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Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

tomshardware.com

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Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#571

Post by vlovich123 »

arcfour wrote: post #457
vlovich123 wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a bold statement to make in the 21st century when nearly everything is run on computers, including cars, planes, hospital networks, etc etc.

Not really. They can get RAM just fine, and delay upgrade/refresh cycles to stretch existing component lifecycle, which was already very long if they needed to.

They can get RAM at drastically more expensive rates. And not all critical applications have unlimited budgets to absorb the increase. It’s the reverse Jevon’s paradox.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#572

Post by scarab92 »

mcdeltat wrote: post #471
abeppu wrote: post #375

So the 1970s oil crisis caused a shift that included fuel efficiency rules. For like, the whole time I've been a software engineer, memory footprints of a lot of software have crept up, even when they aren't really doing more. The memory situation currently is a mess. But ... is it bad enough to get us to _change_ how we build?

It's even more hilarious because all along there has been this complaint, and then people have been like "no no who cares, features are important, dev time is important, just ship ship ship". And now memory is unaffordable and it takes 1GB RAM to display a plaintext file

The cost of producing memory IS low, and is continuing to fall.

It makes zero sense to rebase your mental model of the tradeoff between RAM versus developer time because of a temporary shortage.

In a few years time you’ll look silly for having wasted developer time on lowering BF memory consumption, while your built new features and waited for supply and demand to rebalance.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#573

Post by Pxtl »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #497
Pxtl wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On a macro level you're correct. On a micro level, I miss the pre-pandemic, pre-AI era before stuff got expensive, before Russia invaded Ukraine, before the Israel/Palestine strife went into overdrive, and before the US declared war on Iran, Canada, Greenland, and Minnesota.

Almost everything that is upsetting is you, is being intentionally shoved in front of your face to make you feel mad. You are being played. Your great-grandparents had like a 40% child mortality rate. You’ll be ok that some people around the world are fighting which has been a human constant throughout all of history.

Im not saying "it was better 100 years ago" I'm saying we're in a local dip in the upward curve and it was better like 7 years ago.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#574

Post by mcdeltat »

scarab92 wrote: post #572
mcdeltat wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's even more hilarious because all along there has been this complaint, and then people have been like "no no who cares, features are important, dev time is important, just ship ship ship". And now memory is unaffordable and it takes 1GB RAM to display a plaintext file

The cost of producing memory IS low, and is continuing to fall. It makes zero sense to rebase your mental model of the tradeoff between RAM versus developer time because of a temporary shortage. In a few years time you’ll look silly for having wasted developer time on lowering BF memory consumption, while your built new features and waited for supply and demand to rebalance.

Sure, and in the meantime, we become less efficient at doing legitimately useful tasks and more efficient at making rent seeking slop that collects money for the upper classes. The real fix is get rid of the 90% slop tech and put that to better use (including more efficient use of hardware)

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#575

Post by XorNot »

ncallaway wrote: post #562
XorNot wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes that would be my exact point.

Yes, "quickly" is obviously industry-dependent. If they were fabricating something extremely easy to manufacture, "quickly" might mean months-to-a-year. Fabricating something very complicated like memory "quickly" might mean years. That said, even though we might have to wait years for new supply to hit there market, we probably don't have to wait years to see signals of that. We will likely know that manufacturers a…

In the current environment unless people start decommissioning datacenters en masse supply will be locked up till the early 2030s IMO.

Even if you started a new fab today, it's 5 years till it comes online. The great hope here is that China's DDR5 yields represent a high reject rate of an enormous amount of new capacity that they'll dump into the market to get a sovereign capability in that area.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#576

Post by dijit »

Lucasoato wrote: post #504
abeppu wrote: post #375

So the 1970s oil crisis caused a shift that included fuel efficiency rules. For like, the whole time I've been a software engineer, memory footprints of a lot of software have crept up, even when they aren't really doing more. The memory situation currently is a mess. But ... is it bad enough to get us to _change_ how we build?

A hard hit on Google Chrome users for sure!

All browsers are memory hogs.

It's the price you pay for having an application delivery platform that also needs to be hugely sandboxed running one of the most difficult languages to run efficiently in such large amounts as so the plaintext minified versions are a dozen megabytes in size.

I don't envy browsers even slightly, peoples expectations of them are ludicrous.

The major problem is that nobody is genuinely looking at using more efficient languages, lessening the amount of required inefficient language use or gasp producing native applications. (which, is definitely an order of magnitude harder to produce, I'll grant).

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#577

Post by embedding-shape »

sheeshkebab wrote: post #570
embedding-shape wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When even the large AI labs that supposedly sit on (/with) the best of the best can't even ship native cross-platform desktop applications and instead ship some bloated Electron monsters, I'm not sure what kind of hope there is. The ones who were publishing lightweight apps continue to do so, the ones who didn't care, still don't care.

writing native gui code is atrocious, add to that llms being horrible with ui dev and you end up with with what you describe. but at least if we get more non-ui stuff written in more efficient languages there is going to be some benefit.

> writing native gui code is atrocious

Compared to what though? It's not nearly as horrible as it used to be, and you can do it fairly neatly today, and end up with something much better. Requires you to actually have skill and knowledge about there being other alternatives to Electron though, which seems like knowledge hard to come by these days.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#578

Post by 20after4 »

mcdeltat wrote: post #472
Schnitz wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or it’ll accelerate the push to the cloud even more making the client even thinner.

1. Make shit inefficient software for basic tasks 2. Say it's infeasible to have enough compute locally to do basic tasks 3. Force usage of centrally controlled, subscription-based cloud software. 4. Capitalism win???!

I think this is legitimately (at least part of) the motivation for cornering the supply and driving up the price.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#579

Post by carlosjobim »

pfdietz wrote: post #552
carlosjobim wrote: post #551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't find anything hard to defend about my argument. It origins in response to people arguing on the lines that the government should subsidize RAM because it is expensive. But it is not expensive for a customer unless they're getting a lot of it. My argument has been the same all through this thread, while hackers are arguing all over the place. The most absurd argument is that any consumer would need more than 8…

> I don't find anything hard to defend about my argument. Of course. Because "I need more than 8 GB of RAM" and "the government should subsidize Microsoft" are logically equivalent statements. If you're insane.

You have provoked yourself into a rage, because you didn't understand the arguments being made here. Whether you have the capacity to understand, I don't know. But I'll assume so, and explain:

1. Nobody has argued either for or against for the government to subsidize Microsoft.

2. However people are arguing that the government should subsidize RAM makers. And their extended argument for it is that people choose to purchase Microsoft Windows. A well known low quality product.

That's a very weak argument. If you choose to make bad decisions and use sub-par solutions when good solutions are readily available, that isn't something that the government should take to account when deciding on subsidies.

Re: Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months

#580

Post by Mawr »

Aditya_Garg wrote: post #304
dietr1ch wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People think that shorting is an easy way of getting rich when you think a stock will go down, but even if you know it will, getting the timing wrong on it is catastrophic as you'll get unbounded loses while the market fails to correct the issues you are betting against

OP is blatantly overconfident on his "prediction", so I called him out. Looks like I struck a nerve with some people.

No, you just don't understand what shorting is.
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