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The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

davidoks.blog

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

#251

Post by coldtea »

nickpp wrote: post #195
coldtea wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

State run is better than a private for profit monopoly or few-o-poly which is what we get. People all over the world have often revolted to get some enterprises state run (nationalizing) and were often punished or even bombed for it.

State run (or heavily regulated) services around here in Eastern Europe: health care, education and housing. All incredibly bad and expensive, I pay huge chunks of my monthly salary for them and I try to avoid them at all costs. They get worse and more expensive with time too. All the other services and products I use in my life, from the car I drive to the clothes on my back, the food I eat and the device I write th…

State-run all those things used to be way cheaper and better here than after privatization. So much more, it's not even funny.

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

#252

Post by coldtea »

inglor_cz wrote: post #240
yuriks wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Health care, education and housing have been getting worse and more expensive in the US over the decade also. Must be all that nationalization.

I can buy "more expensive", but as far as "worse", can you provide the relevant metrics? I don't think that your chance of survival of a heart attack or lymphoma got worse since 2016.

If you can afford less (lesser treatment, drugs, procedures, quality of doctors and hospitals you can pay for), then your chances of survival also got WAY worse.

Doesn't matter if the 1% has now access to better versions.

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

#254

Post by wartywhoa23 »

mr_toad wrote: post #66
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #46

It's impressive that somehow, as if by coincidence, we're seeing the biggest inflationary drivers for decades, perhaps for centuries, all happening simultaneously. The Iran war is spiking the price of oil and will likely cause shortages of pretty much everything if it isn't ended. The Ukraine war is helping with that by destroying Russian refining capacity. The memory shortage is set to do the same to consumer electr…

> Meanwhile the AI fad is seeing huge layoffs. This is really the only point I disagree with. Layoffs are being blamed on AI, but they are really a hangover of the covid hiring boom, and subsequent bust. All the tech money is going into building data centres (and the gas turbines that power data centres), and it turns out that programmers don’t have the relevant skills to build gas turbines.

> Layoffs are being blamed on AI, but they are really a hangover of the covid hiring boom.

The world's most convenient virus.

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

#255

Post by ceejayoz »

sroussey wrote: post #146
xbmcuser wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While these private companies exist and are in it for the profits, they don't control the government, meaning any potential price gouging is strictly regulated. The Chinese government actively prevents private companies from becoming too powerful or dominating an industry in the public eye. Instead, they foster competition by promoting and building up alternative companies. A great example of this is how they handled…

But not open up to competitors like Visa.

Credit card processors are, as a natural aspect of their purpose, a deeply useful surveillance network.

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

#256

Post by dboreham »

dyauspitr wrote: post #128
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…

Apple, Google Microsoft Amazon should all set up memory and CPU fabs. I don’t understand why they don’t do it. $400 million ASML machine is chump change and you can almost certainly find/train locals or provide incentives to immigrants to come here as workers to fill the roles there.

30 years ago that's how the industry was structured. IBM was the largest memory manufacturer. MBAs spent decades undoing the arrangement you're now suggesting.

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

#257

Post by automatic6131 »

andybak wrote: post #250
automatic6131 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If inference was profitable - they'd tell us. Msft, goog, public companies. They'd break out the numbers and show us, if they were good.

But instead, all we get is known liars going on podcasts and repeating "stylized facts" that aren't literally true about their supposed profitability on inference, from companies losing billions per year in a situation where they don't have to tell the truth.

That is VERY far from a convincing argument that they are profitable. So I can & will safely conclude that the opposite is true.

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

#258

Post by rjh29 »

andybak wrote: post #250
automatic6131 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A few days ago Gemini redid their rate limits, making images/audio/video generation much more expensive, shrunk limits across the board (including a new weekly limit) and added more expensive tiers.

At the moment you can pay $20/month to do thousands of expensive queries a month (involving file uploads, the Pro model, extended thinking), and evidence suggests that heavy users are not profitable.

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

#259

Post by twoodfin »

ajb wrote: post #189
JuniperMesos wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I own FAANG stock because I own the S&P 500 in my retirement accounts, and so do managed pension funds. There's a lot more than billionaires who benefit from FAANG shares going up in value.

It's true that the current pension provision depends on this. But if pensions are mainly funded by companies which extract monopoly rent, then it would actually be more efficient and be less distortionary to the competitive market to fund them directly out of taxation - one big, simple rent instead of 100,000 different ones clogging everything up.

Are US retirement accounts largely growing on the back of “companies which extract monopoly rent”?

That seems outlandish. My iPhone isn’t “rent”, neither is an Nvidia GPU, or an Instagram ad.

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

#260

Post by zozbot234 »

HPsquared wrote: post #247

I wonder if aggressive swapping could help a bit. Higher performing SSDs with endurance. Unless flash memory is also being squeezed...

Yes, it would be viable. Intel Optane/XPoint is wearout-resistant and has DDR3-like performance for 10% of current DRAM prices (and that's on the secondary market, since it's not being manufactured new). But it's far more power-intensive per bit read/write than even SSDs, let alone DRAM.
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