? Did the industry wake up in late 2025 and think "holy shit, I've been being nice, but it's time to turn over a new leaf and start gouging people?" I mean, don't get me wrong, they are greedy. But that's been true for years. What's changed is the market.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
HBM stacks multiple DRAM dies vertically on top of each other (typically 4-12 layers). It’s very different from DDR, especially during manufacturing because it has to be integrated with custom chips. Afaik, this isn’t available to Chinese foundries.. yet. Thus, they have DDR available. Specifically, theyre using LPDDR5 so far.
But it’s still the same dies- the shortage is in the dies not the packaging, no?
Shorten patents to 18months (the industry's innovation cycle, in the past). I'll bet you'll see a lot more output, esp. with low margins -- to make the market uninteresting for new players.
My personal opinion: Trade Mark - as long as dues are paid Patents a yearly cap of N things and only the most worthy get a 20 year patent, world wide. Copyright ~ 5 years auto with exponentially more expensive renewals in 5 year blocks.
Wright Brothers didn’t make much money from their invention due to the Great War and their patents being canceled to help with the war efforts.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
People pulling their heads out of their ass as to how to actually deploy these systems at scale (AKA to do this effectively, you need to do more than just throw pallets of GPU's at it, such as properly considering Topologies of both NVMe-over-Fabric and PCIe roots/lanes [0]) combined with advances in various technologies (eg RDMA, CXL, cuDF/BaM/GPUD2S/etc) that meaningfully enhance how system ram can be integrated an…
>People pulling their heads out of their ass as to how to actually deploy these systems at scale (AKA to do this effectively, you need to do more than just throw pallets of GPU's at it) Yeah something people don't understand is that the models have become so big it can take minutes to load them from SSDs. If you need to restart a CUDA process for whatever reason, you'd rather want to load the model files from RAM. Th…
11 years after specification released.
DDR4 makes it possible since 5 and half years to build 128GB AMD PC using 4x 32GB DDR4-3200 1.2V JEDEC modules. Only since half a year it is at last possible to build AMD PC with 128GB DDR5-5600 RAM. Because Ryzen DDR5 controller cannot operate with 2 sticks sharing the same channel at JEDEC speed/voltage.
DDR4 just cannot be EOL already because of unbuffered ECC! Even today it is not possible to have 128GB with 2 DDR5 sticks on AMD. Only 96GB.
And actually I'd expect 256GB (DDR5-8800 1.1V JEDEC) to be possible with DDR5. We're now only from 4000 to 5600 5(!) years since the specification was published. What if AMD achieves this only few months before DDR5 EOL?..
> DDR6 will be out in 2026 with consumer availability in 2027
... or not at all?..
