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The RAM shortage could last years

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Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#171

Post by fc417fc802 »

occamofsandwich wrote: post #111
jonas21 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That is quite the amusing read but it seems like a poorly constructed law. It wasn't futures themselves that were the problem there. The duo engaged in blatant market manipulation and severely disrupted part of the food supply in the process.

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#172

Post by lizknope »

rzmmm wrote: post #16

It seems that RAM manufacturers are still reluctant to increase production. They know something that investors don't about long term RAM demands?

The semiconductor industry has been a boom and bust industry for over 50 years.

https://imgur.com/a/cDLoeZm

I've been in the industry for 30 years and I've worked at companies with fabs were demand was high and customers would only get 30% of what they ordered. Then just 2 years later our fab was only running at 50% capacity and losing money. It takes about $20 billion and 3-4 years to make a modern new fab. If you think that AI is a bubble then do you want to be left with a shiny new factory and no products to sell because demand has collapsed?

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#173

Post by nutjob2 »

api wrote: post #123
rekabis wrote: post #121

Earlier 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.

You mean the point is to dump it all on the end user's machine, hogging its resources.

It's bad enough having to run one boated browser, now we have to run multiples?

This is not the right path.

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#174

Post by fc417fc802 »

Rekindle8090 wrote: post #60
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…

This will result in demand destruction which will starve the enterprise which will starve the hyperscaler. theres no situation where people not being able to afford hardware for 4 years results in the bubble not popping

I'd expect unaffordable hardware to drive demand for thin clients connected to cloud services which is something that had already been happening gradually prior to this.

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#175

Post by rTX5CMRXIfFG »

aeonfox wrote: post #163
api wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Lol SwiftUI/Jetpack/WPF aren’t design tools, they’re for writing native UI code. They’re simply not the right tool for building mockups.

I don’t see how design workflows matter in the conversation about cross-platform vs native and RAM efficiency since designers can always write their mockups in HTML/CSS/JS in isolation whenever they like and with any tool of their choice. You could even use purely GUI-based approaches like Figma or Sketch or any photo/vector editor, just tapping buttons and not writing a single line of web frontend code.

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#176

Post by eldenring »

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…

> Folks are now starting to ask difficult questions about their burn rate and revenue.

this view isn't updated correctly post-claude code and codex. there will clearly be sufficient demand.

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#177

Post by bryanrasmussen »

bombcar wrote: post #143
formerly_proven wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DRAM and to a lesser degree storage are notorious for their feast and famine cycles (Well that and collusion)

I don’t know if they realize that collusion lends itself to feast/famine.

but if you don't collude during times of feast you will have famine, and during times of famine you will have famine, in an economy based on feast/famine you must sometimes feast or die.

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#178

Post by philistine »

eldenring wrote: post #176
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…

> Folks are now starting to ask difficult questions about their burn rate and revenue. this view isn't updated correctly post-claude code and codex. there will clearly be sufficient demand.

Seriously? One release is all it took to turn the whole ship around?

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#179

Post by ahartmetz »

XorNot wrote: post #112
ahartmetz wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 is…

Good point, it's a risk but so far the Chinese competition isn't up to par and it's unclear whether they'll be able to exploit the current window of opportunity.

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#180

Post by Panzer04 »

whatever1 wrote: post #167
wordpad wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

This is a wild take.
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