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> these memory makers have learned a very particular lesson from the unforgiving history [deep drops in demand] of their industry: always leave demand unmet
I can't blame them for keeping some reserve demand ready so they keep having customers over the years.
Just consider that a chat application today takes more memory than a full 3D game with thousands of users (including chat) + the operating system used to ~20 years ago. If 128 GB of RAM were the norm then there's a chance we might expect to buy 128 GB of RAM too.
But I suppose it's really a question of how many dollars we expect to spend on memory rather than the specific amounts of memory.
One cannot simply "flood the market" or the Chinese would have done it ages ago.
It's a gambler's ruin problem. Future profits are worth zero if you go out of business first.
Applications can be lazy and grow to the amount of resources using, but the real need for maximum ram is using it for these new purposes.
And then allow small low cost manufacturers to get the rest of the market... like China has been doing this whole time.
I’m pretty sure even an iPhone 11 chip is more powerful than a 2019 MacBook Pro CPU in ST. An iPhone 15 is more powerful than the fastest 2019 MacBook Pro Intel CPU in MT.
I suppose he can be using a 2019 MacBook Pro or older and an iPhone 14 or older and compares only MT speeds.
> 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 producing substandard and defective memory chips before your yields start to look competitive.
Extraordinarily complex and expensive! And yet I look at all the money being shuffled around between Nvidia and Google and Microsoft and Amazon and Apple and can't help but think that this is a tiny amount in comparison to what they're moving around on the stock market buying shares in each other.
Apple in particular has $20B in its couch cushions and is very vertically integrated and hardware-focused. Apple silicon is currently made by TSMC, but it seems they'd be a prime candidate to spin up their own memory fab.
I suppose the biggest problem to current executives at each company is the "few years" until that investment yields results, in the short term it's better to pay through the nose and buy GPUs with HBM at any price.
While Apple et al certainly have the money to tilt up their own fab, they're savvy enough to understand the memory market's long history of constant boom/bust cycles. I still remember the huge DRAM shortage in late 80s forcing my startup at the time to delay launching our new product for a year.
People assume Apple cares about vertically integrating cost but they're actually focused on integrating margin. Apple has billions in cash on hand and when they think about what to do with it, a key metric is Return on Capital, especially the margin that capital will generate. Since a core metric public companies are judged on is blended margin, they are looking for ways their bags o' cash can be put to work generating revenue at margins that will pull their current average margin up vs down.
Averaged over time, mainstream memory devices are historically one of the worst margin areas of the semi market. It's super expensive to tilt up a fab on a new node but once you do, turning the crank faster to make a lot more chips isn't too hard because mainstream DRAM tends to be quite uniform. So when a fab on a new node and/or RAM generation first opens, the margins tend to be pretty great. But as the node matures and/or the RAM generation goes from 'new' to 'commodity', competition heats up as everyone gets better at making more faster. Then they're tempted to maximize revenue by cutting prices until their mature fab is at 101% utilization. And that eventually drives margins down until someone's selling near cost to sustain their low-price-enabling volume - with occasional dips below cost when they get stuck holding excess inventory. That's why cash-rich companies with high margins like Apple are delighted to buy DRAM built with Other People's Money. As long as the DRAM market is under competitive pressure, Apple gets to shop their huge orders around to get the absolute lowest price on RAM that was built with other investor's low margin dollars.
That one was caused by manipulation by politicians, not market forces. Micron started a price war with Japanese memory manufacturers, the Japanese cut prices to compete, Micron sued them for "dumping". The saga ended with the 1986 U.S.–Japan Semiconductor Agreement, which, among other things, created production controls that limited the total dram supply. The level was set based on then current demand, and due to the rapid growth of demand at the time it almost instantly caused a massive global supply deficit.
The agreement also caused the rise of the South Korean memory industry, because the Japanese companies offloaded their now surplus equipment for cheap.
Funny how you then go on to explain it was market _actors_ that drove the politicians to act, but that this is nevertheless totally not an example of market _forces_.
But there's another key bottleneck. Even with all the money in the world, getting those machines that etch the RAM could be a multi year ration shop queue. And they're not making those companies every day!
Yes, except no DRAM maker is taking this as a signal to go deep into debt to double or triple capacity. It takes a minimum of 3+ years to dramatically increase capacity and no one expects this inflated demand bubble to last that long. Because they've seen this cycle before, they'll bump next gen capacity up a bit more than planned, maybe 15-25% because the current windfall profits are enough to build a buffer to absorb the hit if that excess capacity comes online in the next DRAM demand crash.
In the meantime, they'll just apologize to everyone for the "market conditions beyond our control" while banking as much of these crazy profits as they possibly can while it lasts. But deep down they remember they were starving just yesterday and know they'll be starving again tomorrow.
I understand why everyone's pissed at the "evil DRAM makers" but I also remember boasting about how I scored some crazy cheap RAM sticks not so long ago. None of us were shedding tears when they were selling at a loss just to survive.
Is it fair to conclude that DRAM is basically a commodity that can be specified well enough by a set of parameters?
If so it won’t allow you to get any competitive advantage in your products and thus wouldn’t be a business you want to be in as Apple.
You'd need a very strong, very particular forecast to make such a costly bet. And conversely, it may say something about their internal forecasts that they're not making the bet.
Idk if you can read into it that way.
All these companies have cafeterias but you don't see them investing into farmland so they can get their bananas a few cents cheaper.
But also why bother spending 20B on a fab when you can invest 20B into TSMC and let them build the fab?
Mainland China is one concern.
Another is AI being the commodity compliment to semiconductors.
It says they are no longer worried about being punished for monopolistic behavior and have bet a “ballroom donation” will exempt them from another round of punishment.
I feel like folks around here have already forgotten about the last time the memory suppliers quietly agreed to keep raising prices and stop competing with each other.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing_scandal
This is why China is eating the West. Quite easy to start an electronics company when you have such an abundance of suppliers, compare this to America where there is maybe one or two players in the entire nation.
Quite pathetic, but we live in a pathetic world so it tracks.
Nothing to do with cheap labour.
I think people are misled by Marx and derivatives, and misdiagnose the problem. I don't think people are upset by the CEO making lots of money as much as they are by the HBS management style of using people as a tool, or even as interchangeable "resources". However, the philosophical materialism of Marx & Co. pretty much makes this inevitable. (The secular view is also materialism, so you get it on both sides.)
You need capital to make pretty much anything. Somebody has to come up with a large amount of resources (money) put upfront into the venture. Capitalism creates the incentive for that - if the gamble pays off, then the investors get more value back. If it doesn't work out, then investors lose money. Most businesses fail early and do not provide a return for the investment.
The point of capitalism is to keep this system running. As a result of it we have made an ungodly amount of technological and quality of life improvements. Some people have become filthy rich from this, but typically they also provided the world with goods or services that people like and use. Tesla made Elon filthy rich, but it also made electric vehicles popular.
The people making profits are the ones providing food, shelter, and phones to you.
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.
Huge gamble - If they pull it off I wouldn't be surprised if other companies follow
>but it seems they'd be a prime candidate to spin up their own memory fab.
They will be the prime candidate to work with memory makers for additional capacity. Not to start their own one. Here is a $20B cheque and 5 years guarantee of orders. Go and make me some memory for his price.
I mean this is the same story for iPod and NAND. It seems we are repeating what we should have learned.
When you’re Apple and can build it with cash, and ram is currently so insane it saves you a decade of memory price gouging in a single year, the math changes quickly.
I wonder how long it REALLY took them to move from intel to apple silicon, which they don't even make.
It might be easy, like a consumer deciding to generate their own electricity (pv on the roof)
or it might be slightly harder, like a consumer deciding to generate their own electricity by drilling for oil, refining it, etc...
Apple has much, much more control over their silicon than they ever had with Intel.
With Intel, they were stuck with whatever Intel could supply - and that, particularly regarding power management, wasn't much.
In contrast, for ARM, Apple has been one of their longest-ever partners [1], with Apple holding one of the very rare and probably very expensive "Architecture Licenses" that allow Apple to not just build CPUs out of pre-made IP blocks, but also design their own cores and, and that is the crucial thing, extend the ARM instruction set on their CPUs.
The latter is what made the ARM move feasible, there would have been no way of getting high-performance emulation of x86 without a few specific extensions.
[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2023/09/06/apple-inks-new-deal-arm...
Nvidia sells all the stock, prices for GPUs moved up not down.
Companies like Apple don't want to be in every industry. Its risk, its cost, its expertise you need.
And sure you can throw money at it but you need people. Alone hiring all the experts is probalby not that easy. Who knows how to setup a DRam Factory?
It takes years to build this up
The amounts of money circulating whilst some of us struggle to make rent ...
Nothing fair, or just, about this world we live in
It may be expressed in terms of money, but these are assets and capital. You wouldn't find a fab a very comfortable or satisfying place to live.
The reason the numbers get so big is the gargantuan accumulated savings that are prepared to fund the similarly gargantuan ventures. The large numbers are supported by maintaining and sustaining the capitalized value by profitable investment and depreciation.
When you talk about rent, while it may be expressed in the same unit (money), the economic function played is very different. Here, it is consumption rather than saving/investment. If the dollar equivalent of all those assets went towards paying rent, while it would secure housing for some time, it would eventually become completely exhausted, and so too would housing security. Large pools of assets are simply not a way to get stable housing, it would only consume the large savings society has accumulated to be able to undergo those big ventures. It would be short-sighted and harm us in the future.
The cause and solution to rental instability is to be found in housing, building, and land policy that restricts the production of housing.
Man, we need a better term for this criticism.
The US right now is more harsh to live in than the US pre-Reagan, which was more harsh than many countries with a strong welfare state, but all of them are capitalistic.
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-inflicted problem...
Yeah, that one guy and 70% of the country https://www.yahoo.com/news/videos/70-americans-struggle-pay-...
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 been successful is distributing its wealth among many people, I'd say it's the authoritarianism, rather than the capitalism, that has been instrumental. The state sets agendas, quotas, and salaries specifically to produce that outcome. Top-down government control is not a feature of unbridled capitalism.
So we have two large industrializing economies, both capitalist. One (the authoritarian one) has succeeded in drastically reducing poverty; the other has not. And yet you think that capitalism is the driver of equality?
Capitalism produces wealth. You need some other system to distribute that wealth fairly.
The funny thing about this is that practically every single person in the US between the ages of 25-45 was an early adopter and a big fan for some (or all) of FAANG in the early days, and clearly saw the importance. The fact that they aren't filthy rich and far wealthier than older people tells a story. Not a story of lattes and avocados, but a story where housing and education costs guaranteed that as a group they couldn't save, never had a chance to invest, still can't invest. With certain adjustments the story isn't so different for much of the western world.. maybe education was cheap/free but their domestic labor market was weaker, whatever. They were and are still pretty much guaranteed to be on the outside. Luck, timing, and good connections are nice at any time, but the last few decades it's everything. In another timeline maybe wealthy youth is landlording it over the impoverished oldies, but in the best timeline we'd split the difference.
Even worse, it's a uniquely bad time to be smart and hardworking, because that's the type of attitude that could stick you with a lack of resilience at just the wrong time. People who've coasted may do much better than ones who are striving. Would you rather be a university grad with new debt right now, or be a certified HVAC tech for the last 5 years? If you were a mechanic, would you want to own the shop with loans to pay off in this economy and tariffs to deal with, or would you prefer to be a simple employee that can just bounce once the company goes under? I've met phd's who are delivering pizzas to make ends meet. Blue collar folks not only have better job security at the moment, but going back some years, if they got a mortgage at the right time and place with that stable job maybe they could do normal life stuff like kids, retirement one day.
What lessons do we think young people will take from all this? Nothing against anyone who is lucky, but a stubborn belief in mythical meritocracy or the legendary American dream is absolutely stone-cold crazy these days. There's just the insiders and the outsiders and there's not much rhyme or reason to any of it.
"In 1985, if you were a reasonably affluent American, the best computer that you could afford was the IBM PC AT. The PC AT would cost you about $6,000—$19,400 in 2026 dollars—and thus represented about a quarter of the median American’s annual income; and it ran on an Intel 80286 processor, capable of something like 900,000 instructions per second. Today, if you find yourself in a market stall in Nairobi or Lagos, you’ll be able to find a cheap smartphone—like the Tecno Spark Go, manufactured by China’s Transsion—for somewhere between $30 and $120. That phone will run on a processor capable of billions of calculations per second."
Please note that "commerce" and "capitalism" are not synonymous, and that the former does not imply the latter. Capitalism is in no way a prerequisite for technological development.
A third of the world lives in poverty. That's the fault of capitalism.
We all make different choices, and so have different consequences.
For example, I squandered the proceeds of a business deal on a new car. If I'd bought MSFT instead, I could have bought 100 new cars.
Besides, this can't work for everyone - if you get 100 cars without an equivalent amount of more work put in then someone else has to do that work without being properly compensated for it.
(hindsight stock picking is terrible!)
A lot of that is “weird money” created by the act of passing it around between the entities or “Holywood accounting” style money that exists when convenient and will vanish the instant it might be taxed or need to be extracted from the cycle to pay for something tangible. Trying to use a large amount of that money for tangible long-term building projects risks piercing the vail.
Even if you were nowhere near state of the art, being able to produce millions of your own cards every year at cost would save you a lot of money.
Frankly it’s ridiculous how we (the West) dropped renewables like a hot potato because it became synonymous with subsidizing China’s dominance in the field.
"The reason why RAM has become four times more expensive is that a huge amount of RAM that has not yet been produced was purchased with non-existent money to be installed in GPUs that also have not yet been produced, in order to place them in data centers that have not yet been built, powered by infrastructure that may never appear, to satisfy demand that does not actually exist and to obtain profit that is mathematically impossible."
You could literally rewrite the quote to be about iron and about building railroads for trains and passengers that don't exist yet. See how silly that would be?
Except the "profit that is mathematically impossible" part. That's just made up and false. It's entirely possible that we are actually underestimating demand, and there is going to be tons of profit. Nobody knows for sure, but profit is very, very, very possible.
Couldn't possibly happen with railroads!
https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2016/02/crisis...
JP Morgan says $650 billion in annual revenue required to deliver mere 10% return on AI buildout is equivalent to $35 payment from every iPhone user, or $180 from every Netflix subscriber 'in perpetuity.'
Very, very, very unlikely it makes profit, which why AI keeps getting overhyped by CEOs.
When you run the numbers, $65/mo turns AI investment into a a 5-7 ROI, which is totally within normal bounds.
Considering there are over a billion unique weekly active users for the major labs, and demand has been relentless, it's a pretty easy sell to get investors on board.
"You pay internet, you pay phone, you pay AI".
Was your point that owning the steel companies is the path to riches even when most of the railroads fail?
Who buys anything made by AI if he could do it by AI themselves?
Who can afford AI if their customers do with AI what they do?
Who creates the next man made code needed as training data to prevent model collapse?
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 electronics, which are absolutely essential to the modern economy.
Meanwhile the AI fad is seeing huge layoffs. At the same time as the AI Big Cos are beginning to show signs of ending the subsidised free lunch phase and moving to a utility model, which will raise prices for every company that is hooked on AI.
Also tariffs. Although I'm not sure if anyone knows what's happening there.
And farms are failing. Climate change will accelerate that, so there will be food shortages within a few years.
If it's not cynical and deliberate, it's an astounding confluence of (literally) catastrophic mismanagement.
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.
The world's most convenient virus.
Jobs at GE in Schenectady may not be what those developers are looking for even if they were qualified.
Step 1) Instigate price increases for temporary reasons, leading to noticeable price increases.
Step 2) As temporary reasons go away, increase money supply. Prices stay the same, you get to blame the causes from step (1) while not mentioning that the prices could have gone down when the problem went away, or blaming greedy companies for not lowering the prices.
This is the key one to watch out for. Prior food-based conflicts have sparked revolutions and civil wars. People can tolerate not having electricity, people can tolerate not having internet, people can tolerate not having gas.
But a lack of food, due to a wheat shortage which in turn was sparked by Siberian wildfires destroying a whole year's wheat crop in Russia, precipitated the Arab Spring and the subsequent civil wars, as well as the ascendancy of ISIS.
The climate is changing in a positive direction for farming. Farming is easier now than ever before. There's literally no chance of food shortages. Unless, of course, there's another attempt at building socialism.
It’s all such a clown show.
Oops, sorry, wrongthink, I mean "due to the war in the Middle East", even though a large majority of gas in the UK comes from elsewhere (gas and electricity prices in the UK are supposedly very tightly coupled ?)
The imported stuff you bought retail unfortunately won't be refunded (unless one of the current ongoing class action lawsuit will win).
If I did so when I first thought about it, I would be broke by now.
What about the RAM consumption trend of the last 10 years? I think it is very feasible to produce phones with the same amount of RAM as was the norm 10 years ago. The only compromise would be using older algorithms and features that consume less of it, and to take a bit of effort on keeping an eye on memory consumption in the development phase. There's a lot of opportunity. We can even leverage AI these days to optimize existing software for RAM usage.
Think of desktop, browser and electron applications. No way one can comfortable run modern software on 2015 machine. Maybe Linux could help, but anyway
My personal laptop is a ULV 6th gen i5 with 8GB of RAM. Gets the job done, slowly but usably. That's about 9 years old. It runs Ubuntu. A dozen or so Firefox tabs, Kicad, VS Code, Slack. Computer things.
I'm of the opinion that application developers should be given middle-tier consumer systems as work machines. The whole notion of "dogfooding" is "dog-something else" if your devs experience the product using different hardware from the customer.
I think it’s AV that makes the difference. The modern smartphone does a ton of processing on the image sensor, and the modern laptop is expected to output multiple 4k video signals (zoom camera + desktop sharing) while accepting multiple video signals, without dropping below 120hz.
RAM isn't the only reason to upgrade. CPU's are more efficient, screens are significantly better and support variable-refresh-rates (and high refresh rates), battery technology has not stood still: even if they didn't degrade over 10 years.
There's plenty of reasons to upgrade to a new system even if it has the same memory capacity on paper. The memory will probably be faster and lower voltage too.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopsony
Many of them orchestrated the situation.
the second part of the word just means purchase (in a weird ancient Greek tense). there's no relation to fish whatsoever.
(I'm Greek)
He had Claude essentially create a 300MB json file and was doing all of the data processing on that data directly.
It never occurred to him, or Claude, that there were other ways to operate on that data. It took me less than 10 minutes to get that processing time down to under a minute.
These are the type of issues that worry me about vibe coding.
Now, he makes small apps that scratch his own itches, while everything is fresh in his mind and he can clarify or learn “hmm, that’s not actually what I want” and the cost is some tokens and the occasional job that runs in 3 hours instead of not existing at all.
I think it is great that he now has this capability, but a total ignorance of software engineering is going to continually bite this type of user. Instead of questioning Claude's solution, my friend thought he just needed a faster computer.
He was also using very sketchy Python imports when much safer, more mature options are available. Not knowing that you shouldn't use just any random Python package is a ticking time bomb... especially when his machine is connected directly to his corporate intranet.
You could have done it with Claude in 1 minute :) It probably never occurred to the VP to ask Claude for performance optimizations
It has been a disturbing trend on TikTok to see all the livestreamers in the united states showing how to recover gold and metals from e-waste... it used to be an exceptionally dirty and low margin business only done by the world's poorest. Now it has become valuable enough, and the economic situation in the usa has deteriorated enough, that americans are doing it in their homes and backyards.
Poco X3 has excellent support for Ubuntu Touch, PostmarmetOS and LineageOS etc.
I think there's a reason that University of Michigan researcher jumped after that ferroelectric breakthrough.
I am hopeful that some of this massive pressure is going to push us into the next paradigm, which is likely some kind of "true" compute-in-memory system. That may increase performance and efficiency for AI by up to 100 X.
Thankfully my colleagues saw the value in what I was doing. I smuggled the optimization into my PR with their approval. Anecdotal, but there are still people who care about efficiency out there.
That being said, unless your manager is John Carmack, or you work in embedded systems, time spent on reducing memory footprints is seen as wasteful by the business.
I think that there is a way to change that.
If an application runs significantly better on lower end hardware while delivering the same results, the customers should prefer it. It is just a matter of promoting it that way.
MS Teams uses around 1000MB of RAM to do exactly the same things that Microsoft Messenger could do in 8MB.
It's haaard to do state machines.
As other commenters have pointed out but I might have missed in the article, compute maturation is amplifying memory constraints right now and making it worse. Device upgrade cycles are getting longer because most compute-based products have matured, with CPUs not seeing substantial gains and memory usage really only expanding at the absolute top end of workloads pre-LLMs (3D and HPC in particular). An iPhone 14 still has almost all the features of the iPhone 17, because the compute capabilities are remarkably similar; Geekbench shows a performance delta of ~25-30% between the 14 and 17 Pro Max models, which is pretty paltry considering the devices are separated by four years of manufacturing improvements. This extends into desktops, laptops, tablets, STBs, and more, with only VR devices and larger ARM/RISC-based kit seeing more substantial uplifts as general designs improve.
So with compute stagnating and memory constrained, my money is on vendors taking this as an opportunity to gradually shift away from a yearly release cadence and slow down to a biennial cycle that alternates between budget and flagship launches every other year. Even if LLMs fail spectacularly and all that memory capacity becomes available, HBM memory likely isn't to find its way into many consumer devices (just ask AMD how it worked out for them on consumer GCN GPUs).
The name of the game, especially for consumers, is efficiency - "potato builds", as I've been calling them. Software and services optimized for lower power, smaller-specced devices of increasing age instead of pandering to flagship devices with poorly optimized code or engines for the sake of new shinies (like Raytracing). Between the memory shortage, shifting geopolitics, rising costs, and stagnant wages, consumer purchasing power is going to be squeezed like a vice for the foreseeable future, and businesses will need to adapt around that reality.
Haven't they already proven to be extremely useful? In some areas they are definitely here to stay, coding/software and search (retrieve and summarize information). There's a bunch of places where they are surely shoehorned in, overhyped, and don't belong, but there's also equally many places where they might still be transformative but aren't used yet.
But overall I think the technology is well proven.
Besides, the marketplace is still in its infancy for LLMs, with a lot of unanswered questions. A lot of those questions surround the commercial viability of frontier models on bespoke hyperscaler data centers with limited usage outside of LLMs specifically should those economics be non-viable. Since that's where the memory is being tied up into, that means it's a critical question to answer in order to determine long-term investment needs into further memory fabrication.
Most certainly not. The accuracy issues mean that they can't really be used effectively for coding or search, the two things you mentioned.
For example, Apple might make fewer iPhone 18 and let it sell out frequently. They’ll use their RAM supplies mostly for the Pro phones.
I don’t think Apple will stop releasing new iPhone Pros every year. The business is too big.
Apple has a second option that may not be open to most other vendors - as they've just demonstrated with the MacBook Neo, they could cut the RAM in half on the budget models. One good cycle of optimising the hell out of their (almost entirely native) software stack, and iOS would once again sing on a 4GB SKU.
There's a lot of 'ifs' there to be sure, but they'd be fools not to at least discuss the possibility internally and understand their options.
Maybe it is time not just shrink transistors but also software bundles. I can see decades of possible progress hiding in plain sight behind a browser screen.
Making user space applications more memory efficient is not even going to be a rounding error on memory demand.
I am with you that it needs to happen, but it's not going to solve a memory shortage.
If the new memory is needed for AI data centers, it doesn't matter if your existing MacBook doesn't need as much memory anymore.
Any prediction on when it'll end? Can Chinese companies scale up to scare the big 3 into increasing capacity or lose price control?
The demand for AI simply doesn't exist at the real prices. It barely exists at the current subsidized rates - Microsoft, Google, Meta, Anthropic, OpenAI are spending hundreds of billions to make mere billions.
And then these data centers will be worthless, future ones won't get built, memory demand will evaporate on the spot.
At the moment you can pay $20/month to do thousands of expensive queries a month (involving file uploads, the Pro model, extended thinking), and evidence suggests that heavy users are not profitable.
But instead, all we get is known liars going on podcasts and repeating "stylized facts" that aren't literally true about their supposed profitability on inference, from companies losing billions per year in a situation where they don't have to tell the truth.
That is VERY far from a convincing argument that they are profitable. So I can & will safely conclude that the opposite is true.
And ram producers are betting on it, they will just milk the AI companies until they collapse.
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.
As a complete know nothing about the fab industry, I am always puzzled by this. Do the fabs need to be seasoned like an iron cast skillet or something?
There's a mysterious fab entity known as "the Recipe" - the product of long iterative dialing in of the fab's operating parameters. Of which there are a great many. A modern fab performs hundreds of manufacturing steps, with thousands of tweakable parameters, and they may interact in non-obvious ways to affect the outcomes. This is what's discovered and adjusted as the fab runs.
The difference between having the Recipe and not having the Recipe is the difference between 96% yield and 12% yield.
Changing the process (i.e. 4nm to 2nm) is the most sure way to lose the Recipe. The fab knowledge you spent months and years of engineering work discovering will no longer apply. But you can also lose the Recipe by replacing fab hardware, by changing the suppliers, by an act of god, and more.
My head annoyingly refuses to accept the non-deterministic outcomes when applied to electronics. In other disciplines, let's say bow or musical instrument making, you need to harvest the wood, age it, dry it, pray to a deity, work with its natural im/perfections etc, but this is "just" bits.
The unfortunate truth is, "bits" sit on a vast foundation of chemistry and physics pushed to their limits. It's a (mostly) deterministic subspace, carved carefully into the non-deterministic world with sheer effort and skill. This is why those fabs are so expensive and complex. Nature defied, reproducibly and at scale. Keeping the Crawling Chaos away one wafer at a time.
If one line is performing well, you can copy its parameters to another, as a starting point. It'll get you some of the way there. How far? Have fun with that. Those two lines, you see, are not the same exact line copied twice. The equipment is the same, but our "the same" is a short for "merely very similar". There are subtle differences. There always are. And some of them matter.
So, that's another way we are financing the LLM machine and the trillion-dollar valuations of those corporate behemoths.
my 2 cents
Presumably the supply of 5+ year old used phones that fully work is not enough to meet that demand, which is why these frankenstein Android companies exist.
For anyone who doesn’t follow the market closely, this is about a good a primer as you could hope for.
The current crunch and constrain in compute is great time to show once again some ingenuity. The lowest level of smartphones from couple of years ago have more computing power than XBOX 360. That should be enough to run Whatsapp smoothly.
From 2008 to around 2015, upgrading every two years could make a meaningful difference. From ~2015 to ~2020 upgrading every three years might be worth considering. I just upgraded my top of the line flagship after nearly six years. And I actually looked for compelling reasons to buy a new phone every year since 2023. There just weren't any.
Frankly, this latest flagship phone is pretty underwhelming. It's slightly faster at a few things. The battery lasts a little longer. The screen can get a little brighter. The camera is supposed to a little better. But those are just the claimed improvements. I haven't actually noticed any of them in daily use because they weren't issues with my 2020 flagship phone either. Otherwise, the new phone is almost exactly the same size, same weight, same resolution, same look and same capabilities. I only upgraded because I was long out of contract and it was a only a couple hundred bucks for a $1400 MSRP phone with a new contract and a trade-in of the old phone.
I was using an iPad Pro from late 2018 (mostly just for casual web browsing, reading documents and watching video on, I still do all my real work on laptop/desktops) as well until this year, and would have kept using it if I hadn't accidentally dropped it in water. I don't really notice much difference at all between my old one (when it worked) and the new iPad Air I replaced it with, except for the battery being a little better and having a bit more ram being nice (websites in background tabs are less likely to be purged from memory when I come back to them).
Maybe in that vein, one thing I wish phones would do to differentiate themselves is just add more sensors. I want my phone to be the tricorder from star trek. iPhones should have first party support for generating point clouds and measuring distances using lidar. Their microphones are probably already calibrated, why not expose that as a decibel meter. Same for light sensors. Phones used to have IR emitters, why not add those back in?
Also the iPhone still only has 240fps slow motion, I've found samsung's 960fps really useful in capturing transient phenomenon or even measuring mundane things like LED flicker.
Conversely the Pixel seems to be the only one shipping with an IR thermometer, and they'll probably remove it given most people don't seem to care. That's something I would've found useful in ad-hoc situations where I've had to make do with the back of my hand.
Air quality detection (especially pm2.5, CO2, and CO levels) would be great but I don't know if those sensors can be miniaturized enough to fit.
Second, the article doesn’t focus on phones we buy. There won’t be a shortage of those.
> We’re already at the point where marginal buyers in the poor world are getting priced out of the smartphone market. We’re rapidly approaching the point where buyers in the rich world feel the same thing.
So it predicts that phones we buy are next.
1. High-resolution screen, finally approaching paper (600dpi) 2. High-refresh rate screen, up to 240 fps. Once you see 60 fps, you are already hooked, and 240 is just mind-blowing. 3. High-resolution camera, 50 Mpx means that the camera actually starts to match paper (600dpi) 4. Slo-mo camera (240 fps) to match the screen. 5. Decent memory sizes. On my recent 24 Gb size memory I can actually run multiple apps in parallel, and they are not getting killed. You see, using all available memory is a competitive strategy for app developers -- when they use all the memory, their competitors are evicted from RAM and the user is less likely to receive notifications. 6. Decent sdcard size (1Tb). Same reason for the storage. App manufacturers are trying to use all available space, so that you would delete the competitor's apps in order to keep using theirs. 7. HDMI over USB -- finally you can connect a keyboard and a monitor, and get rid of your laptop, just use one device for everything.
I hate it that we had decades of progress to have computers become a very expensive hobby because some dudes high on fentanyl think some text prediction model that destroys the planet is worth a trillion dollars.
China has an advantage here, once domestic DRAM production finally gets going. DRAM policy can be set strategically. China's economic planners may choose to provide DRAM to domestic manufacturers rather than export parts, even if exporting parts would be more profitable in the near term. That's already being done in raw materials. Conversely, if external suppliers have lower prices, there may be a policy decision to buy domestically to keep the domestic manufacturers going. Done with the goal of leveling production, this can work. Done stupidly, it becomes a money drain, of course.
Probably China controls the DRAM market around 2030 or so.
I have a 14900KS, a CPU from 2 years ago and is still amongst the strongest in benchmarks like Cinebench. And 128 GB DDR4 RAM. I feel like I can wait a few more years to upgrade.
>In 1985, if you were a reasonably affluent American, the best computer that you could afford was the IBM PC AT. The PC AT would cost you about $6,000—$19,400 in 2026 dollars—and thus represented about a quarter of the median American’s annual income;
In early 1980s a PC AT was SOTA. I guess that if you buy a SOTA computer today it might cost you close to $19,400.
My 4090 and 12900k are gonna have to last till 2029 at this rate won’t they…
I've heard that is happening for motherboards.
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.
Pics:https://duckduckgo.com/?ia=images&origin=funnel_home_website...
Two other underappreciated handset brands are Doogee and Blackview. Gorgeous devices and solidly built. From what I recall they're friendly to root.