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The RAM shortage could last years

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Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#401

Post by whatsupdog »

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…

Supply and demand. The prices are high because of high demand.

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#402

Post by gadders »

Epa095 wrote: post #283
drnick1 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This just highlights what an utter failure and self-inflicted wound the green policies of Euro countries have been. Europe has already lost the AI race to the U.S. and China.

Renewables is the only realistic path to energy independence. Today's global situation should show the absolute necessity of that, even if you dont give a sh*t about the environment. Had we done more 10 years ago we would have been better of. The second best time to start is now.

Yes, we should definitely optimise for the most expensive form of electricity: https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/bjorn-lomborg-solar-wind-p...

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#403

Post by gadders »

energy123 wrote: post #395
mono442 wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China is building a lot of coal power plants

Their coal generation decreased last year. They're building on the order of 70GW of new coal while they decomission or underutilized more than 70GW of pre-existing coal. Meanwhile they installed 450GW of new renewables energy.

They also consume half of all coal consumed globally per year. They are in no way a green economy.

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#404

Post by gadders »

energy123 wrote: post #306
paganel wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Europe still has coal, lots of it, not using it is a political choice and a self-inflicted wound.

Last year, China's coal use decreased, while China installed 300x more renewables than nuclear. Coal and nuclear aren't cost competitive with renewables, either in a free market or a technocratic top-down economy. Coal and gas still maintain a valid niche of firming intermittency. But that niche is temporary and shrinking.

Of all the coal consumed per year, China uses half of it. They are not a green economy.

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#405

Post by TacticalCoder »

whatever1 wrote: post #147
bombcar wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t the memory makers always get left holding the bag? I feel this has happened at least three times before.

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

That's not what capitalists claim. Capitalists claim communism is responsible for tens, if not hundreds, of millions of death due to famine. And overall miserable ways of life, as if humans were termites deprived of any individualism and any freedom.

Capitalists claim that France importing 500 000 people from the third world each year, out of which only 10% are ever going to work (and these are official numbers) and yet offering them all a safety net is unsustainable. And that that socialism is only going to lead to one thing: running out of taxpayers' money.

Capitalists don't claim they have the best system: what they claim is that they haven't seen a less worse one.

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#406

Post by Qem »

gadders wrote: post #404
energy123 wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last year, China's coal use decreased, while China installed 300x more renewables than nuclear. Coal and nuclear aren't cost competitive with renewables, either in a free market or a technocratic top-down economy. Coal and gas still maintain a valid niche of firming intermittency. But that niche is temporary and shrinking.

Of all the coal consumed per year, China uses half of it. They are not a green economy.

They are greening fast, and enabling greening of others through cost competitive supplies.

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#407

Post by cma »

hgoel wrote: post #400
cma wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think of the factory problem from physics first principals instead, as Elon would say. Musk says he will outcompete earth fabs by building them on the moon in just a few years, deploy radiation harden versions of the chips into space, and beat out TCO vs doing this on earth. If he can do all that that fast, the RAM makers should be able to at least 1000X their fab capacity on earth in one year. One year for scaling u…

The most well known thing about Musk besides being an asshat, is that his timelines are almost always imaginary. He is not building fabs on the Moon in "just a few years".

He doesn't have to build them to sell them. FSD has been sold for almost a decade, more than half the depreciation time of the cars. With first principles sales techniques it's possible X could sell these moon chips now and deliver them made on earth 6 or 7 Moore's law cycles later by a different company, like with the solar roof or hydraulic brick machine from alibaba, way cheaper.

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#408

Post by fc417fc802 »

pron wrote: post #387
fc417fc802 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

GC burns far more CPU cycles. Meanwhile I'm not sure where you got this idea about the value of CPU cycles relative to RAM. Most tasks stall on IO. Those that don't typically stall on either memory bandwidth or latency. Meanwhile CPU bound tasks typically don't perform allocations and if forced avoid the heap like the plague.

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#409

Post by tomaskafka »

locknitpicker wrote: post #256
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.

> If AI makes software easier to create, that will drive the price down. Supposedly AI drives down the cost of producing software,not the "price". > 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? Currently, the cost of AI is between $20/month and around $200/month per developer.…

I got a 128 GB MBP, and the current models are fit enough to manage the calendar or do research on web (very slowly), not to be useful companions for coding as I hoped.

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#410

Post by aeonfox »

rimliu wrote: post #362
aeonfox wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who said anything about mockups? Design goes all the way from concept to real-world. If a designer can specify declaratively how that will look, feel, and animate, that's far better than a developer taking a mockup and trying their hardest to approximate some storyboards. Even as a developer working against mockups, I can move much faster with HTML/CSS than I can with native, and I'm well experienced at both (yes, th…

well, then you are really bad at native and should not be comparing those technologies despite your claims otherwise (which make little sense).

> really bad at native

Yikes. I spent 15 years developing native on both mobile and desktop. If you think that native has the same design flexibility as HTML/CSS, you're objectively wrong.

By design, each operation system limits you to their particular design language, and styling of components is hidden by the API making forward-compatible customisation impossible. There's no escaping that. And if you acknowledge that fact, you can't then claim native has the same design flexibility as HTML/CSS. If you don't acknowledge that fact, you're unhinged from reality.

There's pros and cons to the two approaches, of course. But that's not what's being debated here.

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