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Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening

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Re: Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening

#421

Post by J_Shelby_J »

PunchyHamster wrote: post #408
zrail wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On consumer chips the more memory modules you have the slower they all run. I.e. if you have a single module of DDR5 it might run at 5600MHz but if you have four of them they all get throttled to 3800MHz.

But you can easily have 128GB and still on 2 modules

Larger capacity is usually slower though. The fastest ram is typically 16 or 32 capacity.

The OP is talking about a specific niche of boosting single thread performance. It’s common with gaming pcs since most games are single thread bottlenecked. 5% difference may seem small, but people are spending hundreds or thousands for less gains… so buying the fastest ram can make sense there.

Re: Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening

#422

Post by Tadpole9181 »

1970-01-01 wrote: post #311

>Samsung and its peers, SK hynix and Micron Technology, have redirected much of their fabrication capacity to high-end chips used in AI servers. While this shift yields higher margins, it leaves less capacity for traditional DRAM products that power laptops, desktops, and mainstream servers. So if the AI bubble does pop in early 2026, you will get a tsunami of cheap server RAM. You still won't be able to find cheap P…

Don't worry, my crystal ball of "what RAM is used in" predicts that Cloud providers just found an excuse to raise their prices too!

You get more margins! You get more margins! Everyone's margins go up!

Re: Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening

#423

Post by ls612 »

ksec wrote: post #419
ls612 wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DRAM manufacturers have literally been convicted of price fixing in the past why do you have to white knight for them?

And I am 100% sure a lot of other industries in commodities would have been convicted of price fixing if we look into it. And I say this as someone who have witnessed it first hand. Unfortunately commodity business is not sexy, it doesn't get the press, nor does it get told even in business schools. But a lot of the times these call called price fixing is a natural phenomenon. I wont even go into what get decided in…

Look man I’m a PhD economist I know the difference between monopolistic competition and collusion. All that price fixing does is transfer monopoly rents from you and me to the DRAM cartel (or whatever industry is doing the price fixing).

Re: Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening

#424

Post by sowbug »

mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #331
sowbug wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're underestimating economies of scale, and today's willingness of large corporations to provide cutting-edge services at a loss.

I don't think I am. I don't think economies of scale on hardware will drive costs below free, and while subscription providers might be willing to offer services below the cost of the hardware that runs them, I don't think they'll offer services below the cost of the electricity that runs them. And while data centers might sign favorable contracts, I don't think they are getting electricity that far below retail.

Here in California, as a residential customer, I pay close to 50 cents for even the very first kWh I consume each month, and there is no bulk discount. Meanwhile, Google et al. surely pay less than 10% that rate. A single Gemini query probably involves dozens of distributed machines that skilled SREs keep afloat, but let's say very optimistically that if I had a copy of the model, I could run it on a home workstation with six 80GB GPUs, consuming 4,200 watts when active, and 500 watts when idle. My utilization might be 10% on a day when I'm especially curious, whereas Google probably manages 95% utilization of its inference machines.

I could go on, but I think you get the point: the dollar cost for me to run a hypothetical version of Gemini at home far exceeds the price Google pays to deliver the same service to me. I'm effectively arbitraging the price of electricity by subscribing to an LLM service, because I could never run it for anywhere near the same price in my house -- and to provide the service at the speed and reliability of Gemini, I doubt I could even fit the equipment in my house-sized house and still have room for me to live in it.

Anyway, I stand by my original comment - it's neither easy nor cheap to run a frontier model at home.

Re: Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening

#425

Post by lukeschlather »

lazide wrote: post #345
justin66 wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Congrats on engaging with the facetious part of my comment, but I think the question still stands: do you think the current level of AI-driven data center demand will continue indefinitely? I feel like the question of how many computers are needed to steer a bunch of self-driving taxis probably has an answer, and I bet it's not anything even remotely close to what would justify a decade's worth of maximum investment…

Data center AI is also completely uninteresting/non-useful for self driving Taxis, or any other self driving vehicle.

Do you know comparatively how much GPU time training the models which run Waymo costs compared to Gemini? I'm genuinely curious, my assumption would be that Google has devoted at least as much GPU time in their datacenters to training Waymo models as they have Gemini models. But if it's significantly more efficient on training (or inference?) that's very interesting.

Re: Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening

#427

Post by ddoeth »

autoexec wrote: post #384
lemoncookiechip wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've not had a crash on Firefox in like a decade, basically since the Quantum update in like 2016.

Try living like I do. I currently have 1,838 tabs open across 9 different windows. On second thought, maybe don't live like I do...

Why do you need all of these tabs open? How do you find what you need?

Re: Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening

#428

Post by Ray20 »

1718627440 wrote: post #363
Ray20 wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But the power concentration is a strong reason. A centralized authority capable of so severely restricting the economic freedom of the most powerful people implies a far greater concentration of power than the one you're fighting against. You're proposing to cure the common cold with AIDS.

> A centralized authority capable of so severely restricting the economic freedom of the most powerful people implies a far greater concentration of power Yes. That's the idea. Make the largest concentration of power an elected body auditable by the commons and whose actions are formalized by a bunch of rules, that they can choose, but still need to stick to.

> largest concentration of power an elected body auditable by the commons

So, billionaires are bad because they can use their money to enter into voluntary deals with other people, which can lead to them achieving goals we don't like. Therefore, we create a single point of concentration of power with totalitarian control and dictatorial powers, that can take resources from people they don't like and give those resources to others they do like.

And these people with totalitarian control over the commons and dictatorial powers over the commons and the most powerful lever on everyone whatsoever and especially on everyone with huge amount of money, will continue to be electable and auditable by the commons because... I don't know, probably because they feel like it, there is literally no other reasons or incentives for them to do so.

"Big money give a human to much power, so let's take all that power from EVERYONE, concentrate it in ONE PLAСE, and add to this power dictatorial powers and totalitarian control over society. Some might argue that this is the exact opposite of the stated goals of the whole undertaking, but they do not take into account the insurmountable protection in the form of MAGICAL RULES with the help of which society will be able to control all of this"

Re: Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening

#429

Post by lazide »

lukeschlather wrote: post #425
lazide wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Data center AI is also completely uninteresting/non-useful for self driving Taxis, or any other self driving vehicle.

Do you know comparatively how much GPU time training the models which run Waymo costs compared to Gemini? I'm genuinely curious, my assumption would be that Google has devoted at least as much GPU time in their datacenters to training Waymo models as they have Gemini models. But if it's significantly more efficient on training (or inference?) that's very interesting.

My note is specifically for operating them. Training the models, certainly can help.

Re: Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening

#430

Post by scotty79 »

PunchyHamster wrote: post #411
scotty79 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every corporation is a (not so) little pocket of centrally planned economy. The only saving grace is that it can die and others will scoop up released resources. When country level planned economy dies, people die and resources get destroyed.

> The only saving grace is that it can die and others will scoop up released resources. Ideally. Realistically in market with only few companies around it makes it even less competitive.

Yea, ideally new companies should also be able to be born and have a chance to get a foothold. This sadly is not given and market economy must be regulated to provide this feature.
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