461–470 of 524 posts
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.
As an Indian, my quality of life would be improved more by the Indian state first figuring out how to make functional roads and garbage collection systems India needs to first figure out the absolute basics
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I bought 192GB of DDR3 a year ago for literally $60 ($5 a stick). It's about $22 a stick now, so more like $350 today. What on earth is _anybody_ doing with DDR3?
You could set up swap space on Intel Optane media, it'll be about the same performance as DDR3 and sells for ~$1/GB on the secondary market. Though it will be a lot more power hungry than Flash, let alone DRAM - so not suitable for all uses.
Optane is a technology I’m still mad never became mainstream. It would be particularly useful today when trying to run local models.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure they do. They all have money interests in this. They all want lower memory prices. Memory prices and shortages directly impact all of their profit margins and revenue.
They have other ways of getting what they want.
I find it deeply ironic, that iran has blocked helium supply- while it relies on AI created slopaganda to subvert its advesary. Its one of those afterwits of history.
A US soldier i know commented that the iranian ai slop is "scary and powerful".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
China is about to flood the market and prove this notion wrong. If there is demand they want to meet it with supply. But to your point, that is exactly how American companies like to play now. No one is stopping them from screwing over the consumer. I have a Micron near me and they are building another chip facility but we are years away still so I suspect China will beat them to the punch.
China wants a sovereign DRAM capacity. They're playing an entirely different game then the commercial suppliers in the West.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I struggle to think of a line of business as cyclical as DRAM, maybe like certain kinds of mining would be my only thought. The DRAM fabs have been on a roundabout for 40 years going from getting accused of price fixing and cartel behavior, to struggling to keep the lights on. And imo it's not really their fault, it's all the lead time of advanced semiconductors, combined with the commodity dynamics of oil. And the g…
> from getting accused of price fixing and cartel behavior "Accused" makes it sound like these things may still be up in the air, when they very much are not. I would choose instead the much clearer "A number of those involved in DRAM production have a proven history of cartel behavior and price fixing." For those who may not be familiar with some of the history in this area: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_…
For all I know, maybe they are dumb enough to try and actually coordinate again, my hunch would be no, or they've tried something new and inventive. Like Matt Levine talked about how so many landlords were using the same software to set prices, that one was pretty shady.
But it is interesting where it is popping up at the moment, like power transformers is another area. These companies have lived through these cycles before, and know there is no one to save them if they overleverage and get it wrong.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is one of the thing with consumer when they remember they brought it at the absolutely lowest price point when DRAM maker were bleeding money. Those are not normal pricing. Before the pricing collapse in early 2020, 96GB DDR5 would have cost about $450 to $500. And I will need to restate again the cost of DRAM hasn't really changed much in the past 20 years. Its price just goes up and down in cycles. So in reality…
> Its price just goes up and down in cycles. Historically the price has always trended downward. When I first got into computing $200 could buy you 128 MB (yes M) of ram. Really nice systems had 512 MB. That's obviously changed over the decades as process shrinks have lead to higher memory density. We should generally expect that ram will cheaper up and until the point where process shrinks stop happening. They've de…
Yes if you span into 40 years. But the spot price for DRAM floor was ~$2/GB in 2008 and touched that 2-3 times over the next 15 year. It wasn't until early 2020s it broke that into $1.
Process shrinks happen but majority of DRAM part can't be shrinked by process any more.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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...
The future is here now, it’s just not evenly distributed. China will mass produce something to the point that it is widely distributed. That is how China acts as a great equalizer on a global scale. Another way China is a great equalizer is their willingness to do business with anyone that can pay.
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.
During Mao/cultural revolution for all the bad, two good things were great focus on K-12 education and reducing religious fundamentalism (curbing religious powerhouses). Both of them are now biting India, alongwith standard problems of corruption that plague most poor democracies.
At least we have the CIA to blame on religious fundamentalism.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The memory makers will not expand demand drastically. It is in the nature of their business to keep the market under-supplied, otherwise the following oversupply will kill them. Instead, supply is just rerouted from less profitable segments such as mobile and personal computing.
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…