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DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market

jeffgeerling.com

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Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market

#351

Post by genxy »

helsinkiandrew wrote: post #246
bashtoni wrote: post #95

Helium supply issues are only going to make this worse. I feel like for the first time in our lives we might have seen peak technology for the next few years. Everyone is going to have to make do instead of depending on ever increasing performance.

> Helium supply issues are only going to make this worse. I believe helium, although important constitutes a small percent of the cost of semiconductors, so its effect on price will be less severe. It will be more noticeable in other uses of helium though - party balloons could get very expensive etc.

> although important constitutes a small percent of the cost of semiconductors, so its effect on price will be less severe

You should think about this some more.

Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market

#352

Post by tempaccount420 »

grogenaut wrote: post #304
bombcar wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Familiarity - it’s easy for us Linux dweebs to build a pi that can flip an LED, but programming an arduino is an entire new area.

good news, now you can use all that dram you can't afford to vibe code an arduino program. Think of the savings and the learnings!

You're probably joking, but this is interesting. If we throw more RAM at AI, it can help us optimize programs to reduce our RAM needs, I haven't thought about it like that

Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market

#353

Post by lelanthran »

pseudohadamard wrote: post #343
alsetmusic wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is my greatest concern. So many small players will be wiped out. Consolidation is assured. Always great for consumers to be under the thumb of increasingly large companies.

Will it be such a big deal though? Currently people are swapping out their phones for another model that's exactly the same but with a different number at the end of the name every 12 months. This could just mean that the unnecessary churn dies down a bit, and companies taking advantage of it have to find a new line of business.

> Will it be such a big deal though? Currently people are swapping out their phones for another model that's exactly the same but with a different number at the end of the name every 12 months.

I don't think they do that at the low-end (nor the high-end, though that doesn't matter here - higher-end manufacturers have a small margin they can eat into). People on the low-end phones want a new phone, they just cannot afford it!

Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market

#354

Post by genxy »

gzread wrote: post #321
nullbyte808 wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hypothetically what would happen if China took over Tawain and TSMC?

All modern technology becomes unobtainable.

We are going to have that now in a couple of months regardless. So it won't matter if Taiwan's manufacturing base gets disrupted, the hardware will have already effectively stopped.

Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market

#355

Post by jesseschalken »

Aurornis wrote: post #63
IncreasePosts wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would we need rust, if the AI can just write really good code in C that doesn't exhibit any of the issues that rust protects you from?

Rust's compile-time checks are actually a nice set of guardrails for LLMs. Nobody who works with LLM generated code believes that LLMs produce fault-free code.

Yes, languages with very strong type systems like Rust are incredible when paired with an LLM. Just like chat bots have a calculator as a "tool" because they are not the best at calculation themselves, they need a type system to deterministically validate the safety and cohesion of the code they generate.

Its languages like C that you have to watch out for, because the LLM will gladly say "this is safe!" when its not.

Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market

#356

Post by consp »

fpoling wrote: post #337
nl wrote: post #165

In the Dwarkesh podcast with Semi-Analysis's Dylan Patel they forecast the phone market will shrink by 50% this year because of RAM prices: But that’s the high end of the market, which is only a few hundred million phones a year. Apple sells two or three hundred million phones annually. The bulk of the market is mid-range and low-end. It used to be that 1.4 billion smartphones were sold a year. Now we’re at about 1.1…

I wonder if manufacturers opt to install less memory.

Or optimize the os because I still find 8GB insane for everyday tasks. Ok, gaming I can understand, but most common tasks should be runnable with at most 2GB of memory and that is mostly for browsers.

Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market

#357

Post by neonstatic »

BenjiWiebe wrote: post #308
neonstatic wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Collusion of large corporations promoting LLMs > We all know that DRAM prices have spiked since production is going to those infernal chatbot training data centers I know it's very fashionable here to talk about capitalism as some hand-washes-hand big corp organized scam, but if you put that ideology aside for a moment, you contradicted yourself here, I think. I personally don't like conspiracy-theory-thinking. If…

There is a risk of having a single large customer. As a small food manufacturer we've been warned about it, like to not sell to Walmart even if given the chance. If one customer buys a majority of your product, your entire business is at their mercy. They can dictate terms, or quit buying from you which can end your business. So even with RAM - if a company goes all in on RAM for an AI company, what happens when the…

You are making some very good points.

Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market

#358

Post by jaggederest »

Grosvenor wrote: post #263
jaggederest wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is my theory: we're going to see a lot of languages with straightforward and obvious semantics, high guard rails, terrible dx, and great memory allocation and performance behavior out of the box. Assembler or worse, but with extremely strong typing bolted on in a way that no human would ever tolerate, basically, something in that vibe.

So Pascal and Delphi are coming back? I'm actually cool with that.

Yeah actually I worked with Pascal early in my career and that's kinda the vibes I am thinking about, with maybe a stronger type system more ada-esque though (composite, partial and range-and-domain types, all that jazz)

Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market

#359

Post by lelanthran »

leptons wrote: post #348
therealdrag0 wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep I’ve seen multiple instances of this so far.

Yeah, I got the AI to convert some code that ran at 30fps in Javascript to C, and it resulted in a program that generated 1 frame every 20 seconds. Then I told it to optimize it, and now it's running at 1 fps. After going back and forth with the AI for hours, it never got faster than 1 fps. I guess I'm "doing it wrong" as the hypesters like to tell me.

> Yeah, I got the AI to convert some code that ran at 30fps in Javascript to C, and it resulted in a program that generated 1 frame every 20 seconds. Then I told it to optimize it, and now it's running at 1 fps. After going back and forth with the AI for hours, it never got faster than 1 fps. I guess I'm "doing it wrong" as the hypesters like to tell me.

Remove the "I actually only want a slideshow" instruction from your prompt :-)

Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market

#360

Post by izacus »

consp wrote: post #356
fpoling wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if manufacturers opt to install less memory.

Or optimize the os because I still find 8GB insane for everyday tasks. Ok, gaming I can understand, but most common tasks should be runnable with at most 2GB of memory and that is mostly for browsers.

Optimizing the OS won't do anything about shrinking sales when the spec sheet changes.
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