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The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

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Re: The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

#381

Post by zozbot234 »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #365
zozbot234 wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's newly fabbed memory vs. an existing stock. The stock is quite massive, so optimizing existing use and enabling it to be repurposed can be meaningful.

Not really... If the new memory is needed for AI data centers, it doesn't matter if your existing MacBook doesn't need as much memory anymore.

If the existing MacBook needs less memory, it can use its current memory spec for higher-level uses that formerly required a MacBook Pro. That meaningfully affects the market.

Re: The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

#382

Post by Aerroon »

Maxion wrote: post #204
eecc wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s an entirely different framework, one that doesn’t concern investment decisions of Apple or Google. I do agree that USA and EU could foot the bill and subsidize a couple billions in such industrial infrastructure, perhaps taking back a cut of the profit rather than privatizing all of it. But they’re not doing it, or are making pitiful efforts at that

It's just an insane amount of money to invest with the long-term effect of you oversaturating the chip market. Throwing 20B into a chip fab in the EU would be politically a very unpopular move, if it's done as a public company or worse directly state owned, you'll royally piss of Taiwan, South Korea and China and it's likely they'd retaliate by e.g. subsidising their auto industry more in order to give the death blow…

It shouldn't be a politically unpopular move. Other countries can get pissed off, but those other countries also cannot guarantee that Europe will get chips when times are tough. If you want to build modern drones and missiles you need access to a large amount of computer chips. In a crisis will those still be available to Europe?

Re: The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

#383

Post by nashashmi »

gblargg wrote: post #172
simonw wrote: post #2

The headline here under-serves the article in my opinion: this is a fascinating, deep explanation of how the memory market works and why increased demand for HBM (used by big GPU racks) hurts the availability of wafers for DDR and LPDDR (used by laptops and phones).

This also put a lot into perspective: > these memory makers have learned a very particular lesson from the unforgiving history [deep drops in demand] of their industry: always leave demand unmet I can't blame them for keeping some reserve demand ready so they keep having customers over the years.

> always leave demand unmet

And then allow small low cost manufacturers to get the rest of the market... like China has been doing this whole time.

Re: The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

#384

Post by hackyhacky »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #377
hackyhacky wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please avoid straw man arguments. I didn't say that China didn't use capitalism: I said that it didn't use unfettered capitalism. Its capitalism is strongly tinged by its authoritarian rule with the explicit goal of reducing poverty. The US, like China, continues to use a mixed approach to economic management in the form of regulated capitalism . The degree of regulation in the US has been declining since the 1950s,…

On the subject of straw men, there is no such thing as "unfettered capitalism." That is something you invented to support your argument. Put another way, capitalism, like communism, is one of those pure ideologies that has never really been given a fair shake. In fact, human nature rules out the possibility of a fair trial for any pure ideology. We are political creatures, not ideological ones. If you really are beyo…

For all of your rah-rah capitalist boosterism, you failed to address the actual content of my argument, which is that the reason during the last 50 years that the China has had decreasing poverty, while the US has had increasing poverty, has nothing to do with capitalism, and everything to do with restrictions on capitalism (or their absence).

Re: The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

#385

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

zozbot234 wrote: post #381
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really... If the new memory is needed for AI data centers, it doesn't matter if your existing MacBook doesn't need as much memory anymore.

If the existing MacBook needs less memory, it can use its current memory spec for higher-level uses that formerly required a MacBook Pro. That meaningfully affects the market.

You don't seem to understand supply and demand.

That does not help the demand side for AI data centers - which is the vast majority of the market...

Re: The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

#386

Post by picsao »

Aerroon wrote: post #376
gblargg wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This also put a lot into perspective: > these memory makers have learned a very particular lesson from the unforgiving history [deep drops in demand] of their industry: always leave demand unmet I can't blame them for keeping some reserve demand ready so they keep having customers over the years.

I wonder if this is actually true in the long-term though. If they were to flood the market with lots of high capacity memory, then I think our programs would start using more memory too. As a result we might end up needing more memory faster compared to if they keep demand unmet. Just consider that a chat application today takes more memory than a full 3D game with thousands of users (including chat) + the operating…

[dead]

Re: The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

#387

Post by Aerroon »

shimman wrote: post #30
swatcoder wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what happens if the market settles back down or the leading memory tech pivots away from what you invested all this capital and time chasing? You'd need a very strong, very particular forecast to make such a costly bet. And conversely, it may say something about their internal forecasts that they're not making the bet.

Why should society care about people making profits? Society would greatly benefit from cheap abundant ram than FAANG shares going up. I'm kinda sick about only caring that some billionaire makes more money and would rather you know... actually improve conditions to better society. This is why China is eating the West. Quite easy to start an electronics company when you have such an abundance of suppliers, compare th…

You don't understand the point of capitalism. It's not about making rich people richer. Capitalism is about producing stuff. To create a large variety of (useful) products for society.

You need capital to make pretty much anything. Somebody has to come up with a large amount of resources (money) put upfront into the venture. Capitalism creates the incentive for that - if the gamble pays off, then the investors get more value back. If it doesn't work out, then investors lose money. Most businesses fail early and do not provide a return for the investment.

The point of capitalism is to keep this system running. As a result of it we have made an ungodly amount of technological and quality of life improvements. Some people have become filthy rich from this, but typically they also provided the world with goods or services that people like and use. Tesla made Elon filthy rich, but it also made electric vehicles popular.

Re: The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

#388

Post by dyauspitr »

simonh wrote: post #238
Maxion wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just an insane amount of money to invest with the long-term effect of you oversaturating the chip market. Throwing 20B into a chip fab in the EU would be politically a very unpopular move, if it's done as a public company or worse directly state owned, you'll royally piss of Taiwan, South Korea and China and it's likely they'd retaliate by e.g. subsidising their auto industry more in order to give the death blow…

They'd more likely split themselves laughing. The solution to threats to global economic integration is to address the threats to global economic integration. It's not to cannibalise our own full-employment high value economies, by diverting enormous capital and labour into duplicating vast swathes of lower value jobs we don't actually have the work force for anyway, just so we can pay unaffordable prices for the res…

It’s one thing when toys, pots, furniture etc. is made somewhere else. It’s a completely different thing when your high tech is manufactured there.

Re: The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

#389

Post by xnorswap »

Aerroon wrote: post #376
gblargg wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This also put a lot into perspective: > these memory makers have learned a very particular lesson from the unforgiving history [deep drops in demand] of their industry: always leave demand unmet I can't blame them for keeping some reserve demand ready so they keep having customers over the years.

I wonder if this is actually true in the long-term though. If they were to flood the market with lots of high capacity memory, then I think our programs would start using more memory too. As a result we might end up needing more memory faster compared to if they keep demand unmet. Just consider that a chat application today takes more memory than a full 3D game with thousands of users (including chat) + the operating…

I think that Slack's memory usage is "not bad" at ~300MB just because Discord exists, and somehow that seems to get into the gigabytes before even looking at a message.

Re: The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

#390

Post by sokoloff »

hackyhacky wrote: post #380
sokoloff wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t view long-term investing in productive companies as anything close to gambling.

Which is fine, except that one can't know in advance which companies will continue to be productive..that's why it's gambling.

Feel free to avoid it if you think it’s gambling.

https://www.macrotrends.net/2324/sp-500-historical-chart-dat...

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