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RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung

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Re: RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung

#351

Post by dgacmu »

itopaloglu83 wrote: post #312
dgacmu wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd take the opposite bet on this. They're diverting wafer capacity from lower-profit items to things like HBM, but all indications are that wafer starts are up a bit. Just not up enough. For example: https://chipsandwafers.substack.com/p/mainstream-recovery "Sequentially, DRAM revenue increased 15% with bit shipments increasing over 20% and prices decreasing in the low single-digit percentage range, primarily due to…

So it’s also the perfect time to constrain the product flow to jack up the prices. They’ve been acting like a cartel for a long time now and somehow they never match the demand even after 18 months straight price increases. They already have the fab, the procedures, and everything, so stop acting like they’re setting up a brand new fab just to increase throughput.

This seems like a weird subject on which to be so aggressive, or at least I'm interpreting your tone that way. DRAM manufacturers absolutely have engaged in illegal price fixing in the past (1998-2002 in particular). But they've also overbuilt and underbuilt in fairly regular cycles, resulting in large swings in dram price and profitability. And they've had natural disasters reduce production capacity (e.g., micron in 2021). But there's no evidence right now that this is anything except finding themselves in the nice (but nervous) position of making a product that just just had a major demand spike, combined with some clever contract work by openai.

Demand right now is so high that they'd make more net profit if they could make more dram. They could still be charging insane prices. They're literally shutting down consumer sales - that's completely lost profit.

Re: RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung

#352

Post by snerbles »

fooker wrote: post #341
snerbles wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I too have a crippling dual CPU workstation hoarding habit. Single thread performance is usually worse than enthusiast consumer desktops, and gaming performance will suffer if the game isn't constrained to a single NUMA domain that also happens to have the GPU being used by that game. On the other hand, seeing >1TiB RAM in htop always makes my day happier.

Any pointers on how to buy one?

Personally I use eBay and find the most barebones system I can, then populate the CPU+RAM with components salvaged from e-wasted servers. There are risks with this, as I've had to return more than one badly-bent workstation that was packed poorly.

---

So the Dell Precision T7920 runs dual Intel Scalable (Skylake) and has oodles of DIMM slots (24!), but you'll need to use a PCIe adapter to run an NVMe drive. FlexBays give you hot-swappable SATA, SAS too but only if you're lucky enough to find a system with an HBA (or add one yourself). But if you manage to salvage 24x 64GB DDR4 DIMMs, you'll have a system with a terabyte-and-a-half of ECC RAM - just expect to deal with a very long initial POST and a lot of blink codes when you encounter bad sticks. The power supply is proprietary, but can be swapped from the outside.

The T7820 is the single-CPU version, and has only 6 DIMM slots. But it is more amenable to gaming (one NUMA domain), and I have gifted a couple to friends.

If you're feeling cheap and are okay with the previous generation, the Haswell/Broadwell-based T7910 is also serviceable - but expect to rename the UEFI image to boot Linux from NVMe, and it's much less power efficient if you don't pick an E5 v4 revision CPU. I used a fully-loaded T7910 as a BYOD workstation at a previous job, worked great as a test environment.

Lenovo ThinkStation P920 Tower has fewer DIMM slots (16) than the T7920, but has on-motherboard m.2 NVMe connectors and three full 5.25" bays. I loaded one with Linux Mint for my mother's business, she runs the last non-cloud version QuickBooks in a beefy network-isolated Windows VM and it works great for that. Another friend runs one of these with Proxmox as a homelab-in-a-box.

The HP Z6 G4 is also a thing, though I personally haven't played with one yet. I do use a salvaged HP Z440 workstation with a modest 256GB RAM (don't forget the memory cooler!) and a 3090 as my ersatz kitchen table AI server.

Re: RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung

#353

Post by Forgeties79 »

snerbles wrote: post #352
fooker wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any pointers on how to buy one?

Personally I use eBay and find the most barebones system I can, then populate the CPU+RAM with components salvaged from e-wasted servers. There are risks with this, as I've had to return more than one badly-bent workstation that was packed poorly. --- So the Dell Precision T7920 runs dual Intel Scalable (Skylake) and has oodles of DIMM slots (24!), but you'll need to use a PCIe adapter to run an NVMe drive. FlexBays…

Man this so much incredible information in one comment

Re: RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung

#354

Post by cyanydeez »

ponector wrote: post #349
estimator7292 wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're saying the amount of bloat in modern software is so ridiculous that it requires multiple gigabytes of memory to run a single application that, in a sane universe, shouldn't occupy more than a hundred MB. AI doesn't deserve it more than we do, but also we shouldn't be required to have $300 in RAM for basic functionality. We shouldn't have to deal with RAM scalpers because businesses don't want to develop good…

The thing is: most people don't want to pay for good software. For any software. And on top of that bug fixes and efficiency gains are never a top priority, only new features and redesign are pushed forward.

Explains AI perfectly.

Bizarre how some commentors have rose colored glasses, like AI isn't exponentially bloat.

Re: RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung

#355

Post by joks »

OhMeadhbh wrote: post #335
knallfrosch wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to ship software that behaves exactly the same across three desktop operating systems and two mobile operating systems. Be glad we leave out tablets for this. You're able to hire 4 vibecoding juniors and your deadline is in 6 months. You know what you choose for a frontend? It's Electron + React and React Native. And none of your customers will complain because the people with money to spend are rocking 12GB…

Yeah. That's not the world I live in. I live in the terminal.

Congrats on being part of the 0.001% I guess?

Re: RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung

#356

Post by benced »

OhMeadhbh wrote: post #305

Or we could go back to using software that didn't require 1 Gb to run the OS / Browser combo powerful enough to run a browser that can load "too much" javascript to enable a webmail interface. In the 80s I ran an early SMTP / POP email client that functioned as a DOS TSR with code and data less than 64k. Granted, it was pretty crappy and was text-only (non MIME.) But there's got to be a middle ground between 64k for…

People optimize to what is scarce. Previously, developer time was much more scare than memory. Seems like that might change so folks might start to optimize to memory. It's not a moral judgement, it's a technical decision about where to allocate resources.

Re: RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung

#357

Post by Terr_ »

jsheard wrote: post #5

To be fair, Samsung's divisions having guns pointed at each other is nothing new. This is the same conglomerate that makes their own chip division fight for placement in their own phones, constantly flip-flopping between using Samsung or Qualcomm chips at the high end, Samsung or Mediatek chips at the low end, or even a combination of first-party and third-party chips in different variants of ostensibly the same devi…

I think this is a good time to reference a comic showing software companies' various "Org Charts", especially the one for Microsoft.

https://goomics.net/62

Re: RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung

#358

Post by mitthrowaway2 »

mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #97
sgerenser wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where can you buy a new Thinkpad with 96GB and 4TB SSD for $2K? Prices are looking quite a bit higher than that for the P Series, at least on Lenovo.com in the U.S. And I don't see anything other than the P Series that lets you get 96GB of RAM.

You have to configure it with the lowest-spec SSD and then replace that with an aftermarket 4 TB SSD at around $215. The P14s I bought last week, with that and the 8 GB Nvidia GPU, came to a total of USD $2150 after taxes, including the SSD. Their sale price today is not quite as good as it was last week but it's still in that ballpark; with the 255H CPU and iGPU and a decent screen, and you can get the Intel P14s fo…

Update: $1489 for the AMD model, apparently.

https://www.reddit.com/r/LaptopDeals/comments/1pe69nm/lenovo...

Re: RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung

#359

Post by hug »

cyanydeez wrote: post #345
estimator7292 wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're saying the amount of bloat in modern software is so ridiculous that it requires multiple gigabytes of memory to run a single application that, in a sane universe, shouldn't occupy more than a hundred MB. AI doesn't deserve it more than we do, but also we shouldn't be required to have $300 in RAM for basic functionality. We shouldn't have to deal with RAM scalpers because businesses don't want to develop good…

Yo, are you saying AI is not the epitome of bloat? Like, it's not a cancer of epic proportions. Very confused.. Wat?

LLMs use a lot of RAM as a fundamental part of their operation. The RAM is used to achieve the goal as efficiently as we know how. Even if you disagree with the goal needing to be achieved at all, the RAM usage is about as efficient as we can design.

Regular modern applications use a lot of RAM as an incidental or accidental part of their operation. Even if you think the tasks that they're achieving are of extreme need, the RAM use is excessive.

These problems are apples and oranges. You can hate both, or one, or neither. I know plenty of people who are in each one of those camps.

Re: RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung

#360

Post by array_key_first »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #243
The-Bus wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a business can't pay a living wage, it's not really a successful business. I, too, could become fabulously wealthy selling shoes if someone just have me shoes for $1 so I could resell them for $50.

> If a business can't pay a living wage, it's not really a successful business. Let's consider the implications of this. We take an existing successful business, change absolutely nothing about it, but separately and for unrelated reasons the local population increases and the government prohibits the construction of new housing. Now real estate is more scarce and the business has to pay higher rent, so they're makin…

Successfulness and morality are orthogonal. If you can't make money wherever you're operating your business, then you're not successful.
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