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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

#371

Post by School-Cotton »

astrange wrote: post #349
School-Cotton wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Designing such an advanced lithography machine is probably a Manhattan Project scale task. China is indeed trying to make progress and they will probably get there someday but for now ASML is the only company in the world that knows how to build these or anything remotely close.

ASML is not the only sole supplier involved. There's a few more layers of them you have to replace.

Right, the most famous example is Zeiss which is the only company in the world that builds the high-precision mirrors needed for the most advanced ASML machines. I’m not sure if those are subject to export bans too, but even if they are, I think China could eventually figure out how to build them. It’s just a matter of a huge amount of R&D that would need to be done first.

Re: The RAM shortage comes for us all

#372

Post by lawn »

SchwKatze wrote: post #32

I just gathered enough money to build my new PC. I'll even go to another country to pay less taxes, and this spike hit me hard. I'll buy anyway because I don't believe it will slow down so soon. But yeah, for me is a lot of money

I was planning to buy new in October but decided to wait. That was a bad decision and I had to go down from 64 to 32GB, while still paying more.

Fun times.

Re: The RAM shortage comes for us all

#373

Post by patates »

georgeburdell wrote: post #185
fullstop wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're looking to buy 1TB of DDR5 for a large database server. I'm pretty sure that we're just going to pay the premium and move on.

And that’s why everybody’s B2B these days. The decision-making people at companies are not spending their own money

I think it's not about own versus someone else's money.

Hardware is usually a small piece of the financial puzzle (unless you're building a billion dollar AI datacenter I guess) and even when the hardware price quadruples, it's still a small piece and delivery time is much more important than optimizing hardware costs.

Re: The RAM shortage comes for us all

#374

Post by tavavex »

makeitdouble wrote: post #369
bakugo wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

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

I feel like the implication of what they said was "think of how much worse it would be if they could truly spare no expense on these types of things". If an "unprofitable" company can do this, what could a profitable company of their size do on a whim?

Re: The RAM shortage comes for us all

#375

Post by tavavex »

astrange wrote: post #348
bigiain wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I, for one, would not miss a single one of the electron apps I'm forced to use. Every single one of them makes me feel like the vendor is telling me "we can't be bothered employing half decent developers or giving the developers we have enough time and resources to write decent software, so we're just going to use cheap and inexperience web developers and burn another gigabyte or two of your memory to run what could…

Apps can't be 100MB on modern displays, because there are literally too many pixels involved. Not that I know what's going on in an Electron app heap (because there's no inspection tools afaik), but I'm guessing much of it is compiled code and the rest is images and text layout related.

> Apps can't be 100MB on modern displays, because there are literally too many pixels involved.

What? Are you talking about assets? You'd need a considerable amount of very high-res, uncompressed or low-compressed assets to use up 100MB. Not to mention all the software that uses vector icons, which take up a near-zero amount of space in comparison to raster images.

Electron apps always take up a massive amount of space because every separate install is a fully self-contained version of Chromium. No matter how lightweight your app is, Electron will always force a pretty large space overhead.

Re: The RAM shortage comes for us all

#376

Post by DooMMasteR »

derefr wrote: post #287
phil21 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Currently trying to source a large amount of DDR4 to upgrade a 3 year old fleet of servers at a very unfortunate time. It's very difficult to source in quantity, and is going up in price more or less daily at this point. Vendor quotes are good for hours, not days when you can find it.

Have you considered dropping by in person to your nearest computer recycler/refurbisher? As a teen I worked at one, and the boxes and boxes of RAM sticks pulled from scrapped machines (usually scrapped due to bad main boards) made a strong impression. They tend to not even put the highest-spec stuff they pull into anything, as refurbished machines are mostly sold/donated in quantity (to schools and the like) and big…

We are at a state, where used DDR4 gets bought large scale reballed and resold as refurb chips, because they are so rare.

Re: The RAM shortage comes for us all

#377

Post by beAbU »

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…

I'm not too keyed into the economics of this supposed AI bubble, but is this not an unfathomably risky move on OpenAI's part? If this thing actually pops, or a competitor like Google actually pulls ahead and comes out victorious, then OpenAI will sit holding a very expensive bag of expensive but unusable raw materials that they'll have to sell of at a discount?

Re: The RAM shortage comes for us all

#378

Post by Suppafly »

georgeburdell wrote: post #185
fullstop wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're looking to buy 1TB of DDR5 for a large database server. I'm pretty sure that we're just going to pay the premium and move on.

And that’s why everybody’s B2B these days. The decision-making people at companies are not spending their own money

The price of the hardware, even with inflated prices, is probably equal or less than the combined price of all the software licenses that go on that machine.

Re: The RAM shortage comes for us all

#379

Post by zozbot234 »

sophrosyne42 wrote: post #367
bakugo wrote: post #320

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 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.

It's more like a waste-infinite-money glitch, if that's what they're trying. There's no way that a simple speculative attack actually makes DRAM more valuable in the long term on its own, and that's the only win condition for that kind of play. People have tried to hoard all sorts of commodities as a mere speculative play on the market, and it never works.

Re: The RAM shortage comes for us all

#380

Post by ben_w »

Narishma wrote: post #329
ben_w wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first "proper" "modern" computer I had, initially came with 8 megabytes of RAM. It's not a lot, but it's enough for a dumb terminal.

A dumb terminal doesn't even need a tenth of that.

Only if you don't mind the screen being limited to 640x480 and/or low bit depth.
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