51–60 of 107 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right! Raw wafers, not even memory. I have seen no evidence that this move was anything but a means of taking product out of the global supply chain.
That's correct and a good point I almost forgot about - they can't even utilize what they bought!
One of the things I’ve been hoping for every time a new EC2 instance comes out is for them to unpin the memory:core ratio a bit. I don’t expect they have enough r# and c# users to completely balance things out so what they’re really doing is selling people more CPUs to get the memory they need. It would be nice if it were creeping up generation to generation. But if this keeps up I fear the opposite.
The best way of "unpinning" those ratios for many ephemeral workloads is to use Lambda/FaaS, not EC2.
I see this as a competitive opportunity for Apple. If Apple smartphone specs improve while Androids stagnate it could create more iOS users. The promised AI metaverse is still a long way off and in the meantime people still want the best smartphone.
How is it an opportunity for Apple? They are a customer of Samsung and Micron RAM modules just like everyone else is. They aren't in any unique position other than their user base is already used to paying extreme markup for RAM. Now whether Apple just eats the cost in their profit margin or charges even more for RAM remains to be seen.
"However, this is not just a cyclical shortage driven by a mismatch in supply and demand, but a potentially permanent, strategic reallocation of the world’s silicon wafer capacity. [...] This is a zero-sum game: every wafer allocated to an HBM stack for an Nvidia GPU is a wafer denied to the LPDDR5X module of a mid-range smartphone or the SSD of a consumer laptop." I wonder if this will result in writing more memory-…
What do you mean it can't continue? You'll just have to deal with worse performance is all.
Revolutionary consumer-side performance gains like multi-core CPUs and switching to SSDs will be a thing of distant past. Enjoy your 2 second animations, peasant.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right! Raw wafers, not even memory. I have seen no evidence that this move was anything but a means of taking product out of the global supply chain.
That's correct and a good point I almost forgot about - they can't even utilize what they bought!
"However, this is not just a cyclical shortage driven by a mismatch in supply and demand, but a potentially permanent, strategic reallocation of the world’s silicon wafer capacity. [...] This is a zero-sum game: every wafer allocated to an HBM stack for an Nvidia GPU is a wafer denied to the LPDDR5X module of a mid-range smartphone or the SSD of a consumer laptop." I wonder if this will result in writing more memory-…
Article completely misses the true cause of the price increase - Sam Altman/OAI made a deal with Samsung and SK Hynix get 40% of their RAM wafer production for the 2026 period. This was economic warfare against OpenAI's competitors, and the competitors along with the data centers responded by buying up every bit of DDR5 in sight. This price increase was engineered. The deal was inked on October 1, 2025, and rumors of…
Doesn't Apple routinely do the same thing? Reserve chip production for the leading-edge nodes, and sometimes enter into similar deals for other tech such as displays? I'm not seeing any evidence that this was intentional "warfare" on OpenAI's part: they're just making a high-stakes bet that they can ultimately find a better and higher-margin use for that raw DRAM than HNers' gaming battlestations, or whatever the nex…
The wafers are not DRAM. This is more likely burning oil wells so your enemy can't use them. Wafers are to chips what steel blanks are to engines. You basically need clean rooms just to accept delivery and entire fabs to do anything. Someone who doesn't own a fab buying the wafers is essentially buying them to destroy them.
"However, this is not just a cyclical shortage driven by a mismatch in supply and demand, but a potentially permanent, strategic reallocation of the world’s silicon wafer capacity. [...] This is a zero-sum game: every wafer allocated to an HBM stack for an Nvidia GPU is a wafer denied to the LPDDR5X module of a mid-range smartphone or the SSD of a consumer laptop." I wonder if this will result in writing more memory-…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have no idea how much RAM my phone has. And if you think that somebody buys an iPhone because they compare the specs with Android :)))))
The competitive advantage comes from Apple having the supply chain contracts in place to not be affected by the 2026 price hike as much. The Android phones will be more expensive and thus will capture less market share.
"What do you mean my status flagship iPhone costs only half as much as a flagship Android???"
"However, this is not just a cyclical shortage driven by a mismatch in supply and demand, but a potentially permanent, strategic reallocation of the world’s silicon wafer capacity. [...] This is a zero-sum game: every wafer allocated to an HBM stack for an Nvidia GPU is a wafer denied to the LPDDR5X module of a mid-range smartphone or the SSD of a consumer laptop." I wonder if this will result in writing more memory-…
There's plenty of scope for local AI models to become more efficient, too. MoE doesn't need too much RAM: only the parameters for experts that are active at any given time truly need to be in memory, the rest can be in read-only storage and be fetched on demand. If you're doing CPU inference this can even be managed automatically by mmap, whereas loading params into VRAM must currently be managed as part of running a…