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The RAM shortage comes for us all

jeffgeerling.com

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Re: The RAM shortage comes for us all

#361

Post by cindyllm »

Libidinalecon wrote: post #357
roadside_picnic wrote: post #37

I know this is mostly paranoid thinking on my behalf, but it almost feels like this is a conscious effort to attempt to destroy "personal" computing. I've been a huge advocate for local, open, generative AI as the best resistance to massive take-over by large corporations controlling all of this content creation. But even as it is (or "was" I should say), running decent models at home is prohibitively expensive for m…

This is exactly the kind of thing you would expect to happen and to feel in an insane unsustainable bubble. I am much more worried looking at these ridiculous prices on newegg that memory will be dirt cheap 3 years from now because the economy has imploded from this mass stupidity. I was blown away by Gemini 3 at first but now from using it I have ran into all the dumb things it does because it is a large language mo…

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Re: The RAM shortage comes for us all

#362

Post by Fnoord »

> The reason for all this, of course, is AI datacenter buildouts. I have no clue if there's any price fixing going on like there was a few decades ago—that's something conspiracy theorists can debate—but the problem is there's only a few companies producing all the world's memory supplies.

LE should investigate as this concerns us all. However, I really don't have faith this current administration would criminally investigate this. Maybe the next one will, if there's going to be one.

Re: The RAM shortage comes for us all

#363

Post by giantrobot »

bluGill wrote: post #247
650REDHAIR wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I truly hate how bloated and inefficient MS/Windows is. My hope is that with the growing adoption of Linux that MS takes note...

Can we get web sites to optimize as well? I use a slower laptop and a lot of sites are terrible. My old Sparc station (40mhz) had a better web experience in 1997 because than people cared about this.

Hey XML is ucky, we wouldn't want to just serve it directly and let XSL "hydrate" it in the native browser engine. It's a way better idea to download Doom 2 worth of JavaScript and use a data serialization format without built-in schema validation.

Why get all that capability for inside a native browser engine? We should reinvent all of it to run as JavaScript!

Re: The RAM shortage comes for us all

#364

Post by sidibe »

baq wrote: post #256
barnas2 wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They aren't overproducing consumer modules, they're actively cutting production of those. They're producing datacenter/AI specific form factors that won't be compatible with consumer hardware.

somebody will step up to pick up the free money if this continues.

A lot of ram and disk companies have played this game before and gotten burned so they are more conservative than you'd expect. The problem in the past is shortages cause the customers to invest in efficiency or new tech pops up, it's really hard to predict whether to jump in because of the time it takes to get production going

if it gets really bad though the superscalers will guarantee them enough business years out to make the investment worth it

Re: The RAM shortage comes for us all

#365

Post by oskarkk »

enlyth wrote: post #235
petre wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like the Silver Thursday all over again. I hope OpenAI ends up like the Hunt Btothers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Thursday

> To save the situation, a consortium of US banks provided a $1.1 billion line of credit to the brothers which allowed them to pay Bache which, in turn, survived the ordeal. It seems once you amass a certain amount of wealth, you just get automatically bailed out from your mistakes

Seems that in the end it didn't work out well for them:

> The Hunts lost over a billion dollars through this incident, but the family fortunes survived. They pledged most of their assets, including their stake in Placid Oil, as collateral for the rescue loan package they obtained. However, the value of their assets (mainly holdings in oil, sugar, and real estate) declined steadily during the 1980s, and their estimated net wealth declined from $5 billion in 1980 to less than $1 billion in 1988.

Re: The RAM shortage comes for us all

#366

Post by rasz »

Aurornis wrote: post #328
bullen wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, DDR3 is the lowest CAS latency and lasts ALOT longer. Just like SSDs from 2010 have 100.000 writes per bit instead of below 10.000. CPUs might even follow the same durability pattern but that remains to be seen. Keep your old machines alive and backed up!

> Yes, DDR3 is the lowest CAS latency and lasts ALOT longer. DDR5 is more reliable. Where are you getting this info that DDR3 lasts longer? DDR5 runs at lower voltages, uses modern processes, and has on-die ECC. This is already showing up in reduced failure rates for DDR5 fleets: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/11068349 The other comment already covered why comparing CAS latency is misleading. CAS latency is mea…

It has on-die ECC _because_ it is so unreliable. ECC is there to fix its terribleness from factory.

Re: The RAM shortage comes for us all

#367

Post by sophrosyne42 »

bakugo wrote: post #320
zozbot234 wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're simply making a bet that they can put the DRAM dies to more valuable use than any of the existing alternatives, including e.g. average folks playing the latest videogames on their gaming rig. At this kind of scale, they had better be right or they are toast: they have essentially gone all-in on their bet that this whole AI thing is not going to 'pop' anytime soon.

> They're simply making a bet that they can put the DRAM dies to more valuable use than any of the existing alternatives They can't. They know they can't. We all know they can't. But they can just keep abusing the infinite money glitch to price everyone else out, so it doesn't matter.

When they find out that it is not, in fact, an infinite money glitch, they're going to have to eat that cost. It will work out great for everyone as long as they aren't bailed out.

Re: The RAM shortage comes for us all

#368

Post by CuriousRose »

jjcm wrote: post #274
RachelF wrote: post #110

Perhaps we'll have to start optimizing software for performance and RAM usage again. I look at MS Teams currently using 1.5GB of RAM doing nothing.

Likewise, Slack. Currently at 2.3GB. I'm very curious if this AI wave will actually lead to more native apps being made, since the barrier to doing so will be lower.

I can't fathom why this is even possible, let alone acceptable. You could write an equally featured text chat client in a terminal (IRC style) - no video or file sharing of course - but do those things really need to consume the remaining 2.29 GB of RAM?

Surely video calls have a native capture method in Windows/macOS now where you can overlay the controls for fairly cheap resources, and file sharing only needs to consume RAM during the upload process.

What gives with these apps? Like seriously, is it the fact that they need to load a whole browser environment just to run 100mb of JS? If so, why bother shipping an app at all? Just encourage users to allow notifications in the browser for the site and be done with it. No apps to maintain, instant patching on refresh, where's the obvious downside I'm missing?

Re: The RAM shortage comes for us all

#369

Post by makeitdouble »

bakugo wrote: post #280
Loic wrote: post #13

I think the OpenAI deal to lock wafers was a wonderful coup. OpenAI is more and more losing ground against the regularity[0] of the improvements coming from Anthropic, Google and even the open weights models. By creating a chock point at the hardware level, OpenAI can prevent the competition from increasing their reach because of the lack of hardware. [0]: For me this is really an important part of working with Claud…

Is anyone else deeply perturbed by the realization that a single unprofitable corporation can basically buy out the entire world's supply of computing hardware so nobody else can have it? How did we get here? What went so wrong?

> unprofitable

I'm assuming you wouldn't see it as fine if the corporation was profitable.

> How did we get here?

We've always been there. Not that it makes it right, but that's an issue that is neither simple to fix nor something most law makers are guaranteed to want to fix in the first place.

Nothing in the rules stops you from cornering most markets, and an international companies with enough money can probably corner specific markets if they'd see a matching ROI.

Re: The RAM shortage comes for us all

#370

Post by 650REDHAIR »

vanviegen wrote: post #209
650REDHAIR wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I truly hate how bloated and inefficient MS/Windows is. My hope is that with the growing adoption of Linux that MS takes note...

That's a very indirect way of enjoying the benefits of Linux.

Unfortunately I have to use Windows for work :( .

At home I have Windows, MacOS, Mint, SteamOS, etc.

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