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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

#341

Post by andruby »

andrekandre wrote: post #314
walterbell wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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'?

Constrict the supply, and price goes up. It works like textbook economics.

Maybe I'm misinterpreting "et tu" here.

Or maybe you meant "free markets" instead. Modern RAM production requires enormous R&D expenses, and thus has huge moat, which means the oligopoly is pretty safe (at least in the short to medium term) from new entrants. They "just" need to keep each other in check because there will be an incentive to increase production by each individual participant.

I do like the "OMEC" name as a paralel for OPEC.

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

#342

Post by mschuster91 »

m4rtink wrote: post #315
mschuster91 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Chips also need rare doping materials, plus an absurd level of purity for the silicon. The problems are the same no matter if we're talking about chips or batteries.

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

#343

Post by bfrog »

AI has had a net negative on my life and created negative value for me and my family. It's raising my power rate. It's stealing my ideas and creative output. All to enrich a select few assholes who didn't need any more enrichment.

AI embodies everything wrong with our modern gilded age era of capitalism.

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

#344

Post by nothrabannosir »

ptero wrote: post #285
wickedsight wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a very optimistic scenario for AI companies - that AI capable of replacing knowledge workers can be developed using the current batch of hardware, in the span of a year or two. I'm really interested in what will happen to the economy/society in this case. Knowledge workers are the market for much that money is being made on. Facebook and Google make most of their money from ads. Those ads are shown to billions of p…

I don't know why you are getting downvoted. While I might agree or disagree with the argument, it is a clear, politely expressed view. It is sad HN is sliding in the direction of folks being downvoted for opinions instead of the tone they use to express them :(

I agree with you, but:

> I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness.

- Paul Graham, 2008

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

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

#345

Post by cellular »

vee-kay wrote: post #301
tazjin wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or, we can expect better from software. Maybe someone can fork Firefox and make it run better, hard cap how much a browser window can use. You can already do this. For example, I use `systemd-run` to run browsers with CPU quotas applied. Firefox gets 400% CPU (i.e. up to 4 cores), and no more. Example command: systemd-run --user --scope -p CPUQuota=400% firefox

You can impose CPU restrictions in Windows 10 or 11 too... You can limit CPU usage for a program in Windows by adjusting the "Maximum processor state" in the power options to a lower percentage, such as 80%. Additionally, you can set the program's CPU affinity in Task Manager. Please note this will only affect the process scheduling. You can also use a free tool like Process Lasso or BES to limit the CPU for a Window…

CPU affinity? I haven't been able to change priority in task manager since window 8 i think. Cpu affinity seems only to allow which cores get assigned...not really good management.

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

#346

Post by theappsecguy »

andy99 wrote: post #290
oblio wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI won’t replace knowledge workers, it will just give them different jobs. Yeah, and those new jobs will be called "long term structural unemployment", like what happened during deindustrialization to Detroit, the US Rust Belt, Scotland, Walloonia, etc. People like to claim society remodels at will with almost no negative long term consequences but it's actually more like a wrecking ball that destroys houses while…

I’m not saying society will remodel, I’m saying the typical white collar job is already mostly unnecessary busywork anyway, so automating part of that doesn’t really affect the reasons that job exists.

How do you determine that a typical job is busy work? While there are certainly jobs like that, I don’t really see them being more than a fraction of the total white collar labour force.

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

#347

Post by compiler-devel »

imglorp wrote: post #332
windexh8er wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Where does it stop? When we decide to drop all technology as it is? It doesn't stop. This is because that it's not the "technology" driving AI. You already acknowledged the root cause: CEOs. AI could be great, but it's currently being propped up by sales hype and greed. Sam wants money and power. Satya and Sundar want money and power. Larry and Jensen want to also cash in on this facade that's been built. Can LLMs…

The CEO quiet part out loud was very clearly: "salaries". This will scale back when AI replacement attempts slow down as expectations temper (Salesforce, Klarna, etc).

It's always about cutting the OpEx spend. Companies are nothing more than giant piles of money seeking to grow themselves in any way possible.

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

#348

Post by Ekaros »

parrellel wrote: post #335
Ekaros wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand servers. But why do actually average user need more than 2 or 4GB? For what actual data in memory at one time?

Where have you seen 4 GB cut it in the last decade? 2 GB was enough to make Vista chug in 2007? I've got old linux boxes that feel fine with a couple gig of DDR3, but can't think of a place where that would be acceptable outside of that.

My entire question is why can't whatever users do on computers actually work on 2GB of RAM? Like what is the true reason we are in state that it is for some reason not possible?

2 GB is huge amount information. So surely it should be enough for almost all normal users, but for some reason it is not.

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

#349

Post by DeepSeaTortoise »

deadbabe wrote: post #280
DeepSeaTortoise wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the point of telemetry if your IDE launching in under 10s is considered the pinnacle of optimization? That's like 100B+ instructions on a single core of your average superscalar CPU. I can't wait for maps loading times being measured in percentage of trip time.

If your IDE isn’t launching instantly you have a bad IDE.

I guess so, but:

https://youtu.be/qqUgl6pFx8Q?si=x3CpsW9Aane7GHHV&t=1875

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

#350

Post by rabf »

ssl-3 wrote: post #132
dottjt wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not happening though, hence why we need more ram.

Eh? As I see it, we've got options. Option A: We do a better job at optimizing software so that good performance requires less RAM than might otherwise be required Option B: We wish that things were different, such that additional RAM were a viable option like it has been at many times in the past. Option C: We use our time-benders to hop to a different timeline where this is all sorted more favorably (hopefully one…

There is plenty of well optimised software out there already, hopefully a ram shortage can encourage people to seek it out. Would be nice if there were some well curated lists of apps. Sort of like suckless but perhaps a little less extreme. A long standing problem in the software industry is developers havein insanely overspecced machines and fat interne popes leading to performance issues going unnoticed by the people that should be fixing them. The claim that they the need that power to run their their code editor and compiler is really only a need for a code editors and compilers that suck less. I've always ran a 10 year old machine (I'm cheap) and had the expectation that my debug builds run acceptably fast!
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