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The RAM shortage could last years

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Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#91

Post by AnthonyMouse »

moffkalast wrote: post #18
stuxnet79 wrote: post #11

Ok so Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron do not have the capacity to meet demand. Also, what little capacity they do have they are allocating to HBM over DRAM. Based on my limited knowledge HBM can not be easily repurposed for consumer electronics. Translation: main street is cooked for the next 3-4 years. It doesn't stop there though. OpenAI is currently mired in a capital crunch. Their last round just about sucked all th…

Memory makers did get themselves into this situation by selling all wafers for empty promises and alienating everyone but OpenAI tbh. I do hope they end up holding the bag once again, cause after covid and the cartel thing they don't seem to ever learn their lesson on how to have the tiniest amount of integrity.

> Memory makers did get themselves into this situation by selling all wafers for empty promises and alienating everyone but OpenAI tbh.

Wasn't the problem here that OpenAI was negotiating with Samsung and SK Hynix at the same time without the other one knowing about it? People only realized the implications when they announced both deals at once.

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#92

Post by jmyeet »

This is simple extrapolation from current demand, nothing more. And that's a borderline silly analysis because it assumes the AI bubble won't burst. The great misadventure in the Persian Gulf probably accelerates that because we're almost certainly going to be facing a recession.

Another thing I've been thinking about is what happens when the next generation of NVidia chips comes out? I suspect NVidia is going to delay this to milk the current demand but at some point you'll be able to buy something that's better than the H100 or B200 or whatever the current state-of-the-art for half the price. And what's that going to do to the trillions in AI DC investment?

I'm interested when the next bump in DRAM chip density is coming. That's going to change things although it seems like much of production has moved from consumer DRAM chips to HBM chips. So maybe that won't help at all.

I do think that companies will start seeing little ot no return from billions spent on AI and that's going to be aproblem. I also think that the hudnreds of billions of capital expenditure of OpenAI is going to come crashing down as there just isn't any even theoretical future revenue that can pay for all that.

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#93

Post by mrbuttons454 »

cco wrote: post #50
torginus wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Radeon VII came out in 2019 as a $700 consumer GPU with an 1TB/s HBM2 memory subsystem which is more than any consumer GPU you can get today, including the high-end ones afaik. At that point in time, there was a whole lineup of AMD GPUs with HBM going down into the midrange. If they could make this stuff and sell it to regular people a decade ago for very palatable prices, why do they come up with the idea that t…

That card only had 16GB of memory; its memory bandwidth was 1TB/s.

The Pro variant had 32GB, I had one in a 2019 Mac Pro

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#94

Post by AnthonyMouse »

DoctorOetker wrote: post #69
VladStanimir wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think its from the ML collapse FUD, its most likely from the multiple time's in the past when they overbuilt and it resulted in a memory oversupply and price collapses. The 1985–1988, 1993–1994, 1998–2002 and the post pandemic oversupply. These were all cases where shortages followed by over corrections caused oversupply, financial losses due to low prices and fewer surviving companies. I think they're taking…

its not like all the RAM is passing the same machine, they can gradually increase machines and observe the change in demand, and smoothly match it.

If they gradually increase production capacity then prices stay high for 10+ years (or for as long as it takes for demand to crash) because a gradual increase in production takes that long for them to add enough capacity for current demand.

If they add enough capacity to meet current demand quickly then if demand crashes they still have billions of dollars in loans used to build capacity for demand that no longer exists and then they go bankrupt.

The biggest problem is predicting future demand, because it often declines quickly rather than gradually.

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#95

Post by platevoltage »

torginus wrote: post #42
stuxnet79 wrote: post #11

Ok so Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron do not have the capacity to meet demand. Also, what little capacity they do have they are allocating to HBM over DRAM. Based on my limited knowledge HBM can not be easily repurposed for consumer electronics. Translation: main street is cooked for the next 3-4 years. It doesn't stop there though. OpenAI is currently mired in a capital crunch. Their last round just about sucked all th…

The Radeon VII came out in 2019 as a $700 consumer GPU with an 1TB/s HBM2 memory subsystem which is more than any consumer GPU you can get today, including the high-end ones afaik. At that point in time, there was a whole lineup of AMD GPUs with HBM going down into the midrange. If they could make this stuff and sell it to regular people a decade ago for very palatable prices, why do they come up with the idea that t…

I was gonna say, I still use an AMD Vega that uses HBM2.

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#97

Post by platevoltage »

kubb wrote: post #24
stuxnet79 wrote: post #11

Ok so Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron do not have the capacity to meet demand. Also, what little capacity they do have they are allocating to HBM over DRAM. Based on my limited knowledge HBM can not be easily repurposed for consumer electronics. Translation: main street is cooked for the next 3-4 years. It doesn't stop there though. OpenAI is currently mired in a capital crunch. Their last round just about sucked all th…

I would expect that OpenAI gets as much money as they ask for for the next 10 years. There’s virtually infinite capital: if needed, more can be reallocated from the federal government (funded with debt), from public companies (funded with people’s retirement funds), from people’s pockets via wealth redistribution upwards, from offshore investment. They will be allowed to strangle any part of the supply chain they wan…

I'm guessing they become pets.com within the year. At least I hope.

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#98

Post by HerbManic »

torginus wrote: post #42
stuxnet79 wrote: post #11

Ok so Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron do not have the capacity to meet demand. Also, what little capacity they do have they are allocating to HBM over DRAM. Based on my limited knowledge HBM can not be easily repurposed for consumer electronics. Translation: main street is cooked for the next 3-4 years. It doesn't stop there though. OpenAI is currently mired in a capital crunch. Their last round just about sucked all th…

The Radeon VII came out in 2019 as a $700 consumer GPU with an 1TB/s HBM2 memory subsystem which is more than any consumer GPU you can get today, including the high-end ones afaik. At that point in time, there was a whole lineup of AMD GPUs with HBM going down into the midrange. If they could make this stuff and sell it to regular people a decade ago for very palatable prices, why do they come up with the idea that t…

I have been wondering this recently. It was the convention that if you wanted to keep costs down, try to keep the memory bus size down as low as possible. Still remember the awful Radeon 9200 SE - 64bit data bus that strangled an already slow GPU.

Heck, I have a phone with a 16bit memory bus for instance. The high(ish) clock rate only makes up the difference slightly.

But with general prices on all components going up, it might not be such a big factor any more.

HBM migght make sense for higher end products which can free up space for the lower end that will never use the tech.

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#99

Post by HerbManic »

tim-projects wrote: post #5

The era of optimisation is finally here. I'm excited.

I said it for many years that OS developers need to focus on over optimisations. If it wasnt a chip sgortage it would be the ever slowing progress on chip scaling.

But software optimisation helps all hardware and that doesnt drive sales.

Linux however, they dont have to worry about that. Maybe it is finally the era of Haiku OS as the ghost of BeOS rises!

Re: The RAM shortage could last years

#100

Post by nullsanity »

nostrademons wrote: post #89
stuxnet79 wrote: post #11

Ok so Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron do not have the capacity to meet demand. Also, what little capacity they do have they are allocating to HBM over DRAM. Based on my limited knowledge HBM can not be easily repurposed for consumer electronics. Translation: main street is cooked for the next 3-4 years. It doesn't stop there though. OpenAI is currently mired in a capital crunch. Their last round just about sucked all th…

What kind of consumer electronics can you build with HBM? That's the startup you should be founding...

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