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The RAM shortage could last years

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Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#241

Post by wmf »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #171
occamofsandwich wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And now OpenAI is engaged in blatant market manipulation and severely disrupted the entire world's DRAM supply.

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#242

Post by mistyvales »

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.

My main system still uses a Vega 64 and it plays all the games I'd care about. Undervolts like a champ! Will use it until it dies..

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#243

Post by badsectoracula »

fl4regun wrote: post #158
thehamkercat wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RX7900 XTX has 24GB

this card is 4 years old, it's not on store shelves anymore.

FWIW that depends on the stores you're looking at. There are three models from different manufacturers available here in a few shops. The prices are a bit ouchier than what i paid for mine around Christmas 2024 though (i got mine on a sale).

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#244

Post by wmf »

DoctorOetker wrote: post #159
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they gradually increase production capacity then prices stay high for 10+ years (or for as long as it takes for demand to crash) because a gradual increase in production takes that long for them to add enough capacity for current demand. If they add enough capacity to meet current demand quickly then if demand crashes they still have billions of dollars in loans used to build capacity for demand that no longer exi…

do we have evidence of RAM manufacturers going bankrupt? do we have evidence that the increased capacities after the mentioned past shortages went unused or were operated at a loss?

There used to be a dozen DRAM manufacturers and now there are five. I don't know if the others went bankrupt but they got out of the market somehow.

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#245

Post by zamalek »

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…

Not a rec, but just my source: Atrioc (streamer, YouTuber) is good at gathering all the facts for the rest of us. There's many other things in play, like the Strait of Hormuz (helium, bromine). Ultimately it works out that the shortage, and shortage profits, will continue; the chip makers are probably going to continue to see record profits (as Samsung has).

The specific mix of factors could change at any time, but the supply chain is relatively inelastic, it will take some time to show up on price labels.

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#247

Post by LastTrain »

Something I haven’t been able to reconcile: If AI makes software easier to create, that will drive the price down. How are software companies going to make enough revenue to pay for AI, when the amount of money being spent on AI is already multiples of the current total global expenditure on software? This demand for RAM is built on a foundation of sand, there will be a glut of capacity when it all shakes out.

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#248

Post by zamalek »

nostrademons wrote: post #89
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…

What kind of consumer electronics can you build with HBM? That's the startup you should be founding...

Anything where there's _at worst_ solder and traces between the compute and the memory. That's why you see it on GPUs (and Apple hardware). DRAMs advantage is modularity.

At least as I understand it.

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