I wonder if this might motivate to write more memory efficient software. I mean we have so much memory, but even some trivial programs eat hundreds of megabytes of ram.
The RAM shortage could last years
161–170 of 536 posts
Re: The RAM shortage could last years
#162Ok 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…
> Soo ... how sure are we that the memory makers themselves are not going to be the ones holding the bag?
The memory makers specifically did not scale up capacity to avoid being left holding the bag.
Re: The RAM shortage could last years
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think this will smack the hands of developers who don’t manage RAM well And hopefully kill Electron. I have never seen the point of spinning up a 300+Mb app just to display something that ought to need only 500Kb to paint onto the screen.
The point is being able to write it once with web developers instead of writing it a minimum of twice (Windows and macOS) with much harder to hire native UI developers.
And HTML/CSS/JS are far more powerful for designing than any of SwiftUI/IB on Apple, Jetpack/XML on Android, or WPF/WinUI on Windows, leaving aside that this is what designers, design platforms and AI models already work best with. Even if all the major OSes converged on one solution, it still wouldn't compete on ergonomics or declarative power for designing.
Re: The RAM shortage could last years
#164I wonder if this might motivate to write more memory efficient software. I mean we have so much memory, but even some trivial programs eat hundreds of megabytes of ram.
I've definitely done some vibe-coding with the explicit intent to reduce memory usage.
Re: The RAM shortage could last years
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That's fine, but I was responding to a comment that said that RAM prices would put pressure to optimise footprint. Optimising footprint could often lead to wasting more CPU, even if your starting point was optimising for neither.
My response was that I disagree with this conclusion that something like "pressure to optimize RAM implies another hardware tradeoff" is the primary thing which will give, not that I'm changing the premise.
Pressure to optimize can more often imply just setting aside work to make the program be nearer to being limited by algorithmic bounds rather than doing what was quickest to implement and not caring about any of it. Having the same amount of time, replacing bloated abstractions with something more lightweight overall usually nets more memory gains than trying to tune something heavy to use less RAM at the expense of more CPU.
Re: The RAM shortage could last years
#166Earlier 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.
It has the makings of a natural monopoly, except its compounded by RAM cartels colluding to shut out the last of the competitors.
Recently they had a second price fixing lawsuit thrown out (in the US).
Now with the state of things I'm sure another lawsuit will arrive and be thrown out because the government will do anything to keep the AI bubble rolling and a price fixing suit will be a threat to national security, somehow. Obviously thats speculative and opinion but to be clear, people are allowing it. There are and more so were things that could be done.
Re: The RAM shortage could last years
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
All of the capital intensive businesses face this issue. Chemicals, Shipping, Semiconductors etc. You get market signals that the demand is there, you acquire the necessary capital, you spend 5 years to build capacity, but guess what, 5 other market players did the same thing. So now you are doomed, because the market is flooded and you have low cash flow since you need to drop prices to compete for pennies. Now you…
>Capitalists claim that this is optimal. It's more optimal than planned economies until we have AI planned economies with realtime feedback, I guess. Consumers get cheap goods during oversupply and most inefficient companies get elliminated during bust while consolidation leads to economies of scale.
No this is literally a sign of an unstable system with too high of a gain K.
There is an alternative where legislation dampens this behavior but the short term profits will be lower. Hence the hawks don’t like it.
Re: The RAM shortage could last years
#168if a shortage lasts years, it's not a shortage. "The market clearing price of RAM in the face of expected sustained healthy demand should lead to a stable market for years."
even if gaming is and will remain very popular for years, it and the desire to upgrade gaming rigs is still a discretionary activity with more price elasticity of demand than corporate uses for RAM in the dawn of the AI age. gamers live on the margin of this market, where low prices will stimulate upgrades and high prices will lead to holding out. The complaints about price are real, but that segment of the market is some combination of less large and less important.
Re: The RAM shortage could last years
#169I wonder if this might motivate to write more memory efficient software. I mean we have so much memory, but even some trivial programs eat hundreds of megabytes of ram.
I've definitely done some vibe-coding with the explicit intent to reduce memory usage.
How efficient is AI at reducing RAM consuption?
Re: The RAM shortage could last years
#170if a shortage lasts years, it's not a shortage. "The market clearing price of RAM in the face of expected sustained healthy demand should lead to a stable market for years." even if gaming is and will remain very popular for years, it and the desire to upgrade gaming rigs is still a discretionary activity with more price elasticity of demand than corporate uses for RAM in the dawn of the AI age. gamers live on the ma…
The issue is supply is inelastic so even as prices soar they can only make more so fast and that won’t get fixed until 2028.