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The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

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

#321

Post by fittingopposite »

automatic6131 wrote: post #212
kopirgan wrote: post #194

Very well written sub. Any prediction on when it'll end? Can Chinese companies scale up to scare the big 3 into increasing capacity or lose price control?

It will end slowly, and then very suddenly. The demand for AI simply doesn't exist at the real prices. It barely exists at the current subsidized rates - Microsoft, Google, Meta, Anthropic, OpenAI are spending hundreds of billions to make mere billions. And then these data centers will be worthless, future ones won't get built, memory demand will evaporate on the spot.

Very interesting and thoughtful comment. I agree. When demand from hyperscalars drops rapidly after the tide goes out and everyone realizes that they can't continue building out the data centers, then fabs will be left with overcapacity that will flood the market. Wondering what this will mean for local LLMs when good RAM is available for cheap?

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

#322

Post by stasomatic »

ACCount37 wrote: post #311
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…

Can a recipe be acquired and reproduced to perform correctly from the start? Say one line is performing well, can its parameters be copied over to a new one and start producing?

My head annoyingly refuses to accept the non-deterministic outcomes when applied to electronics. In other disciplines, let's say bow or musical instrument making, you need to harvest the wood, age it, dry it, pray to a deity, work with its natural im/perfections etc, but this is "just" bits.

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

#323

Post by DeathArrow »

>One of the most remarkable things about the last few decades is how cheap computers have gotten.

>In 1985, if you were a reasonably affluent American, the best computer that you could afford was the IBM PC AT. The PC AT would cost you about $6,000—$19,400 in 2026 dollars—and thus represented about a quarter of the median American’s annual income;

In early 1980s a PC AT was SOTA. I guess that if you buy a SOTA computer today it might cost you close to $19,400.

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

#324

Post by hackyhacky »

sophrosyne42 wrote: post #221
hackyhacky wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This quote has nothing to do with capitalism. Please note that "commerce" and "capitalism" are not synonymous, and that the former does not imply the latter. Capitalism is in no way a prerequisite for technological development.

"Capitalism" is an ever shifting ambiguity that exists to be a scapegoat to attack but is completely meaningless in its concrete usage by the attackers. But "capitalism" in its historical and practical meaning means nothing other than commerce, i.e. the society based exchange, the system of production based on exchange. It was only through capitalist accounting methods that businesses were able to conduct commerce in…

> But "capitalism" in its historical and practical meaning means nothing other than commerce, i.e. the society based exchange, the system of production based on exchange

Completely wrong. Many of my comments here distinguish commerce from capitalism.

Commerce, ie the exchange of goods and services, has existed longer than civilization. Even some animals do it.

Capitalism is specifically the substitution of labor with ownership as a means of profiting. This produces an imbalanced market: some people compete for resources by selling their labor, while others compete simply by owning capital: the means of production. The problem is that the latter mode allows unlimited accumulation of wealth, while the former is limited by time and effort.

Imagine if Elon Musk was working a salaried job that paid $60000 per hour. How long would he have to work in order to earn his current fortune?

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

#325

Post by nathanaldensr »

supriyo-biswas wrote: post #141
p0w3n3d wrote: post #139

I heard that one company buying all the product or a majority of the product is called a monopoly practice. If a dominant buyer locks up most of the supply chain through exclusive contracts, it prevents rival companies from getting the materials they need to survive, which violates laws like Section 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act.

It's called a monopsony[1], regardless, antitrust regulation is famously dead under the current US administration. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopsony

Antitrust has been dead for decades. It spans administrations and parties.

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

#326

Post by hackyhacky »

tick_tock_tick wrote: post #126
hackyhacky wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This quote has nothing to do with capitalism. Please note that "commerce" and "capitalism" are not synonymous, and that the former does not imply the latter. Capitalism is in no way a prerequisite for technological development.

I mean we don't really have any counter examples even China didn't really start advancing in any meaningful way until they started moving towards capitalism.

We didn't have any examples of states without a divinely appointed absolute monarch until we did. Things can change.

And as a matter of fact, there are many examples of non capitalist societies.

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

#327

Post by cbdevidal »

Zopieux wrote: post #242
cbdevidal wrote: post #231

The optimist in me hopes this means developers will pay more attention to memory usage in their apps.

Well, not if you believe that all future software will be slop.

I don’t. Also from my optimist side :-)

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

#328

Post by DeathArrow »

>All of which is to say: things are going to get a lot worse before they get better.

I have a 14900KS, a CPU from 2 years ago and is still amongst the strongest in benchmarks like Cinebench. And 128 GB DDR4 RAM. I feel like I can wait a few more years to upgrade.

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

#329

Post by hackyhacky »

ivewonyoung wrote: post #142
hackyhacky wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, talk about moving the goal posts. I was pointing out that capitalism has not always been the universal economic system, and now you're trying to make me explain why years of exploitative colonialism and corrupt authoritarianism haven't yielded a better alternative. Well, isn't it obvious? 300 hundred years ago, every country in the world was ruled by an absolute monarch, and that fact alone was considered persua…

The problem is that your proposed approach has been tried again and again and has failed every single time with disastrous consequences for several generations. Once people are given all the resources they want they are not motivated to work. The productive people get tired of the product of their hard work being forcibly taken away and stop working since they would be given resources anyway. That's how the system co…

> Once people are given all the resources they want they are not motivated to work

You are again straw manning an argument. I said nothing about giving people all resources with no work. In fact, I explicitly said the opposite: I want a society where people compete to provide labor in order to gain material advantage.

My argument against capitalism is that that competition should be fair: people should compete for resources with labor, and not against those who contribute no labor.

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

#330

Post by libertine »

coldtea wrote: post #182
mr_toad wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is why China is eating the West. Nothing to do with cheap labour.

No, nothing to do with that. Even Steve Jobs said so back 20+ years ago, about why Apple can't just get out of China manufacturing. He said the labour cost is neghigible and not qualitatively different to the US. It's the availability of every part and tech you need in nearby supply centers and factories, the huge supply of appropriate resources, including the ability to have tens of thousands of expert workers on co…

I'd buy that if you're talking about developing new products/new production lines, it's cheaper to have suppliers and know how hand - and it's great for margin optimization, because they have other production lines.

But that margin isn't funneled to pay wages and improve living standards.

To say wages don't play a role it's more of a corporate narrative to wash those decisions.

If wages aren't a factor, why don't they raise wages and living standards for those workers?

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