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Memory has grown to nearly two-thirds of AI chip component costs

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Re: Memory has grown to nearly two-thirds of AI chip component costs

#441

Post by tonyhart7 »

jmb99 wrote: post #414
dominotw wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

man i keep thinking. why cant india get into stuff like this. Do their own manhattan project to build factories and tech for this and immigrate experts with high salaries.

I am typing this on my return flight home from a business trip in Delhi. There are many other areas the Indian government needs to be focussing on first. I had a similar view to you ~2 weeks ago. Spending some time there very quickly made me realize that there’s a lot of other things that are much more pressing.

such as ?????

Re: Memory has grown to nearly two-thirds of AI chip component costs

#442

Post by theshackleford »

Ray20 wrote: post #200
aunty_helen wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is 100% going to kill the home built pc market. When I started building gaming pcs, the top top card was 750$ (NZD). Now they’re 10,000 just for the gpu and another 1-2000 for ram. People used to get into gaming pcs as an affordable hobby, now it’s making general aviation look like plan B.

I don't understand the threat to the PC market. Prices haven't risen THAT much and are quite affordable. And if you look at the improved quality of upscalers (DLLS 4.5 for example), gaming is now more affordable than ever, despite the increased cost of components. Of course, the 5090 prices are insane, as are for SOME memory models, but that's nothing new and represents a fairly small market share. > When I started b…

> When I started building gaming PC, the top $700 cards didn't even provide comfortable performance or graphics.

When would this have been? I can not remember a time this was accurate for the games of the time, outside of a handful of meme titles like the original crysis that made bad hardware bets. Most of them fulfilled the needs of the software and hardware of the time. I'd say the biggest issue was that for a time, software and hardware were advancing so rapidly that you wouldnt get very long out of your hardware, but that's just the reality of rapid development and not the fault or failure of any specific hardware release.

> Back then, you were supposed to have several of this connected SLI or somethin.

SLI was aimed squarely at enthusiasts, not at joe-average PC gamer and it was certainly never a requirement. It existed as a halo feature for people chasing maximum performance, benchmark scores, and bragging rights.

Re: Memory has grown to nearly two-thirds of AI chip component costs

#444

Post by malwrar »

jmspring wrote: post #372
jmspring wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just found two 4tb Samsung EVO drives - unused - while organizing my garage.

I forgot to add, I paid ~500 each, Samsung for the same drive is quoting $2k on their site (maybe a new sku). These were bought 2ish years ago. Strange things are a foot at the Circle-K.

Lucky find! Just picked up one of those for a build, ohhhh boy was that a painful purchase. Thank god for my fortune to work in tech.

Re: Memory has grown to nearly two-thirds of AI chip component costs

#445

Post by roenxi »

gpm wrote: post #352
raincole wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just DRAM market, but the GPU market soon. China is the great equalizer of the world.

> Not just DRAM market, but the GPU market soon China doesn't have EUV fabs... They've pushed DUV impressively far... but until they get EUV working industrially (and reasonable timelines are at least 2-4 years for that) it shouldn't be possible for them to compete for that market. > China is the great equalizer of the world. China is hardly an egalitarian society...

> but until they get EUV working industrially (and reasonable timelines are at least 2-4 years for that)

Does this not count as soon? How often do you buy new computers? That seems pretty soon. I remember a year or few ago being told it'd never happen so they're already infinity years ahead of schedule if we accept that as reasonable. The rate they're pulling ahead of expectations appears to be so sharp there is a risk they leapfrog EUV to go on to the next big thing.

Re: Memory has grown to nearly two-thirds of AI chip component costs

#446

Post by simoncion »

Gigachad wrote: post #436
simoncion wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Those servers still have to pay the same price for components... Not if Nvidia is running the service. Seems quite possible to me that Nvidia sells to the public just enough graphics cards to keep any frisky antitrust investigators off its back and reserves the rest for GeForce NOW, its "pay monthly for limited access to a remote gaming PC" service. The cards for NOW are billed to the BU running NOW at or below cos…

These kinds of conspiracies require everyone to collude, which just about never happens since the reward to defect increases. If nVidia tries this, they would just lose the market to AMD who would spam out as many GPUs to gamers as they could. If both AMD and nVidia teamed up, it would leave a gap that either intel or some Chinese startup would jump on. It's just far more likely that these GPUs actually do cost a ton…

> These kinds of conspiracies require everyone to collude...

No, only Nvidia makes and sells Nvidia GPUs. They're the sole supplier of the GPUs used in 95% of the graphics cards sold in the US.

> If both AMD and nVidia teamed up, it would leave a gap that either intel or some Chinese startup would jump on.

Fascinating.

a) Explain why the only even vaguely-recent cheap video cards were made by Intel, and why it looks like Intel has pretty much stopped making video cards? [0]

b) Tell me how that Chinese startup gets past USian Sinophobic/protectionist trade barriers?

c) Tell me how that Chinese startup convinces the big gaming development houses to ignore the advice of Nvidia's driver engineering team that just so happens to make their games work great on the hardware in NOW and really, really poorly on that unknown-to-US-customers Chinese startup?

> It's just far more likely that these GPUs actually do cost a ton to make...

You seem to have not been paying much attention to the reports of Nvidia, AMD, and major RAM and storage suppliers changing focus from the consumer market to the far more profitable datacenter (read as "LLM") market. Several such suppliers have exited the consumer space entirely. As any residential renter in San Francisco [1] can tell you, extremely limited supply drives price up to obscene levels.

[0] This shift in Intel's focus may or may not be related to Nvidia becoming the third- or fourth-largest Intel shareholder.

[1] ...or any other "hot" market with large, artificial barriers to entry...

Re: Memory has grown to nearly two-thirds of AI chip component costs

#447

Post by roenxi »

alexwwang wrote: post #415
noosphr wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should work in the Central African Republic coltan mines if you think anyone has a leg to stand on.

I am living in China and I think you cannot just talk with imagination.

And are you going to enlighten us? What is life like working in a Chinese mine?

Re: Memory has grown to nearly two-thirds of AI chip component costs

#448

Post by 55555 »

alexwwang wrote: post #415
noosphr wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should work in the Central African Republic coltan mines if you think anyone has a leg to stand on.

I am living in China and I think you cannot just talk with imagination.

I manufacture/buy electronics in Shenzhen and have visited my factories. They seemed fine to me.

Re: Memory has grown to nearly two-thirds of AI chip component costs

#449

Post by roenxi »

CGMthrowaway wrote: post #251
tooltalk wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is wrong. It is NOT in their nature to keep the market under-supplied -- eg, Samsung, the industry's largest company, was notorious for expanding their capacity during the industry downturn to gain market share while everyone else was cutting back to minimize loss. I'm guessing you are also probably unfamiliar with the terms like "chicken game" which refers to the cutthroat, high-stakes price wars where dominant…

You're making the point for him. Undersupply in a boom, store cash to ramp up capacity in a downturn. Presevres capital and avoids overcapacity during the turning

This sounds like a plan to sell less when prices are high and more when prices are low. That is one of the stupidest strategies a company could adopt. I assure you, the RAM makers are pumping out as much as they can and increasing capacity as fast as they think the market can handle.

I'm not sure what world we live in when the scheming capitalists are all hunched around their table working out how to dodge selling their products into an enormous price boom. Do they not like money all of a sudden?

Re: Memory has grown to nearly two-thirds of AI chip component costs

#450

Post by roenxi »

array_key_first wrote: post #203
KeplerBoy wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are trillions to be made. That moat won't be as insurmountable in hindsight.

There really aren't though. The reason there's only three is because memory is a commodity and margins are historically very low. It's not a very good business to be in, generally. In the past when memory supply was short and then rebounded, many companies went out of business because making memory was no longer profitable.

And margins will continue to be low, otherwise they'll discover they don't have a moat. Commodity markets being competitive is a self fulfilling prophecy.

The companies have two choices. They either produce RAM cheaply and in large quantities, or they get replaced by someone who will produce RAM cheaply and in large quantities. Current incumbents are free to pick which of those two scenarios they prefer.

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