531–540 of 587 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Memory fab build out times are years not months. The existing ones already run 24/7. If these companies could pull more supply out of thin air they would, but they cannot.
Memory fabs take years to build, they cost a lot and there is no guarantee that the demand will stay as high years in the future. It's all very complex.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"It is probable" So RAM manufacturers will turn down company B's $2M offer for company A's $1M offer because company A "needed it more"? I'm actually done discussing this...
My comment is about B offering 2M when normally the price of that RAM was around 1M. Most probably B has a way to get > 2M value from that RAM.
In a bubble market where B has massive amounts of capital allocated to it in a way that will likely collapse in the future than it's very likely they will never recuperate the 2M they put in the RAM. Instead buyer A that would get at least 1M of usefulness if not more, gets far less, crippling their business. Then when B collapses a ton of RAM is dumped on the market for far less than 1M cratering the RAM providers business for years.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But if we learn anything from big corporations, they'll keep the difference as profits. IOW, Apple won't be lowering their prices.
Nope. Apple wants to maximize profits. They clearly make more at lower prices. Source: the fact that they had lower prices until they were forced to increase them. They will be hoping to return to a more optimal price point as soon as they can.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The situation may be even more different from fuel. The memory shortage may be just a first of such crisis to come - the shortage of anything related to AI/robotics (from electricity to materials needed to produce robots and for the robots to produce even more robots). I think we have a runaway situation - the more of AI/robots produced, the more is demand for such production. The difference from classic production/m…
This makes me think of Factorio. When you make a breakthrough like getting robots, what do you do with it? Use it to make more robot factories. But in the real world, haven't we got to see whether all this investment will pay off? What happens if it turns out people actually don't want to pay for this?
The companies go bankrupt their stuff is sold for pennies & investors loose their money.
The now super cheap stuff might get reused for something else, that is actually profitable. Or will just get dumped, like many unprofitable or never finished lines from the railway mania days.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Willing to enter a private trade with you if you're actually willing to put up the money
And who determines the price if there is no publicly traded market?
We can come up with a formula what "tanking financially in a few years" actually means
Let me know if you're interested in moving forward
So I went to the DDR4 aisle (similarly: wow!), and realized that I'm sitting on a gold-mine of reclaimed DDR4, from several 8th-10th-gen Intels (probably a few hundred gbs, total, mostly as 8gb modules).
Incredibly, this was all e-waste (given to me "if I took it all"). Eureka.
If anybody wants any DDR2/DDR3, I'm in SE Tennessee (and have even more of that... not worth too much, pay for shipping).
----
Anybody shopping for RTX 5050 or 5060 (for new OEM, 8GB both, non-Ti), WalMart has the best prices (probably hasn't recalibrated recently?), beating Microcenter by $85 and $115, respectively. I ended up getting a 5070Ti from MicroCenter (for a great price; my local WalMart does not carry this xx70Ti version), so the trip wasn't wasted.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The situation may be even more different from fuel. The memory shortage may be just a first of such crisis to come - the shortage of anything related to AI/robotics (from electricity to materials needed to produce robots and for the robots to produce even more robots). I think we have a runaway situation - the more of AI/robots produced, the more is demand for such production. The difference from classic production/m…
This makes me think of Factorio. When you make a breakthrough like getting robots, what do you do with it? Use it to make more robot factories. But in the real world, haven't we got to see whether all this investment will pay off? What happens if it turns out people actually don't want to pay for this?
Once everyone has to pay enough for the usage to just break even, it's going to be a shitshow. And what's worse, they'll have to make up for all the debt they're accumulating now, so even pricier.
Basically, individuals will only stay at the current massive discount. Corporations that are paying token costs right now are dialing back as they realize it's not worth the expense.
We are going to have an AI crash, and the only thing left are going to be the efficient on-device or local models, which are already starting to bridge the gap.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> or just an excuse to fleece regular buyers In a market with healthy competition (no collusion), this generally can't happen. Every single vendor is incentivized to lower their prices slightly at all times, with a floor at cost plus margin.
why plus margin? the floor is cost
I wonder if supply chain constraints currently represent an inherent scepticism of manufacturers that demand will last. It feels to me like a side effect of the self-dealing / incestuous financing that is going on is that manufacturers are not willing to bet on it all materialising and therefore are not scaling up capacity nearly as much as they would if they thought it was certain.
It's funny you mention that because this exact same issue has come up in war in Iran and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. What a producer will do now is hedge their risk. They do this by forward-selling their product, in this case oil from an oil well. The peak for spot prices, depending on the particular flavor of oil, peaked at >$170/barrel while future prices (which are the prices we see) didn't really get abo…
Nobody is "switching" old process node fabs to new processes, they just aren't building new fabs for old processes.
AI and high density tasks will use memory fabricated with newer processes, freeing the old supply for more elastic, price-sensitive tasks.
The vast majority of memory that has price impacts for most consumers isn't in personal computers, it's in embedded applications that were also impacted by the overall squeeze.