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RAM now represents 35 percent of bill of materials for HP PCs

arstechnica.com

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Re: RAM now represents 35 percent of bill of materials for HP PCs

#321

Post by zozbot234 »

toast0 wrote: post #305
zozbot234 wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are increasing production as fast as they can (which is not fast at all, it's more like slowly steering a huge ship towards the correct direction) because current prices are too high even when accounting for the historical oligopoly dynamics. They can easily increase their collective profits by making more.

RAM manufacturers don't increase production as fast as possible, because they've been through enough boom and bust. Rapid increase in capacity leads to oversupply which leads to negative margins. They've been there before, and they don't want to go there again. RAM manufacturers do routinely setup new fabs and decommision old fabs. Maybe they're trying to hurry up new fab construction in times like these, and they wo…

They've actually not seen such prices before. DRAM now costs as much per Gb as it did around 2006-2007 - despite around 20 years of real technical progress since then! That's genuinely unprecedented.

Re: RAM now represents 35 percent of bill of materials for HP PCs

#324

Post by bradlys »

toast0 wrote: post #317
bradlys wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meanwhile I’m at faang and they’re reusing 7 year old monitors still. Still getting equipment from pre-covid era. Where are these luxurious big corporations that give their employees nice new equipment? :(

As long as it's working (and not gross), why do you need a new monitor? My current monitor is a 2010 model, I think I got it around 2013. I don't know what a new monitor would do for me, other than have a worse aspect ratio, cause Dell stopped making 30" 16:10 monitors.

In theory, yes. However a lot of these monitors are still 2560x1440 and are 30”+. The ppi is quite low. I’m looking for 4k and something that looks similar enough to the M4 MBP I’m working on. A lot of these just don’t look good as they used to.

Re: RAM now represents 35 percent of bill of materials for HP PCs

#325

Post by toast0 »

bradlys wrote: post #324
toast0 wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as it's working (and not gross), why do you need a new monitor? My current monitor is a 2010 model, I think I got it around 2013. I don't know what a new monitor would do for me, other than have a worse aspect ratio, cause Dell stopped making 30" 16:10 monitors.

In theory, yes. However a lot of these monitors are still 2560x1440 and are 30”+. The ppi is quite low. I’m looking for 4k and something that looks similar enough to the M4 MBP I’m working on. A lot of these just don’t look good as they used to.

Probably your new corporate monitor is also going to have relatively low ppi though. The problem isn't really the age then.

Re: RAM now represents 35 percent of bill of materials for HP PCs

#326

Post by hinkley »

password4321 wrote: post #233
coppsilgold wrote: post #121

If you are on Linux you can 'download' some RAM. Enable zram, configure sysctl variables to make good use of it. Note that it won't help you if your workload makes use of all your RAM at once. If you have a bunch of stuff running in the background it will help a lot. I get 2 to 3 compression factor at all times with zstd. I calculated the utility to be as if I had 20GB extra RAM for what I do.

Back in the day if you could find a deal on defective RAM (that wasn't going to degrade further?), Linux could be configured to avoid the defects. Unfortunately this isn't allowed with secure/UEFI boot. https://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/grub/html_node/badr...

I helped someone turn that on because we still didn’t have full furniture sets in our houses and new memory was going to have to wait a couple paychecks.

Several times I set about trying to turn it on and found out a whole chip was fried and that means the 7th bit of every read was stuck, so nothing much you can do there.

Re: RAM now represents 35 percent of bill of materials for HP PCs

#327

Post by hinkley »

Gigachad wrote: post #25
Aerroon wrote: post #9

I think Europe should invest into manufacturing RAM. RAM isn't going anywhere, all of modern compute uses it. This would be an opportunity to create domestic supply of it.

The worry is that these high prices aren't going to last long. And by the time you spend years building the capacity, the prices plummet making your facility uneconomical to run. Ram will always be in some demand, but that doesn't mean it's viable for everyone to start building production.

I used to know people who lived near Micron factories and it was just boom and bust over there for decades. Hire a bunch of people, then big layoff.

Re: RAM now represents 35 percent of bill of materials for HP PCs

#328

Post by hinkley »

nirui wrote: post #151
malshe wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren’t Chinese manufacturers already expanding their capacity? Given that Samsung and SK Hynix have left that market in the pursuit of HBM4 chips, China is going to rule this market. At least that’s what analysts are saying.

In this market, CXMT is more likely to also move to HBM production rather than consumer grade RAMs. After all China is also doing an AI push in a competition with the US, and the domestic Chinese companies are "recommended/guided" by the government to help, while consumers are pushed to lower priorities. The situation I'm worrying about is that these PC manufacturers could use this opportunity to push for a more lock…

Does that mean we should be designing HBM into consumer devices?

Re: RAM now represents 35 percent of bill of materials for HP PCs

#329

Post by zozbot234 »

bradlys wrote: post #324
toast0 wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as it's working (and not gross), why do you need a new monitor? My current monitor is a 2010 model, I think I got it around 2013. I don't know what a new monitor would do for me, other than have a worse aspect ratio, cause Dell stopped making 30" 16:10 monitors.

In theory, yes. However a lot of these monitors are still 2560x1440 and are 30”+. The ppi is quite low. I’m looking for 4k and something that looks similar enough to the M4 MBP I’m working on. A lot of these just don’t look good as they used to.

1440p is good enough that you aren't going to see individual pixels - just sit far back enough from the screen and use reasonable font hinting (Mac users are sadly out of luck here, but even then 2160p/4K is overkill).

Re: RAM now represents 35 percent of bill of materials for HP PCs

#330

Post by medi8r »

vv_ wrote: post #181
medi8r wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

8GB is unusable, but is MacOS and Safari optimizabe? The point is they control the stack so they could reduce memory usage. It would be a big selling point, it could make a Mac "experience for experience" price competitive with PCs.

My Macbook Pro 13" Early 2015 w/ 8 GB RAM and 128 GB SSD is still very usable for what most people commonly use a laptop for - browsing the web, e-mail and streaming.

I would hope so!
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