Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

davidoks.blog

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 682 posts

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

#311

Post by ACCount37 »

stasomatic wrote: post #297

"and then it’ll take you a few years of producing substandard and defective memory chips before your yields start to look competitive." As a complete know nothing about the fab industry, I am always puzzled by this. Do the fabs need to be seasoned like an iron cast skillet or something?

Kind of.

There's a mysterious fab entity known as "the Recipe" - the product of long iterative dialing in of the fab's operating parameters. Of which there are a great many. A modern fab performs hundreds of manufacturing steps, with thousands of tweakable parameters, and they may interact in non-obvious ways to affect the outcomes. This is what's discovered and adjusted as the fab runs.

The difference between having the Recipe and not having the Recipe is the difference between 96% yield and 12% yield.

Changing the process (i.e. 4nm to 2nm) is the most sure way to lose the Recipe. The fab knowledge you spent months and years of engineering work discovering will no longer apply. But you can also lose the Recipe by replacing fab hardware, by changing the suppliers, by an act of god, and more.

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

#312

Post by H8crilA »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #294
heisenbit wrote: post #286

We always knew the limits to Moore‘s Law are first and foremost economic. Given an industry used over decades to predictable lowering of price per compute function and thus swallowed any advance for new user functions and overhead when the limits are reached there is going to be a squeeze. AI scaled up at the time the production capacity became more inelastic. Maybe it is time not just shrink transistors but also sof…

AI data centers are eating like 80% of memory. Making user space applications more memory efficient is not even going to be a rounding error on memory demand. I am with you that it needs to happen, but it's not going to solve a memory shortage.

It would make memory-poor phones more viable. Like why can't we have a 512MB, or even 256MB RAM phone. Although I doubt that the software effort would be cheaper than just buying the extra RAM. It's definitely much more uncertain.

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

#313

Post by tw04 »

swatcoder wrote: post #19
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…

And what happens if the market settles back down or the leading memory tech pivots away from what you invested all this capital and time chasing? You'd need a very strong, very particular forecast to make such a costly bet. And conversely, it may say something about their internal forecasts that they're not making the bet.

> And conversely, it may say something about their internal forecasts that they're not making the bet.

It says they are no longer worried about being punished for monopolistic behavior and have bet a “ballroom donation” will exempt them from another round of punishment.

I feel like folks around here have already forgotten about the last time the memory suppliers quietly agreed to keep raising prices and stop competing with each other.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing_scandal

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

#314

Post by Schlagbohrer »

LatencyKills wrote: post #291
sokoloff wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would have happened five years ago? I suspect this VP would have gone entirely without analysis tools for these datasets or would have a department of people slowly grinding away at his long list of tickets, tickets that were poorly specified and hard to get clarity on because by the time they were worked on, he’d lost some of the context of his original request. Now, he makes small apps that scratch his own itc…

He didn't even know that there was a solution to the performance issues. He simply assumed that processing data took that long. I think it is great that he now has this capability, but a total ignorance of software engineering is going to continually bite this type of user. Instead of questioning Claude's solution, my friend thought he just needed a faster computer. He was also using very sketchy Python imports when…

> Not knowing that you shouldn't use just any random Python package is a ticking time bomb... especially when his machine is connected directly to his corporate intranet.

Don't worry, I'm sure IT would never give this manager priveleged access to systems permissions.

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

#315

Post by yxhuvud »

skiing_crawling wrote: post #79
stego-tech wrote: post #27

This is the biggest memory repricing cycle I've ever seen in my life; some degree of high price/limited availability and "free RAM with purchase of Doritos" cycle is always expected, but this has been the worst one yet. As other commenters have pointed out but I might have missed in the article, compute maturation is amplifying memory constraints right now and making it worse. Device upgrade cycles are getting longer…

> Even if LLMs fail spectacularly Haven't they already proven to be extremely useful? In some areas they are definitely here to stay, coding/software and search (retrieve and summarize information). There's a bunch of places where they are surely shoehorned in, overhyped, and don't belong, but there's also equally many places where they might still be transformative but aren't used yet. But overall I think the techno…

They work well functionally, but financially anything can still happen.

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

#317

Post by hackyhacky »

WalterBright wrote: post #174
joe_mamba wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's up to individuals to take advantage of the opportunity, or not. The problem is that after decades monopolies consolidated and you have massive offshoring of labor to cheap countries and offshoring of profits to tax havens, there's not much opportunities the working class individuals can take, as all the opportunities are now geared towards the asset owning rent seeking class.

There are endless businesses you can start with little to no capital.

> There are endless businesses you can start with little to no capital.

Well, that's good news. I guess the cause of poverty must simply be laziness.

That's convenient, because it allows me to demonize the lower economic classes without having to address the systemic inequality that rewards capital ownership over labor.

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

#318

Post by Schlagbohrer »

ngcazz wrote: post #245
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

It will result in more people having to "rent" their computer from a corporate cloud. An extension of what already exists for poor gamers who stream their own games from a cloud renderer.

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

#319

Post by hackyhacky »

eklavya wrote: post #144
hackyhacky wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It seems to me like your attitude is that "If I can't be rich, then no one should be rich." The problem with capitalism is not that some people get rich and some people don't. The problem is that of an unfair playing field. Everyone has a body and a mind, and commerce allows us to rent out those features in exchange for pay. People who are smarter or stronger or work harder or work more will be able to benefit more…

> The other way to get rich is to own things. If you own a factory or real estate or bonds you get to charge other people and make a profit even though you are expending no effort. And in this case there is no limit on your profit, because you can use your profit to buy more capital and make more profit from that. Risk : Reward, that's obvious, isn't it? I have known many relatives who bankrupted themselves trying to…

> Risk : Reward, that's obvious, isn't it? I have known many relatives who bankrupted themselves trying to "own" stuff. I also know some who succeeded and are rich. Starting a business is very hard, try it

In order to risk one's own capital, one must first own capital. Today's working poor, just like the serfs of times gone by, have nothing to invest but their own labor. It's hard to build a business when you're fully occupied in working to buy food.

You've inadvertently pointed out the fundamental inequality of capitalism: in order to get the (potential) benefits of capital, you must first belong to the capitalist class.

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

#320

Post by ReptileMan »

Havoc wrote: post #239

Amused by all the comments about optimisation. If anything the vibe coding era will lead to the opposite

LLMs are quite good at optimization. Here is a simple prompt - rewrite this crap from electron to rust + whatever time tested ui framework. And now we have 80% less ram usage.
Post reply on HN