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The RAM shortage comes for us all

jeffgeerling.com

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Re: The RAM shortage comes for us all

#261

Post by quesera »

delfinom wrote: post #200
seanalltogether wrote: post #135

I wonder if these RAM shortages are going to cause the Steam Machine to be dead on arrival. Valve is probably not a big enough player to have secured production guarantees like Sony or Nintendo would have. If they try to launch with a price tag over $750, they're probably not going sell a lot.

If anyone that has hidden cash reserves that could buy out even Apple. It would probably be Valve. Lol, wacky reality if they say "hey we had spare cash so we bought out Micron to get DDR5 for our gaming systems"

To save my fellow ignorami some math, Valve is estimated to be valued at approximately 3.2% of Micron, or 0.2% of Apple. :)

Re: The RAM shortage comes for us all

#262

Post by NexRebular »

MPSimmons wrote: post #89

This reminds me of the recent LaurieWired video presenting a hypothetical of, "what if we stopped making CPUs": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2OJFqs8bUk Spoiler, but the answer is basically that old hardware rules the day because it lasts longer and is more reliable of timespans of decades. DDR5 32GB is currently going for ~$330 on Amazon DDR4 32GB is currently going for ~$130 on Amazon DDR3 32GB is currently goin…

> works great with your Linux distro of choice.

...or you could go with FreeBSD. There's even a brand new release that just came out!

https://www.freebsd.org/releases/15.0R/announce/

Re: The RAM shortage comes for us all

#263

Post by bullen »

mrob wrote: post #248
bullen wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not for small amounts of data. Bandwith increases, but if you only need a few bytes DDR3 is faster. Also slower speed means less heat and longer life. You can feel the speed advantage by just moving the mouse on a DDR3 PC...

RAM latency doesn't affect mouse response in any perceptible way. The fastest gaming mice I know of run at 8000Hz, so that's 125000ns between samples, much bigger than any CAS latency. And most mice run substantially slower. Maybe your old PC used lower-latency GUI software, e.g. uncomposited Xorg instead of Wayland.

I only felt it on Windows, maybe tht is due to the special USB mouse drivers Microsoft made? Still motion-to-photon latency is really lower on my DDR3 PCs, would be cool to know why.

Re: The RAM shortage comes for us all

#264

Post by vel0city »

snuxoll wrote: post #130
jl6 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, fair enough, but what are OpenAI doing buying production capacity rather than, say, paying NVIDIA to do it? OpenAI aren’t the ones making the hardware?

Just because Nvidia happily sells people discrete GPU's, DGX systems, etc., doesn't mean they would turn down a company like OpenAI paying them $$$ for just the packaged chips and the technical documentation to build their own PCBs; or, let OpenAI provide their own DRAM supply for production on an existing line. If you have a potentially multi-billion dollar contract, most businesses will do things outside of their s…

> doesn't mean they would turn down a company like OpenAI paying them $$$ for just the packaged chips and the technical documentation to build their own PCBs

FWIW, this was the standard state of affairs of the GPU market for a long while. nVidia and AMD sold the chips they paid someone to produce to integrators like EVGA, PNY, MSI, ZOTAC, GIGABYTE, etc. Cards sold under the AMD or nVidia name directly were usually partnered with one of these companies to actually build the board, place the RAM, design the cooling, etc. From a big picture perspective, it's a pretty recent thing for nVidia to only really deliver finished boards.

On top of this, OpenAI/Sam Altman have been pretty open about making their own AI chips and what not. This might point to them getting closer to actually delivering on that (pure speculation) and wanting to ensure they have other needed supplies like RAM.

Re: The RAM shortage comes for us all

#265

Post by conception »

650REDHAIR wrote: post #172
RachelF wrote: post #110

Perhaps we'll have to start optimizing software for performance and RAM usage again. I look at MS Teams currently using 1.5GB of RAM doing nothing.

I truly hate how bloated and inefficient MS/Windows is. My hope is that with the growing adoption of Linux that MS takes note...

So you’ve hated Windows for the last 30 years?

Re: The RAM shortage comes for us all

#266

Post by ActorNightly »

quesera wrote: post #261
delfinom wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If anyone that has hidden cash reserves that could buy out even Apple. It would probably be Valve. Lol, wacky reality if they say "hey we had spare cash so we bought out Micron to get DDR5 for our gaming systems"

To save my fellow ignorami some math, Valve is estimated to be valued at approximately 3.2% of Micron, or 0.2% of Apple. :)

Value =/= cash reserves. Valve has ran VERY lean for quite some time.

Re: The RAM shortage comes for us all

#267

Post by bullen »

0manrho wrote: post #259
bullen wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, DDR3 is the lowest CAS latency and lasts ALOT longer. Just like SSDs from 2010 have 100.000 writes per bit instead of below 10.000. CPUs might even follow the same durability pattern but that remains to be seen. Keep your old machines alive and backed up!

> 100.000 writes per bit per cell* Also, that SSD example is wildly untrue. Especially with the context of available capacity at the time. You CAN get modern SSD's with mind boggling write endurance per cell, AND has multides more cells, resulting in vastly more durable media than what was available pre 2015. The one caveat there to modern stuff being better than older stuff is Optane (the enterprise stuff like the 9…

Maybe but in my experience a good old 100GB from 2014+ in longevity.

Some say they have the opposite experience, mine is ONLY Intel drives, maybe that is why.

X25-E is the diamond peak of SSDs probably forever since the machines to make 45nm SLC are gone.

Re: The RAM shortage comes for us all

#268

Post by TSiege »

baal80spam wrote: post #207
aynyc wrote: post #17

Ha! Maybe Javascript developers will finally drop memory usage! You need to display the multiplication table? Please allocate 1GB of RAM. Oh, you want alternate row coloring? Here is another 100MB of CSS to do that. edit: this is a joke

Haha, the amount of downvotes of your very true comment just proves how many web developers are there on HN.

Its funny because the blogpost author makes the same joke

Re: The RAM shortage comes for us all

#269

Post by lysace »

GistNoesis wrote: post #255
lysace wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please explain to me like I am five: Why does OpenAI need so much RAM? 2024 production was (according to openai/chatgpt) 120 billion gigabytes. With 8 billion humans that's about 15 GB per person.

What they need is not so much memory but memory bandwidth. For training, their models have a certain number of memory needed to store the parameters, and this memory is touched for every example of every iteration. Big models have 10^12 (>1T )parameters, and with typical values of 10^3 examples per batch, and 10^6 number of iteration. They need ~10^21 memory accesses per run. And they want to do multiple runs. DDR5 R…

Thanks - but this seems like fairly extreme speculation.

> if money is not a problem.

Money is a problem, even for them.

Re: The RAM shortage comes for us all

#270

Post by bigiain »

bombcar wrote: post #182
oskarkk wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless the AI bubble pops.

One possible outcome is the remaining memory manufacturers have dedicated all their capacity for AI and when the bubble pops, they lose their customer and they go out of business too.

I wouldn't be too surprised to find at least some of the big ram foundries are deeply bought into the fake money circles where everybody is "paying" each other with unrealised equity in OpenAI/Anthropic/whoever, resulting in a few trillion dollars worth of on-paper "money" vanishing overnight, at which stage a whole bunch of actual-money loans will get called in and billion dollar companies get gutted by asset strippers.

Maybe larger makerspaces and companies like Adafruit, RasPi, and Pine should start stockpiling (real) money, and pick themselves up an entire fab full of gear at firesale prices so they can start making their own ram...

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