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The RAM shortage could last years

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Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#181

Post by fn-mote »

elorant wrote: post #105
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…

The market is already stagnated. Even if OpenAI doesn’t buy what they reserved other players will do so. SK Hynix CEO said there is a 20% gap between supply and demand per year. And that doesn’t account the shock effect that will take place the moment prices normalize and everyone and their dog will go out and start buying inventory to avoid the next crisis. I for one would certainly buy more than I currently need ju…

I think: s/stagnated/saturated/

Edit: also, that demand pressure is going to be applied constantly; there isn’t going to be a shock, it’s just going to keep prices high longer.

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#182

Post by Ardon »

kev009 wrote: post #157
whatever1 wrote: post #147

Earlier 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…

Is the DRAM industry really capitalist? Focusing on just the Korean parties, it functions like a command economy. I would say the same about most high end semi-conductor manufacturing, TSMC, Intel, ASML are being commanded and driven by nation-state level decision making. Right now the command is to focus on high wattage centralized AI systems at the expense of everything else.

No one at high levels is capitalist, in ideology or action. An ideological capitalist would be in favor of competition, but these people disdain it and collude regularly. The only 'capitalist' actions they take are by accident, the real goal is as much power/money as possible as fast as possible.

We don't even expect companies to plan long-term anymore, it's just moving wealth as fast as possible.

That isn't really a change, very few people could ever have been said to be ideological capitalists. (capitalist is not a word with a hard definition, but I'm considering it a different thing than the more modern pure libertarian zero-regulation ideology)

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#183

Post by fc417fc802 »

pron wrote: post #133
dehrmann wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're thinking an algorithmic tradeoff, but this is an abstraction tradeoff.

Some of the algorithms are built deep into the runtime. E.g. languages that rely on malloc/free allocators (which require maintaining free lists) are making a pretty significnant tradoff of wasting CPU to save on RAM as opposed to languages using moving collectors.

Free lists aren't expensive for most usage patterns. For cases where they are we've got stuff like arena allocators. Meanwhile GC is hardly cheap.

Of course memory safety has a quality all its own.

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#184

Post by philistine »

fsckboy wrote: post #168

if 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…

Why are you only talking about gamers? Apple, the most cautious planners in the whole industry have straight up cancelled their 512gb RAM Mac Studio. Don’t ask; they won’t sell you one.

Everybody’s getting pinched, not just the gamers.

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#185

Post by sidewndr46 »

torginus wrote: post #42
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…

The Radeon VII came out in 2019 as a $700 consumer GPU with an 1TB/s HBM2 memory subsystem which is more than any consumer GPU you can get today, including the high-end ones afaik. At that point in time, there was a whole lineup of AMD GPUs with HBM going down into the midrange. If they could make this stuff and sell it to regular people a decade ago for very palatable prices, why do they come up with the idea that t…

It also does 64 bit floating point I think?

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#186

Post by BirAdam »

Of course, alternatively, the AI companies could go bust before finding profitability. Then, there’d be a ton of supply, prices would crash, and one or two of the current memory suppliers would go out of business. After that, the new Chinese memory companies might be producing at volume, and Renesas could be up and running.

At the moment, nothing is certain. Could this last? Sure. Could it not last? Yup.

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#187

Post by lmm »

rekabis wrote: post #121
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.

> 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.

Who cares about 300Mb, where is that going to move the needle for you? And if the alternative is a memory-unsafe language then 300Mb is a price more than worth paying. Likewise if the alternative is the app never getting started, or being single-platform-only, because the available build systems suck too bad.

There ought to be a short one-liner that anyone can run to get easily installable "binaries" for their PyQt app for all major platforms. But there isn't, you have to dig up some blog post with 3 config files and a 10 argument incantation and follow it (and every blog post has a different one) when you just wanted to spend 10 minutes writing some code to solve your problem (which is how every good program gets started). So we're stuck with Electron.

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#188

Post by wordpad »

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.

>legislation dampens this behavior

Potentially. Well meaning and thought out legislation still distorts the markets, possibly making things objectively worse.

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#189

Post by subarctic »

michaelt wrote: post #137
necovek wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am surprised we consider TSMC like a natural resource: isn't it really a combination of know-how and build-out according to that know-how? If smarts leave the country, perhaps this moves with them. The risk with China taking over Taiwan is that they mostly expedite their own production research by a couple of years.

> I am surprised we consider TSMC like a natural resource: isn't it really a combination of know-how and build-out according to that know-how? Have you seen how many states and countries look enviously at Silicon Valley’s tech companies, China’s manufacturing dominance, or London’s financial sector and try to replicate them? Turns out it’s way harder than you’d expect. Hell, Intel can’t match TSMC despite decades of…

With you on the first two, but I haven't heard of London's financial sector being a big deal, what's going on there?
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