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The RAM shortage could last years

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Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#351

Post by mherkender »

Ray20 wrote: post #298
raydev wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It won't be "happening" until Slack, Teams, and Discord leave Electron behind. They are the apps that need to be open 24/7.

It's not entirely clear what the connection is. We're not doing Electron because some popular software also using it. We're doing Electron because the ability to create truly cross-platform interfaces with the web stack is more important to us than 300 MB of user memory.

> web stack is more important to us than 300 MB of user memory.

May I never have to use or work on your project's software.

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#352

Post by energy123 »

thelastgallon wrote: post #295

It will last forever. After covid, all manufacturers understood the value of limiting supply and extracting profits. Cars used to super cheap before covid, they will never go back to the same levels. From now on, RAM will always be super costly for consumers, because they can't make massive deals like Apple/OpenAI/etc. We are the bagholders.

Covid inflation was because of supply chain disruptions, loose fiscal policy (like Biden's ARP which a Central Bank analysis said added a few % to annual inflation), and money supply expansions. There was less goods and more money. When you go and trade money for goods, it should be obvious what happens.

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#353

Post by energy123 »

ymolodtsov wrote: post #315
thelastgallon wrote: post #295

It will last forever. After covid, all manufacturers understood the value of limiting supply and extracting profits. Cars used to super cheap before covid, they will never go back to the same levels. From now on, RAM will always be super costly for consumers, because they can't make massive deals like Apple/OpenAI/etc. We are the bagholders.

Of course, clearly businesses were just stupid before and only learned how to make revenue in 2021.

When lithium prices decreased over 80% from 2022 to 2025, it was because lithium miners felt altruistic. Car manufacturers were feeling greedy. This is how bad the thinking has gotten.

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#354

Post by rimliu »

nirui wrote: post #297
LastTrain wrote: post #247

Something I haven’t been able to reconcile: If AI makes software easier to create, that will drive the price down. How are software companies going to make enough revenue to pay for AI, when the amount of money being spent on AI is already multiples of the current total global expenditure on software? This demand for RAM is built on a foundation of sand, there will be a glut of capacity when it all shakes out.

> This demand for RAM is built on a foundation of sand Not exactly. LLMs are already quite useful today if you use them as a tool, so they are there to stay. The remaining problem is scalability, a.k.a. how to make LLMs cheap to use. But scalability is not really a requirement when you look the bigger picture. If smaller software company/projects can't afford to use AI, the bigger ones might just. Eventually they wil…

Would they be considered as useful if users are required to pay non-subsidized price though.

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#355

Post by fransje26 »

cbdevidal wrote: post #96

I’m a bit of an optimist. I think this will smack the hands of developers who don’t manage RAM well and future apps will necessarily be more memory-efficient.

Hope dies last, as they say.

Then again, after many, many years of claims that the following year would be the year of the Linux Desktop, there seems to be more and more of a push into that direction. Or at least into a significant increase in market share. We can thank a current head of state for that.

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#356

Post by adrian_b »

tpm wrote: post #65
torginus wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Radeon VII came out in 2019 as a $700 consumer GPU with an 1TB/s HBM2 memory subsystem which is more than any consumer GPU you can get today, including the high-end ones afaik. At that point in time, there was a whole lineup of AMD GPUs with HBM going down into the midrange. If they could make this stuff and sell it to regular people a decade ago for very palatable prices, why do they come up with the idea that t…

> 1TB/s HBM2 memory subsystem which is more than any consumer GPU you can get today 5090 has 1.8 TB/s?

5090 is an overpriced outlier. A typical consumer GPU, like RTX 5070, has a 3-times lower memory throughput.

Even a RTX 5080 has a lower memory throughput than a Radeon VII from 2019, 7 years ago, while being much more expensive.

The memory throughput of GPUs per dollar has regressed greatly during the last 5 years, despite the fact that the widths of the GPU memory interfaces have been reduced, in order to decrease the production costs.

RTX 5080 has a 256-bit memory interface, while the much cheaper Radeon VII had an 1024-bit memory interface. RTX 5080 has almost 4-times faster memories than Radeon VII, but it has not used this to increase the memory throughput, but only to reduce the production costs, while simultaneously increasing the product price.

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#357

Post by AnthonyMouse »

GreySeer wrote: post #210
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We live in a neoliberal world where corporate monopolies / oligopolies aren’t even remotely regulated. If you try to do even the gentlest regulation of companies people scream about communism and totalitarianism. Unless the regulation serves the monopolies by making it harder to enter the market. The thing that enables this is pretty obvious. The population is divided into two camps, the first of which holds the he…

Arguably a more efficient approach might just be to have a tax that adds on to corporate tax incrementally for every % of market share a company has above say 7-8%. Then dominant companies are incentivised to re-invest in improving their efficiencies rather than just buying/squeezing out competitors. A more evenly spread market would then, as a result, be against regulations that make smaller market participants less…

> Arguably a more efficient approach might just be to have a tax that adds on to corporate tax incrementally for every % of market share a company has above say 7-8%.

How is this more efficient? You'd still be applying all of the inefficient regulatory rules intended to mitigate a lack of competition to the smaller companies trying to sustain a competitive market, and those rules are much more deleterious for smaller entities than higher tax rates.

If you have $100M in fixed regulatory overhead for a larger company with $10B in profit, it's only equivalent to a 1% tax. The same $100M for a smaller company with $50M in profit is a 200% tax. There is no tax rate you can impose on the larger company to make up for it because the overhead destroys the smaller company regardless of what you do to the larger one.

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#358

Post by AngryData »

wordpad wrote: post #156
whatever1 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of the capital intensive businesses face this issue. Chemicals, Shipping, Semiconductors etc. You get market signals that the demand is there, you acquire the necessary capital, you spend 5 years to build capacity, but guess what, 5 other market players did the same thing. So now you are doomed, because the market is flooded and you have low cash flow since you need to drop prices to compete for pennies. Now you…

>Capitalists claim that this is optimal. It's more optimal than planned economies until we have AI planned economies with realtime feedback, I guess. Consumers get cheap goods during oversupply and most inefficient companies get elliminated during bust while consolidation leads to economies of scale.

Why is the opposite of capitalist markets automatically assumed to be a command economy? Co-op style businesses aren't really capitalist orientated but are also not reliant on government action.

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#359

Post by high_na_euv »

varispeed wrote: post #310
parl_match wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why do they come up with the idea that this is the technology of the gods, unaffordable by mere mortals? because the gods want it all and are willing to pay top dollar.

Isn't this the case of money going from left pocket to the right, since these companies are owned by the same investment funds? I wonder whether this is some kind of a racket.

"Owned"? You mean they invested

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#360

Post by AngryData »

stackbutterflow wrote: post #308
gtech1 wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't even know what human consciousness is. We can't even answer if we have free will or not. And you are proposing that AGI..is what exactly ?

The IQ of the smartest human, the perfect memory storing and recollection of computers, the fact that it never tires. I don't know if it's AGI but it's already something greater than us.

If it was greater than humans already it wouldn't need humans to help it work.
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