291–300 of 524 posts
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They’ll just fill up the ram with bigger models. Demand will INCREASE, not decrease.
Every time we add capacity with almost anything, we find ways to saturate it.
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They're doing decent enough already for consumer electronics. Corsair is selling 16GB 6000MT/s CL36 DDR5 sticks in China using memory from CXMT: https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/ddr5/chinese-memo...
How long would it take an aggressive company to expand production capacity? I always thought it takes a few years, at minimum, for even established players to stand up new fabs
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It is not a law of nature that Chinese products are lower quality (cf. electric cars) and I don't see why they would go for that. They can just bin what they produce like everyone else and sell their products for what they have been tested to deliver.
But it is a near law that the first to market attempts will fully embraces the deeply engrained culture of 差不多, until market forces beat it out of the product line.
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The memory makers will not expand demand drastically. It is in the nature of their business to keep the market under-supplied, otherwise the following oversupply will kill them. Instead, supply is just rerouted from less profitable segments such as mobile and personal computing.
Reminds me of how Samsung is giving out $340,000 per person bonuses. Shows you how much of a stronghold they have in market.
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That's such a nonsensical argument, it holds for every other business too and in this case it's just a lame excuse for monopolization. If you are that chicken and can't stomach competition you should not be in business anyway. The current RAM manufactures were convicted of conspiracy to manipulate prices back in the 2000s or thereabout, doing so is their modus operandi, but this time the government is participating i…
Chip manufacturing has unusually long spin-up times, high capital costs and relatively thin margins for anything but the latest and greatest processes, compared to most industries.
BTW all RAM is severely overpriced, not only the one using the latest process nodes.
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Nvidia doesn't own fabs though, TSMC does. By 2017, ASICs for Bitcoin were well underway. Ethereum hadn't switched to PoS, and wouldn't until 2022. For that specific question, the answer is yes, because the GTX 1080 Ti is/was a monster card, and the crypto miners have a somewhat predictable demand for them, so there's some modeling you can do based on demand for the 2016 generation of cards. The question is ofc, if y…
TSMC doesn’t get to take the profit that currently accrues to Nvidia and Apple, even though they absolutely could from a business/leverage perspective, because they are an economic colony of the United states and hiking their prices (which Apple and Nvidia would have almost no choice but to pay, but would upset their benefactors) would jeopardize their national security/defense. In a world where TSMC is functionally…
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For lifespan, AWS is still running a ton of T4 GPUs from 2018, that power a lot of computer vision models. A ton of these will have a long life, not all ML is about frontier LLMs.
How can it be economically viable to still run them? You can get 100x the output with the same energy use.
Maybe the capabilities of newer GPUs allow AWS to charge higher margins for them? I don't actually know.
An interesting implication of this is that AI inference and training has a path to a ~3x hardware cost reduction (and maybe ~2x total cost reduction) without any technical innovation whatsoever, we just need to wait for dram supply to meet demand (either by manufacturing scaling or just waiting for the current rate of manufacturing to fill the demand spike).
I wonder if we will see an adoption of alternative floating point formats. IEEE floats are notoriously terrible at lower widths (<= 16 bits). Floating point formats such as posits do much better at 16 or 8 bits. If you could train at 16 bits per value instead of 32, and suffer a much smaller inaccuracy penalty than you would from IEEE32 to IEEE16...
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This is 100% going to kill the home built pc market. When I started building gaming pcs, the top top card was 750$ (NZD). Now they’re 10,000 just for the gpu and another 1-2000 for ram. People used to get into gaming pcs as an affordable hobby, now it’s making general aviation look like plan B.
It's more likely to kill the AI market. They're overbuilding capacity and most of it is going unused. The upcoming haircut is going to kill a lot of the major players. They've intentionally crafted an unsustainable business model in an effort to get users in the front door and raise their MAUs. We've seen this story before. We should know precisely where it's headed.