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The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

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Re: The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

#91

Post by rationalist »

hackyhacky wrote: post #88
rationalist wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You should really read a bit about the philosophy that you're arguing so vehemently for, apparently without knowing anything about it. You had a good comment until you wrote that. Don't lower your standards with stupid personal attacks. > The problem with capitalism is not that some people get rich and some people don't. The problem is that of an unfair playing field. I would love for things to be fair, but I grew…

> You had a good comment until you wrote that. Don't lower your standards with stupid personal attacks. I apoligize for judging you based on the things that you write. > Unless you can change the human characteristic of greed, the world will always be unfair. There is nothing wrong with greed or unfairness, to a degree. As I said in my previous comment, some personal characteristics will naturally lead to inequality…

> I apoligize for judging you based on the things that you write.

I apologize for thinking you were willing to have a decent conversation. I won't waste any more of your time.

Re: The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

#92

Post by F3nd0 »

hackyhacky wrote: post #77
KnuthIsGod wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China going capitalist ( while remaining authoritarian ) has helped lift 800 million out of desperate poverty. I hope that India too can emulate this in my lifetime. I was born in Kerala and would love to see Indians live in a country that is as wealthy per capita ( PPP adjusted ) as Singapore or failing that even as wealthy as the USA. Capitalism has it's problems. But you struggling with rent is entirely your self-…

> But you struggling with rent is entirely your problem... Who said anything about struggling with rent? Sounds like you a grasping for a straw man. > I hope that India too can emulate this in my lifetime I, too, hope the best things for the people of China and of India. But India, by any metric, is already a capitalist economy, where its wealth is concentrated in the hands of a very few. To the extent that China has…

> Who said anything about struggling with rent?

The person they replied to, in the very comment they replied to…?

> > > The amounts of money circulating whilst some of us struggle to make rent ...

Re: The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

#93

Post by platevoltage »

KnuthIsGod wrote: post #72
richforrester wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Literally the most overwhelming thought, reading this, is "man, capitalism is a mistake" The amounts of money circulating whilst some of us struggle to make rent ... Nothing fair, or just, about this world we live in

China going capitalist ( while remaining authoritarian ) has helped lift 800 million out of desperate poverty. I hope that India too can emulate this in my lifetime. I was born in Kerala and would love to see Indians live in a country that is as wealthy per capita ( PPP adjusted ) as Singapore or failing that even as wealthy as the USA. Capitalism has it's problems. But you struggling with rent is entirely your self-…

"while remaining authoritarian" implies that Authoritarianism is an exclusive trait of Communism, which is the most absurd thing I've ever heard. Use any Capitalist country with an Authoritarian leader as an example.

Re: The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

#94

Post by pibaker »

bdangubic wrote: post #58
7thpower wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Farms are failing where? More than usual?

they are not failing, our Socialist President provides billions in handouts for Farmers so they gonna be just fine

Handout for American farmers or Argentine ones?

Re: The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

#95

Post by phil21 »

rationalist wrote: post #36
ls612 wrote: post #21

I’m really wishing I had overbuilt my NAS last year. As it stands I feel lucky to have even built it at all given I bought all the parts in the last week of September. My 4090 and 12900k are gonna have to last till 2029 at this rate won’t they…

Won't processors come down in price because people are buying less of them because people are buying less computers because of higher RAM prices? I've heard that is happening for motherboards.

Processors are currently becoming the next bottleneck on the server component side of things. If consumer SKUs start seeing even less volume than they are today, manufacturers will simply produce more for the datacenter.

Certain popular AMD SKUS are already 120 days lead time and growing. If a vendor will talk to you at all.

I expect motherboards to get cheap until they get to be really expensive niche products should the current situation last a few more years. At least as we know them today as PC enthusiasts and/or prosumers. I could very much see that market evaporating entirely and moving towards large integrators instead. Gamers and such were already a rather small niche to begin with.

Right now the saving grace is a server board doesn’t look a whole lot different than a consumer board. But that may change significantly faster than anyone predicts should current trends with SoCs and the like continue. You may be in a place soon where you get to choose your CPU/RAM/storage at purchase time like you do with a MacBook today.

Re: The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

#96

Post by doodlebugging »

I appreciated the detailed breakdown of the memory crunch and how it will affect parts of the industry and consumers. Very good article.

I'm not one of those people who chases all the new great things. I wait until things wear out or become completely obsolete before upgrading. I just get comfortable doing things the same way every day and see no reason to waste money on SaaS shit or anything else wastes my time or money.

I think the memory shortage will present opportunities for those willing to take advantage of the situation. A lot of DRAM is going into GPUs for data centers in AI work. Those units have a limited lifetime online and they will be rotated out and replaced with new units as performance degrades. I think this will be a lot like Li-ion batteries in that many of these GPUs will be perfectly fine for home pcs or small business workstations or for other less intensive use cases and the RAM will be performant enough that a viable recycling industry should arise from this AI buildout.

Funny enough, one day the local AI noise-making, power-wasting, water-wasting data centers will be the best places to score high-tech components and many of us will have one right down the road. That should set a lot of people up as recyclers redistributing reconditioned components to those who build their own systems.

Re: The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

#97

Post by jurgenburgen »

mgh2 wrote: post #85
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #46

It's impressive that somehow, as if by coincidence, we're seeing the biggest inflationary drivers for decades, perhaps for centuries, all happening simultaneously. The Iran war is spiking the price of oil and will likely cause shortages of pretty much everything if it isn't ended. The Ukraine war is helping with that by destroying Russian refining capacity. The memory shortage is set to do the same to consumer electr…

Don't forget the threat of Ebola, hantavirus, Taiwan war

The Taiwan war that the world is sleepwalking into is going to wipe out so much chip capacity that the current inflation will look like a blip.

Re: The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

#98

Post by stouset »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #15

What was most surprising about all this to me was this line: > So modern DRAM manufacturing is an extraordinarily complex and expensive process. Building a single state-of-the-art DRAM fabrication facility, a “fab,” will cost you about $15 to $20 billion; acquiring all the necessary equipment, like lithography tools and etching machines, will cost you another few billion; and then it’ll take you a few years of produc…

While I think Apple is a prime candidate to do something like this financially, I’ve never had the impression that they ever want to get involved in something “just” for vertical efficiency. There’s always a long-term vision where they can leverage it to gain a competitive edge that their competitors can’t match (the PA Semi acquisition being a perfect example of this).

RAM doesn’t seem like something where simply owning the manufacturing could lead to a disproportionate competitive edge. It would just be a vertical efficiency gamble that may or may not pay off. Of course that could simply be a failure of my imagination.

Re: The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

#99

Post by threecheese »

mr_toad wrote: post #66
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #46

It's impressive that somehow, as if by coincidence, we're seeing the biggest inflationary drivers for decades, perhaps for centuries, all happening simultaneously. The Iran war is spiking the price of oil and will likely cause shortages of pretty much everything if it isn't ended. The Ukraine war is helping with that by destroying Russian refining capacity. The memory shortage is set to do the same to consumer electr…

> Meanwhile the AI fad is seeing huge layoffs. This is really the only point I disagree with. Layoffs are being blamed on AI, but they are really a hangover of the covid hiring boom, and subsequent bust. All the tech money is going into building data centres (and the gas turbines that power data centres), and it turns out that programmers don’t have the relevant skills to build gas turbines.

A few months ago I’d have been right there with you; however recently there have been a number of high profile multi-thousand-head layoffs attributed to budget pressure of deploying AI - and so technically it’s more of an indirect rather than “a robot stole my job” replacement, but still causal. Those tokens will be “doing” labor, rather than the human.

Re: The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

#100

Post by shimman »

prewett wrote: post #71
shimman wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should society care about people making profits? Society would greatly benefit from cheap abundant ram than FAANG shares going up. I'm kinda sick about only caring that some billionaire makes more money and would rather you know... actually improve conditions to better society. This is why China is eating the West. Quite easy to start an electronics company when you have such an abundance of suppliers, compare th…

Society should care about people making profits because otherwise those people do something else instead of providing goods and services. What happened in Communism is instructive on this point. Now if you want to argue that the pursuit of maximum profit as an end is a problem, there's a case to be made. The US had something like a marginal tax rate of 90% around the 1940s/1950s, if I recall correctly, and it obvious…

Call me crazy but society should care about giving people meaning, providing healthcare, and an education. You know the three things that lead to productive humans.

Notice in my comment I mention nothing about taxes? Maybe people are mislead about neoliberalism? All it has done was sell out American jobs, get civilians addicted to drugs, and manufactured a political class that cares about donations over material needs.

This is an economic system that isn't even 50 years old and you're already going with the Marx scare quotes as if US branded capitalism hasn't already killed 10s of millions of Americans in the pursuit of profit.

Let's not even peel back the founding of this nation, a colonial white slaver state with minority protections baked into the constitution to impede people's chances of progress with every life.

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