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The RAM shortage could last years

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Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#381

Post by tcfhgj »

api wrote: post #123
rekabis wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think this will smack the hands of developers who don’t manage RAM well And hopefully kill Electron. I have never seen the point of spinning up a 300+Mb app just to display something that ought to need only 500Kb to paint onto the screen.

The point is being able to write it once with web developers instead of writing it a minimum of twice (Windows and macOS) with much harder to hire native UI developers.

There is native to the OS and there's native to the machine.

Anyways, I'm both cases you don't really have to write it twice.

Native to the OS: write only the UI twice, but implement the Core in Rust.

Native to the machine: Write it only once, e.g. in iced, and compile it for every Plattform.

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#382

Post by rldjbpin »

let the analyst and news say what they want - the entire situation is artificial and is up to the manufacturers.

the current relative spike in the prices misses the medium-term trend of the vast decrease in memory price post-covid that led to the recent surge. the cartel got another opportunity to make bank and they will use that lever to the max.

funnily enough i've been personally stuck with 16 gigs since 2015, across three memory generations! but i am used to the past when you would spend 80-100 on an 8gb stick (jdec timings, nothing fancy but from a major brand) without accounting for inflation.

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#383

Post by goldenarm »

cylemons wrote: post #379

When I personally use chatgpt and friends, I am not seeing any slowdowns or anything, meaning that their servers can handle the loads just fine. So then, why are these companies spending so much building new capacity if the current capacity is enough?

Frontier labs flagship models are ~2T params at the moment, but they intend to ship 10T models like Claude Mythos, which would require substantial datacenter expansion. Same thing for training.

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#384

Post by xigoi »

im3w1l wrote: post #278
wmf wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And now OpenAI is engaged in blatant market manipulation and severely disrupted the entire world's DRAM supply.

Cornering the market with the intent to flip the goods is not quite the same as cornering the market because you actually want the goods and intend to use them yourself.

And it just so happens that many people will now have to use OpenAI’s products because they can’t get enough RAM to run a local LLM. What a coincidence.

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#385

Post by mlvljr »

HerbManic wrote: post #98
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…

I have been wondering this recently. It was the convention that if you wanted to keep costs down, try to keep the memory bus size down as low as possible. Still remember the awful Radeon 9200 SE - 64bit data bus that strangled an already slow GPU. Heck, I have a phone with a 16bit memory bus for instance. The high(ish) clock rate only makes up the difference slightly. But with general prices on all components going u…

[dead]

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#386

Post by mongrelion »

fsckboy wrote: post #215
shash wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not merely a “gaming vs data center“. There’s so many other places DRAM and NVM are needed - mobile, automotive, other consumer electronics,… the current situation is that _all_ of that is deprived of the memory that it needs. And much of this is critical to the real economy.

i could have used lemons and lemonade stands to explain supply and demand, the lesson is still the same. letting the market set prices ensures that the chips go to the critical markets and uses. less critical uses will not allocate funds for purchases.

letting the market set prices ensures that the chips go to the critical markets and uses.

Can you please elaborate what you mean by "critical market"?

Edit: formatting

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#387

Post by pron »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #183
pron wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of the algorithms are built deep into the runtime. E.g. languages that rely on malloc/free allocators (which require maintaining free lists) are making a pretty significnant tradoff of wasting CPU to save on RAM as opposed to languages using moving collectors.

Free lists aren't expensive for most usage patterns. For cases where they are we've got stuff like arena allocators. Meanwhile GC is hardly cheap. Of course memory safety has a quality all its own.

> Free lists aren't expensive for most usage patterns.

Whatever little CPU they waste is often worth more than the RAM they save.

> For cases where they are we've got stuff like arena allocators.

... that work by using more RAM to save on CPU.

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#388

Post by close04 »

high_na_euv wrote: post #374
close04 wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Neither party apparently knew he was negotiating with the other. I don’t buy it that two of the largest manufacturers of DRAM in the world, from the same country , didn’t know this. Even of you ignore each company’s intelligence teams, that’s also the job of the country’s internal intelligence services, to make sure they know what all companies are doing and then make it so they have the best leverage to gain as mu…

Wut? How they [gov] would know that? By spying?

How would the country’s internal intelligence services know what’s happening? Yes, by spying. That’s literally their job and they have assets in every critical area in a country. Every institution, every major industry player, they are monitored to a degree by the internal intelligence in every country in the world. There are more nefarious reasons to do this but the ostensible one is that if it’s of strategic importance the country needs to know everything there is to know.

The companies also do a lot of spying themselves, every bit of info could give them an edge.

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#389

Post by grumbelbart2 »

ece wrote: post #370
xbmcuser wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am betting the pendulum swings faster to the other side to excess capacity as all the construction lies of Altman fall through with financiers waking up the the fact they can't build the infrasctructure as fast nor make any profits on that infrastructure that will get built.

OpenAI does have projections for making money with ads that would make Google and Meta blush.

To show ads you need people to stay on your platform. This is especially true once ads become more intrusive or of lower quality, something the big players seem to gravitate towards to keep revenue up. Google and Meta have ways to lock in users (networking effects, the best search engine available, having your data stored there).

I am not sure if OpenAI has that. Their edge regarding models is small, their strategy currently seems to be "buy ALL the hardware so nobody else can". Users can quite easily switch to other models.

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#390

Post by [deleted] »

torginus wrote: post #42
stuxnet79 wrote: post #11

Ok so Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron do not have the capacity to meet demand. Also, what little capacity they do have they are allocating to HBM over DRAM. Based on my limited knowledge HBM can not be easily repurposed for consumer electronics. Translation: main street is cooked for the next 3-4 years. It doesn't stop there though. OpenAI is currently mired in a capital crunch. Their last round just about sucked all th…

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…

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