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The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

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Re: The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

#241

Post by inglor_cz »

coldtea wrote: post #187
tick_tock_tick wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They pivoted away from that quite a while ago now they just disappear people for a week or two and randomly completely crush a business here and there to make sure they understand their place.

[flagged]

If you have no practical experience living in a totalitarian country, don't wish that upon yourself and your family.

That momentary feeling of triumphing over your enemies won't compensate for what you'd lose. This is a mistake that was made by numerous intellectuals in history.

Re: The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

#244

Post by inglor_cz »

eecc wrote: post #150
prewett wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Society should care about people making profits because otherwise those people do something else instead of providing goods and services. What happened in Communism is instructive on this point. Now if you want to argue that the pursuit of maximum profit as an end is a problem, there's a case to be made. The US had something like a marginal tax rate of 90% around the 1940s/1950s, if I recall correctly, and it obvious…

Perhaps it’s not capitalism that’s the problem but the unboundedness of the greed of a few, with respect to the other needs of humanity. Also Adam Smith implied that unbounded avarice is irrational and disruptive to society. The assumption is that morality survives grotesque wealth accumulation, we see many examples proving otherwise

"unboundedness of the greed of a few"

Lots of people claim "greed", but the stereotypical Tech billionaire doesn't simply roll around in gold like Scrooge McDuck, doing nothing and demanding more. They invest and reinvest it into new enterprises.

Of all the ways of dealing with massive wealth, this is probably the second least disruptive one. (The first one would be just giving it to honorable causes.)

Re: The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

#245

Post by ngcazz »

21asdffdsa12 wrote: post #243

I find this deeply ironic, the revolutionary product is eating the devices the consumer who where supposed to use it on. Saturn is hungry!

I feel like this has just accelerated what was the ideal scenario all along: high hardware prices push more people to rent

Re: The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

#246

Post by spockz »

mrandish wrote: post #65
LeifCarrotson wrote: post #15

What was most surprising about all this to me was this line: > So modern DRAM manufacturing is an extraordinarily complex and expensive process. Building a single state-of-the-art DRAM fabrication facility, a “fab,” will cost you about $15 to $20 billion; acquiring all the necessary equipment, like lithography tools and etching machines, will cost you another few billion; and then it’ll take you a few years of produc…

> it seems they'd be a prime candidate to spin up their own memory fab. While Apple et al certainly have the money to tilt up their own fab, they're savvy enough to understand the memory market's long history of constant boom/bust cycles. I still remember the huge DRAM shortage in late 80s forcing my startup at the time to delay launching our new product for a year. People assume Apple cares about vertically integrat…

The only reason I can see Apple do this is if it enables them to sell entry level devices with vastly more ram than the competition can afford. Say entry level MacBook Pro with 256GiB ram to facilitate running frontier level local models. If that is an edge they want to have.

Re: The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

#248

Post by Ilaurens »

gblargg wrote: post #172
simonw wrote: post #2

The headline here under-serves the article in my opinion: this is a fascinating, deep explanation of how the memory market works and why increased demand for HBM (used by big GPU racks) hurts the availability of wafers for DDR and LPDDR (used by laptops and phones).

This also put a lot into perspective: > these memory makers have learned a very particular lesson from the unforgiving history [deep drops in demand] of their industry: always leave demand unmet I can't blame them for keeping some reserve demand ready so they keep having customers over the years.

I'm no expert analyst on this topic, but I'm worried this time might be different for them. China finally has the technological capability to challenge this time around and they will gobble up the unmet demand, allowing them to get more experience and more money to catch up.

Re: The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

#249

Post by simonh »

shimman wrote: post #100
prewett wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Society should care about people making profits because otherwise those people do something else instead of providing goods and services. What happened in Communism is instructive on this point. Now if you want to argue that the pursuit of maximum profit as an end is a problem, there's a case to be made. The US had something like a marginal tax rate of 90% around the 1940s/1950s, if I recall correctly, and it obvious…

Call me crazy but society should care about giving people meaning, providing healthcare, and an education. You know the three things that lead to productive humans. Notice in my comment I mention nothing about taxes? Maybe people are mislead about neoliberalism? All it has done was sell out American jobs, get civilians addicted to drugs, and manufactured a political class that cares about donations over material need…

>Call me crazy but society should care about giving people meaning, providing healthcare, and an education. You know the three things that lead to productive humans.

Things that are paid for by economic surpluses. No profits, no investment, no taxes.

It's very much a matter of balance, you're not wrong that those services you mention are vital as are many others generally provided by governments. However it's all funded by a dynamic efficient economy.

The question of private wealth is the hardest, but private wealth by itself isn't a problem. The question there is, who should own and run productive economic activity. If it's not the state, it's private individuals. The wealth of billionaire industrialists doesn't consist of one big pile of money they wallow in, like Scrooge McDuck. It consists of their ownership and control of companies that do things in the economy.

Taking away that wealth means taking away those companies, and doing what with them? if you sell them to other private individuals, now they own and run those companies. If you can just take companies away from people like that, why would anyone build or buy them? If you take the companies into public ownership, now they're run by civil servants and politicians, but you'd have to pay for the companies, right? If you just seize assets, nobody is going to invest in anything that can be seized.

I do think inequality is a growing problem, but there are no easy answers.

Re: The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

#250

Post by andybak »

automatic6131 wrote: post #212
kopirgan wrote: post #194

Very well written sub. Any prediction on when it'll end? Can Chinese companies scale up to scare the big 3 into increasing capacity or lose price control?

It will end slowly, and then very suddenly. The demand for AI simply doesn't exist at the real prices. It barely exists at the current subsidized rates - Microsoft, Google, Meta, Anthropic, OpenAI are spending hundreds of billions to make mere billions. And then these data centers will be worthless, future ones won't get built, memory demand will evaporate on the spot.

I'm yet to see any convincing argument that inference is subsidised in any substantial way. Training and speculative expansion are where the spend is from what I can see.
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