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As AI gobbles up chips, prices for devices may rise

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Re: As AI gobbles up chips, prices for devices may rise

#311

Post by bmacho »

arnaudsm wrote: post #188
UltraSane wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Supply should increase as a response to higher prices, this bringing prices down.

That's economical theory, but the real world is often non-linear. Crucial is dead. There's a finite amount of rare earth. Wars and floods can bankrupt industries, supply chains are tight.

It's not even the economical theory. Supply should not increase to increased demand. They want more profit, and if less supplies is what accomplishes that, they will absolutely keep the supplies constant and manufacture a scarcity. This is the economical theory.

Re: As AI gobbles up chips, prices for devices may rise

#312

Post by tliltocatl »

torginus wrote: post #133

It's somewhat alarming to see that companies (owned by a very small slice of society) producing these AI thingies (whose current economic is questionable value and actual future potential is up to hot debate), can easily price the rest of humanity out of computing goods.

DUV processes are still a things and perfectly usable for general compute - but not for AI. Rising prices will make them competitive again. And it will require us to ditch Electron (which is a good thing). If anything, we might see a compute renaissance.

Re: As AI gobbles up chips, prices for devices may rise

#313

Post by TrackerFF »

Ekaros wrote: post #134

Outside say video and image editing and maybe lossless audio. Why is this much ram even needed in most use cases? And I mean actually thinking about using it. Computer code unless you are actually doing whole Linux kernel, is just text. So lot of projects probably would fit in cache. Maybe software companies should be billed for user's resources too...

Electron apps hog memory. The vast, vast majority of computer users are Windows users. Using 8 GB of memory without really "using" it, is trivial. Chrome + some Microsoft office apps will spend that much.

Re: As AI gobbles up chips, prices for devices may rise

#314

Post by andrekandre »

walterbell wrote: post #276
compounding_it wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on the article, demand exceeds supply by 10%. It seems that companies are taking advantage of this gap nothing else. I won't be surprised if the demand is kept this way for a while to extract profits. GPUs saw a similar trend during crypto. Then there were affordable GPUs at one point.

"OMEC" (Organization of Memory Exporting Countries) NAND production quotas lowered by ~10%? https://x.com/jukanlosreve/status/1988505115339436423 Samsung Electronics has lowered its target for NAND wafer output this year to around 4.72 million sheets, about 7% down from the previous year's 5.07 million. Kioxia also adjusted its output from 4.80 million last year to 4.69 million this year.. SK hynix and Micron are lik…

   > bid to benefit from higher prices
et tu 'law of supply and demand'?

Re: As AI gobbles up chips, prices for devices may rise

#315

Post by m4rtink »

mschuster91 wrote: post #214
lotsofpulp wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The business that owns crucial is producing more chips than ever. Rare earth metals are in the dirt around the world. Supply and demand curves shifting, hence prices increasing (and decreasing) is an expected part of life due to the inability to see the future.

> Rare earth metals are in the dirt around the world. They are. The problem is, the machinery to extract and refine them, and especially to make them into chips, takes years to build. We're looking at a time horizon of almost a decade if you include planning, permits and R&D. And given that almost everyone but the AI bros expects the AI bubble to burst rather sooner than later (given that the interweb of funding and…

Aren't rare earth metals used mainly for batteries, not chips ?

I guess people might be mixing up all the headlines of all the articles they did not read by this point.

Re: As AI gobbles up chips, prices for devices may rise

#316

Post by numpad0 »

bratbag wrote: post #310
blitzar wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If AI lives up to the hype, it's a portent of how things will feel to the common man. This hype scenario would be the biggest bust of all for Ai. Without jobs or money then there is nobody to pay Ai to do all the things that it can do, it the power and compute it needs to function will be worth $0.

Or the value of everything non ai drops to zero, which makes the value of ai infinite by comparison.

Either ways it'll be the end of the USD as we know it. But then again such fantasy situations had been "predicted" numerous times and never once came to be a reality.

Re: As AI gobbles up chips, prices for devices may rise

#317

Post by greesil »

SunlitCat wrote: post #213
magicalhippo wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Non-AMP link: https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/news/story/ram-shortage...

To be honest, it starts to look more and more like a single company (we all know which one), is just buying up all DRAM capacities to keep others out of the (AI) game.

Diabolical

Re: As AI gobbles up chips, prices for devices may rise

#318

Post by motbus3 »

Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #231
motbus3 wrote: post #226

For me, there is concerning a flag about all of this. I know this is not always true, but on this case, crucial folks say the margins for end user are too low and they have demand for AI. I suppose they do not intend to bring a new AI focused unit because it is not worth it or they believe the hype might be gone before it they are done. But what intrigues me is why they would allow other competitors to step up in a s…

So my understanding of the situation is that, Crucial folks had downsized their factory production (see my other comments for reference perhaps) but then AI involvement started demanding chips just at the time their factory production was at their lows. So now for these AI companies, they got tons of money to burn so they are willing to pay a lot more, so now crucial only have a limited supply of ram and the thing is…

> Well, would you increase the prices 3-4x? (Text below is quite long, let me say it here, you made great points in your answer!)

It seems they could. They not only single handed caused it to double or more without trying :/ Not sure if it would trigger other sorts of regulatory issues though

It is my impression that there is a fabricated scarcity of all goods. That's a common practice in cloth retailers. In the 90s they thought for brand name and market share. They noticed it was silly because they could sell half for double of the price and as this means less logistics, it also meant higher margins. It is not a lunch free approach. Selling less means that you delegate at least the bottom portion of your clients to the market, and if there are options, they might just be gone. That's exactly what happened with Chevrolet, Ford, etc. they stopped investing and when a new competitor appeared, even if it was more marketing than product, they lots rivers of money and barely can keep the fight on (except for maybe making a puppet tell others that there is no such thing as climate change, but that's something else)

Technology space right now looks like it. We already see major brands stagnation allegedly because they did all that is possible and it will take some time until some nouvelle approach to appear.

As a consumer, I want to believe this won't take long to settle but I'm afraid money is going elsewhere

Re: As AI gobbles up chips, prices for devices may rise

#319

Post by YetAnotherNick »

coderenegade wrote: post #230
YetAnotherNick wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No just stop being cynical. The reason almost every electronic item is cheaper now than 2 decades back is just becuase the demand(and thus supply) is higher.

I can't tell if this is sarcasm or not. I'd argue it's more the result of the CCP bankrolling the Chinese electronics industry to the point where roughly 70% of all electronics goods are produced in China. The concentration of expertise and supply chains is staggering, and, imo, was really born out of geopolitical strategy.

No, its not. Transistors used to cost $1. Now they cost $1/billion or something. It's all because the 10s of billions of fixed cost incurred by fab is shared among customers. If we create less chips, the fixed cost wont reduce.

Re: As AI gobbles up chips, prices for devices may rise

#320

Post by danaris »

lysace wrote: post #267
tirant wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is factually wrong. That might be the case only for the infotainment system, but there’s usually many other ECUs in an EV. The ADAS ECUs are carrying similar amounts as an iPhone or the infotainment system. Telematics is also usually also a relatively complex one, but more towards lower sized amounts. Then you have around 3-5 other midsized ECUs with relatively high memory sizes, or at least enough to require MM…

So how many GB in total for a Tesla, or say a VW EV? Something like 16-32 GB? Is that not roughly like a $1k phone?

For reference, the iPhone 17 Pro (which starts at $1100) has 12GB of RAM.
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