Part of this is that memory companies recognize that nobody is going to enforce antitrust law for the forseeable future, so collusion to raise prices is the norm now.
Hold on to Your Hardware
191–200 of 559 posts
Re: Hold on to Your Hardware
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems like you largely agree with the article - people shall own nothing and be happy. Perhaps the artificially induced supply crunch could go on indefinitely. Also, I wonder how many of us, even here on HN, have the ability to spend that amount of money on computer for personal use. Frankly I wouldn't even know what to do with all the RAM - should I just ramdisk every program I use and every digital thing I made…
People spend a lot more than that on a car they use less, especially if they're in tech. The RAM choice was because I have never regretted buying more RAM - it's practically always a better trade than a slightly faster CPU - and 96GB DIMMs were at a sweet spot compared to 128GB DIMMs. That, and the ability to have big LLMs in memory, for some local inference, even if it's slow mixed CPU/GPU inference, or paged on dem…
I bought a 4 year old car for significantly less than that. And I can get a computer that can do 99% of what your monster can do for like 10% of the price. And if I want LLM inference I can get that for like $20 a month or whatever.
I don't mean to judge, it's your money but to me it seems like an enormous waste. Just like spending $100k on a car when you can get one for $15k that does pretty much exactly the same job.
Re: Hold on to Your Hardware
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
We won't be in a supply crunch forever. We'll have a demand crunch. The demand of powerful consumer hardware will shrink so much that producing them will lose the economics of scale. It 've always been bound to happen, just delayed by the trend of pursuing realistic graphics for games. People who are willing to drop $20k on a computer might not be affected much tho.
> We'll have a demand crunch This is what I'm afraid of. As more stuff moves to the cloud helped in part by the current prices of HW, the demand for consumer hardware will drop. This will keep turning the vicious cycle of rising consumer HW prices and more moves to the cloud. I can already see Nvidia rubbing their hands together in expectation of the massive influx of customers to their cloud gaming platform. If a GP…
> I can already see Nvidia rubbing their hands together in expectation of the massive influx of customers to their cloud gaming platform.
Roblox is not popular because of its graphics. Younger gamers care more about having fun than having an immersive experience.
Re: Hold on to Your Hardware
#194It's a thought provoking article and I felt the pain when I shopped around for a new GPU lately to replace a 4090 I thought was faulty (eventually a cleaning of the PCIe connector solved those crashes). I bought it at the end of 2022 and three and a half years it seems like we've gone backwards, not forward on GPUs available for end users. They cost more and do less. But also consider that PCs have been an anomaly fo…
Yea; I believe this is unprecedented. This is the firs time I've observed this regression in GPU price/ performance. That 4090 is still top-tier, and now costs more than when it was new.
Re: Hold on to Your Hardware
#195We are in a renaissance of computing right at this moment. If expand our definition of computers outside of screens and traditional input devices, microcontrollers are capable of so much more, with so much less (energy consumption | ram | storage). The tipping point for MCUs was WiFi - which not only allows you to speak multiple protocols (UDP/Zigbee/HTTP/etc) and have audio IO, but also P2P communication and novel n…
you are right! Power management improvements are what really enable these form factors... being able to run a wifi sensor on a coin cell for a year makes applications possible that were unthinkable just a few years ago
Re: Hold on to Your Hardware
#196The general take here seems to be "everything eventually passes". That isn't always true. I wonder how many people have a primary computing device that they don't even have full control over now (Apple phones, tablets...). Years ago the concept of spending over $1k on a computer that I didn't even have the right to install my own software on was considered ridiculous by many people (myself included). Now many people…
Being in control of your own computing device was always a niche. The vast majority of people are not interested in computing itself, only in the output. For that majority, this is fine.
The niche is still there, probably as big as it was before. For example, as I grew weary of being subject to services I have little control over, I set up my own home server using a refurbished PC. It has been an amazing journey so far. But I don't think a normie would ever get interested in buying a refurbished Dell, install Debian on it, and set up their own services there.
As long as there is a niche of people interested in buying their own computers, there will be companies willing to fill that niche.
Re: Hold on to Your Hardware
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
The thing is, other than AI stuff, where does a non powerful computer limit you? My phone has 16gigs of ram and a terabyte of storage, laptops today are ridiculous compared to anything I studied with. I'm not arguing mind you, just trying to understand the usecases people are thinking of here.
>My phone has 16gigs of ram and a terabyte of storage That's "non powerful" to you?
The opposite. I meant that if this is what consumer grade looks like nowadays, even with a fraction of current flagships we seem well covered - this was less than 800 bucks.
Re: Hold on to Your Hardware
#198Not a single comment mentioning how programmers these days don’t give a shit about optimization.
Re: Hold on to Your Hardware
#199I don't buy the central thesis of the article. We won't be in a supply crunch forever. However, I do believe that we're at an inflection point where DC hardware is diverging rapidly from consumer compute. Most consumers are using laptops and laptops are not keeping pace with where the frontier is in a singular compute node. Laptops are increasingly just clients for someone else's compute that you rent, or buy a time…
The thing is, other than AI stuff, where does a non powerful computer limit you? My phone has 16gigs of ram and a terabyte of storage, laptops today are ridiculous compared to anything I studied with. I'm not arguing mind you, just trying to understand the usecases people are thinking of here.
I've never have a personal computer that came even close to powerful enough to do what i want. Compiles that take 15 minutes, is really annoying for instance.
Re: Hold on to Your Hardware
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We'll have a demand crunch This is what I'm afraid of. As more stuff moves to the cloud helped in part by the current prices of HW, the demand for consumer hardware will drop. This will keep turning the vicious cycle of rising consumer HW prices and more moves to the cloud. I can already see Nvidia rubbing their hands together in expectation of the massive influx of customers to their cloud gaming platform. If a GP…
> I can already see Nvidia rubbing their hands together in expectation of the massive influx of customers to their cloud gaming platform. Roblox is not popular because of its graphics. Younger gamers care more about having fun than having an immersive experience.
I love it when I get my Robloxhead daughter to test drive some of the games I play on my 5090 box. "Ooooh these graphics are unreal" "Can we stop for just a moment and admire this grass" :-D