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The RAM shortage could last years

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Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#191

Post by jandrewrogers »

whatever1 wrote: post #147
bombcar wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t the memory makers always get left holding the bag? I feel this has happened at least three times before.

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…

Forecasting demand 5 years into the future is intrinsically highly unreliable. It doesn’t matter if it is capitalism or a command economy. The bet is always going to be risky and someone will have to pay for that risk.

At least with capitalism you have many different people with different perspectives on the risk making independent bets. That mitigates the more extreme negative outcomes.

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#192

Post by tcfhgj »

lmm wrote: post #187
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.

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 a…

> And if the alternative is a memory-unsafe language

and if not?

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#193

Post by bluGill »

formerly_proven wrote: post #102
bombcar wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t the memory makers always get left holding the bag? I feel this has happened at least three times before.

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

There are a lot of cyclical businesses that make money every year. It requires careful management. Factories can produce less than full capacity - but you better design for that. you can make money in the worst years without laying anyone off even - but it requires careful attention to details and not over hiring in good times as if they will never end.

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#195

Post by tcfhgj »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #183
pron wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

hopefully not implying needing a gc for memory safety...

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#196

Post by lmm »

tcfhgj wrote: post #192
lmm wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

> And if the alternative is a memory-unsafe language and if not?

> and if not?

If the alternative is memory-safe and easy to build, then maybe people will switch. But until it is it's irresponsible to even try to get them to do so.

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#197

Post by Numerlor »

bluGill wrote: post #193
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)

There are a lot of cyclical businesses that make money every year. It requires careful management. Factories can produce less than full capacity - but you better design for that. you can make money in the worst years without laying anyone off even - but it requires careful attention to details and not over hiring in good times as if they will never end.

Factories working at (significantly) less than full capacity gets a bit harder when you've got one of the most expensive machines on earth working in them, and production lines that'll be out of date in a couple of years

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#198

Post by tverbeure »

platevoltage wrote: post #95
torginus wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I was gonna say, I still use an AMD Vega that uses HBM2.

Vega was a card with decent perf/$ for the consumer, but from a pure technical point of view (perf/mm2, perf/BW, perf/W) it was a major failure. Both Vega (and Fiji before it) showed that excess memory BW alone is not sufficient to win.

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#199

Post by drnick1 »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #30
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…

To add a more local hurdle as well, the Dutch power grid is at capacity and its managing company is now telling companies that planned to build a datacenter that they can't be connected to the grid until 2030, even though said companies already paid for and got guarantees about that connection. That is, memory capacity is reserved for datacenters yet to be built, but this will do weird things if said datacenter const…

This just highlights what an utter failure and self-inflicted wound the green policies of Euro countries have been. Europe has already lost the AI race to the U.S. and China.

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#200

Post by drnick1 »

VladStanimir wrote: post #46
hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people who fucked over consumers are left holding the back that they sold us out over? Oh no!

They won't be, prices are high because they are refusing to build capacity for demand that may evaporated by the time they are done. They are holding back and building only enough so when the bubble pops they will be fine.

You can't build capacity overnight, and even with that in mind, it's hard to say if it is sensible to increase capacity now that we are in an AI bubble. For all we know, the bubble might burst.
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