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PS5 now costs less than 64GB of DDR5 memory. RAM jumps to $600 due to shortage

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Re: PS5 now costs less than 64GB of DDR5 memory. RAM jumps to $600 due to shortage

#71

Post by testing22321 »

SirFatty wrote: post #39
timschmidt wrote: post #16

Potentially unpopular take: memory manufacturers have been operating on the margins of profitability for quite a while now. Their products are essentially an indistinguishable commodity. Memory from Samsung or Micron or another manufacturer may have slight differences in overclockability, but that matters little to folks who just want a stable system. Hopefully the shortage leads large purchasers to engage in long-te…

"memory manufacturers have been operating on the margins of profitability for quite a while now." The manufacturers are scumbags is more likely answer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing_scandal

You mean “capitalists”.

Maximizing profit is the only sane way to play a rigged game

Re: PS5 now costs less than 64GB of DDR5 memory. RAM jumps to $600 due to shortage

#72

Post by kabdib »

dboreham wrote: post #61
librasteve wrote: post #55

I used to sell 64kbit (yes, bit) DRAM at $7 in 1982. 1 year later was The memory business is a pure commodity and brutally cyclic. Big profit => build a fab => wait 2 years => oh shit, everyone else did it => dump units at below cost. Repeat.

Old enough here to remember Intel exiting the DRAM business.

Old enough here to remember Intel entering the DRAM business :-)

Re: PS5 now costs less than 64GB of DDR5 memory. RAM jumps to $600 due to shortage

#73

Post by HPsquared »

timschmidt wrote: post #56
caycep wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a sad trend for "the rest of us" and history in general. The economic boom of the 80's thru the 2010s has been a vast democratization of computation - hardware became more powerful and affordable, and algorithms (at least broadly if not individually) became more efficient. We all had supercomputers in our pockets. This AI movement seems to move things in the opposite direction, in that us plebeians have less and…

One can see it that way, granted. When I zoom all the way out, all of consumer computation has existed as sort of an addendum or ancillary organ to the big customers: government, large corporations, etc. All our beloved consumer tech started out as absurdly high priced niche stuff for them. We've been sold the overflow capacity and binned parts. And that seems to be a more-or-less natural consequence of large purchas…

Gaming drove the development of GPUs which led to the current AI boom. Smartphones drove small process nodes for power efficiency.

Re: PS5 now costs less than 64GB of DDR5 memory. RAM jumps to $600 due to shortage

#74

Post by timschmidt »

HPsquared wrote: post #73
timschmidt wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One can see it that way, granted. When I zoom all the way out, all of consumer computation has existed as sort of an addendum or ancillary organ to the big customers: government, large corporations, etc. All our beloved consumer tech started out as absurdly high priced niche stuff for them. We've been sold the overflow capacity and binned parts. And that seems to be a more-or-less natural consequence of large purchas…

Gaming drove the development of GPUs which led to the current AI boom. Smartphones drove small process nodes for power efficiency.

SGI and 3Dfx made high-end simulators for aerospace in the beginning. Gaming grew out of that. Even Intel's first GPU (the i740) came from GE Aerospace.

Re: PS5 now costs less than 64GB of DDR5 memory. RAM jumps to $600 due to shortage

#75

Post by j45 »

timschmidt wrote: post #16

Potentially unpopular take: memory manufacturers have been operating on the margins of profitability for quite a while now. Their products are essentially an indistinguishable commodity. Memory from Samsung or Micron or another manufacturer may have slight differences in overclockability, but that matters little to folks who just want a stable system. Hopefully the shortage leads large purchasers to engage in long-te…

Manufacturing is based on anticipating demand.

Unforseen things like the pandemic hurt profits.

Letting things go this unmanaged with a 3 year run way for AI demand seems a little hard to understand. In this case, not anticipating demand seems to creates more profit.

Re: PS5 now costs less than 64GB of DDR5 memory. RAM jumps to $600 due to shortage

#76

Post by HPsquared »

timschmidt wrote: post #50
SirFatty wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"memory manufacturers have been operating on the margins of profitability for quite a while now." The manufacturers are scumbags is more likely answer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing_scandal

I don't disagree per-se, but this is the sort of thing which happens when only a few businesses exist in a commodity market with high entry costs. IOW, it's not great, but it is predictable. See: Oil.

Looking forward to the "Organization of Processor-Etching Corporations".

Re: PS5 now costs less than 64GB of DDR5 memory. RAM jumps to $600 due to shortage

#77

Post by Aurornis »

timschmidt wrote: post #16

Potentially unpopular take: memory manufacturers have been operating on the margins of profitability for quite a while now. Their products are essentially an indistinguishable commodity. Memory from Samsung or Micron or another manufacturer may have slight differences in overclockability, but that matters little to folks who just want a stable system. Hopefully the shortage leads large purchasers to engage in long-te…

> Hopefully the shortage leads large purchasers to engage in long-term contracts with the memory manufacturers which give them the confidence to invest in new fabs and increased capacity.

Most DRAM is already purchased through contracts with manufacturers.

Manufacturers don't actually want too many extremely long term contracts because it would limit their ability to respond to market price changes.

Like most commodities, the price you see on places like Newegg follows the "spot price", meaning the price to purchase DRAM for shipment immediately. The big players don't buy their RAM through these channels, they arrange contracts with manufacturers.

The contracts with manufacturers will see higher prices in the future, but they're playing the long game and will try to delay or smooth out purchasing to minimize exposure to this spike.

> Additionally, we're likely to see Chinese fab'd DRAM now, which they've been attempting since the '70s but never been competitive at.

Companies like Samsung and SK Hynix have DRAM fabs in China already. This has been true for decades. You may have Chinese fab'd DRAM in the computer you're using right now.

Are you referring to complete home-grown DRAM designs? That, too, was already in the works.

Re: PS5 now costs less than 64GB of DDR5 memory. RAM jumps to $600 due to shortage

#78

Post by immibis »

caycep wrote: post #44
timschmidt wrote: post #16

Potentially unpopular take: memory manufacturers have been operating on the margins of profitability for quite a while now. Their products are essentially an indistinguishable commodity. Memory from Samsung or Micron or another manufacturer may have slight differences in overclockability, but that matters little to folks who just want a stable system. Hopefully the shortage leads large purchasers to engage in long-te…

It's a sad trend for "the rest of us" and history in general. The economic boom of the 80's thru the 2010s has been a vast democratization of computation - hardware became more powerful and affordable, and algorithms (at least broadly if not individually) became more efficient. We all had supercomputers in our pockets. This AI movement seems to move things in the opposite direction, in that us plebeians have less and…

It's not like you need 64GB to have "democratized computation". We used to have 64MB and that was plenty. Unfortunately, software got slower more quickly than hardware got quicker.

Re: PS5 now costs less than 64GB of DDR5 memory. RAM jumps to $600 due to shortage

#79

Post by retrac »

debo_ wrote: post #65

The oft-snickered-at "smuggling 3mb of hot RAM" line from Neuromancer may have been prophetic after all.

If you are a scifi author, it's a mistake to give any hard numbers in real-world units. You will, most likely, greatly underestimate. Even trying to greatly overestimate, you will underestimate.

Commander Data's specifications in the Star Trek TNG episode The Measure of a Man from 1989: 800 quadrillion bits of storage, computing at 60 trillion operations per second.

100 petabytes. That's a big machine. A very big machine. But supercomputers now have memories measured in petabytes.

They never used "bits" again in any Star Trek script. It was kiloquads and gigaquads from then on.

Re: PS5 now costs less than 64GB of DDR5 memory. RAM jumps to $600 due to shortage

#80

Post by somernd5678 »

timschmidt wrote: post #16

Potentially unpopular take: memory manufacturers have been operating on the margins of profitability for quite a while now. Their products are essentially an indistinguishable commodity. Memory from Samsung or Micron or another manufacturer may have slight differences in overclockability, but that matters little to folks who just want a stable system. Hopefully the shortage leads large purchasers to engage in long-te…

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