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Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening

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191–200 of 449 posts

Re: Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening

#191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would permanently increase DRAM prices. Memory fabricators either earn billions of dollars in income each year or they can't keep going. There are no little Mom and Pop businesses that can do photolithography on leading process nodes.

Nonsense, it would force vertical de- integration. Chip fabs used to be like book publishers; you don't have to own a printing press to be an author. Carver Mead even described his vision of the industry that way. Nowadays you have to get your cell libraries and a large chunk of your toolchain from the fab. Of course it's laundered through cadence+synopsys, but it's still coming from the fab. You have to buy your mas…

> Chip fabs used to be like book publishers;

I can still make a book like that in my basement. People do this as a hobby now. You can still build chips like that in your garage. People do this as a hobby now.

These things DO NOT SCALE... you cant have 10,000 people running printing presses in their basement to crank out the NYT every day. A modern chip fab has more in common with the printer for the NYT than it does with what you can crank out in your garage.

Let's look at TSMC's plant in AZ. They went and asked intel "hey where are you sourcing your sulfuric acid from. When they looked at the American vendors TSMC asked intel "how are you working with this". Intels response was that it was the best they could get.

It was not.

TSMC now imports sulfuric acid from Taiwan, because it needs to be outrageously pure. Intel is doing the same.

Every single part, component, step and setup in the chain is like that. There is so much arcane knowledge that loss of workers represents a serious set back. There are people in the production chain, with PHD's, who are literally training their successors because thats sort of the only option.

Do you know who has been trying the approach you are proposing? China. It has not worked.

https://www.youtube.com/asianometry probably the best rough and ready education you can get on the industry.

Re: Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening

#192
post #6

I'm so mad about this, I need DDR5 for a new mini-PC I bought and prices have literally gone up by 2.5x.. 128GB used to be 400$ in June, and now it's over $1,000 for the same 2x64GB set.. I have no idea if/when prices will come back down but it sucks.

Why do we all need 128GB now? I was happy with 32. Close a few Chrome tabs, and save some DDR5 for the rest of us. :-)

It depends on what you are doing.

If you are working on an application that has several services (database, local stack, etc.) as docker containers, those can take up more memory. Especially if you have large databases or many JVM services, and are running other things like an IDE with debugging, profiling, and other things.

Likewise, if you are using many local AI models at the same time, or some larger models, then that can eat into the memory.

I've not done any 3D work or video editing, but those are likely to use a lot of memory.

Re: Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening

#193
post #6

I'm so mad about this, I need DDR5 for a new mini-PC I bought and prices have literally gone up by 2.5x.. 128GB used to be 400$ in June, and now it's over $1,000 for the same 2x64GB set.. I have no idea if/when prices will come back down but it sucks.

it's cyclical. just wait 10 years

Good advice for the immortal. For everyone else, "do something else instead" is more practical.

Re: Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening

#194
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that revenue, or profit? If revenue, it'll slam certain kinds of high-volume low-profit businesses, and if it's profit then the company will just arrange to have big compensation "expenses" for executives. The latter would have to be backstopped by taxes on individual income.

revenue, obviously, but maybe it would scale with employee numbers... if you have lots of employees, you get taxed less.

[deleted]

Re: Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening

#196
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that revenue, or profit? If revenue, it'll slam certain kinds of high-volume low-profit businesses, and if it's profit then the company will just arrange to have big compensation "expenses" for executives. The latter would have to be backstopped by taxes on individual income.

revenue, obviously, but maybe it would scale with employee numbers... if you have lots of employees, you get taxed less.

So the policy goal is to minimize revenue per employee?

Re: Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening

#197
post #6

I'm so mad about this, I need DDR5 for a new mini-PC I bought and prices have literally gone up by 2.5x.. 128GB used to be 400$ in June, and now it's over $1,000 for the same 2x64GB set.. I have no idea if/when prices will come back down but it sucks.

I just looked at the invoice for my current PC parts that I bought in April 2016: I paid 177 EUR (~203 USD) for 32GB (DDR4-2800). It's kinda sad when you grow up in a period of rapid hardware development and now see 10 years going by with RAM $/GB prices staying roughly the same.

I bought a bunch of hard drives in 2021 (16TB Seagate Exos) that are now $50-$100 more expensive. It's depressing.

Re: Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening

#198
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder, is there any way to avoid this kind of market failure? Even a planned economy could succumb to hype - promises that improved societal efficiency are just around the corner.

> Is there any way to avoid this kind of market failure? There are potentially undesirable tradeoffs and a whole new game of cheats and corruption, but you could frustrate rapid, concentrated growth with things like an increasing tax on raised funds. Right now, we basically let people and companies concentrate as much capital as they want, as rapidly as they want, with almost no friction, presumably because it helped…

We don't really seem to be shying away from government corruption.

Re: Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening

#199
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is there any way to avoid this kind of market failure? There are potentially undesirable tradeoffs and a whole new game of cheats and corruption, but you could frustrate rapid, concentrated growth with things like an increasing tax on raised funds. Right now, we basically let people and companies concentrate as much capital as they want, as rapidly as they want, with almost no friction, presumably because it helped…

> there are levers to pull that could slow down this kind of freight train before it were to get out of control Care to share some keywords here?

Taxes and/or regulatory approval processes.

Re: Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening

#200

All I can say is, - the insane frothing hype behind AI is showing me a new kind of market failure - where resources can be massively misallocated just because some small class of individuals THINK or HOPE it will result in massive returns. Even if it squeezes out every single other sector that happens to want to use SDRAM to do things OTHER than buffer memory before it's fed into a PCIE lane for a GPU. - I'm really R…

Games eventually will move to consoles and the whole PC industry will take a huge hit.

Consoles are increasingly becoming PCs, so I don't see this happening
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