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Potentially unpopular take: memory manufacturers have been operating on the margins of profitability for quite a while now. Their products are essentially an i
by timschmidt 11mo ago
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-term contracts with the memory manufacturers which give them the confidence to invest in new fabs and increased capacity. That would be great for everyone. Additionally, we're likely to see Chinese fab'd DRAM now, which they've been attempting since the '70s but never been competitive at. With these margins, any new manufacturer could gain a foothold.
If LLMs' utility continues to scale with size (which seems likely as we begin training embodied AI on a massive influx of robotic sensor data) then it will continue to gobble up memory for the near future. We may need both increased production capacity _and_ a period of more efficient software development techniques as was the case when a new 512kb upgrade cost $1,000.
- wkat4242 11mo agoWell, what really prompted this crisis is AI, as well as Samsung shutting down some production (and I have to say I don't think they mind that the pricing has skyrocketed as a result!) But yes we're going to need more fabs for sure
- embedding-shape 11mo ago> Well, what really prompted this crisis is AI, If the shortage of RAM is because of AI (so servers/data centers I presume?), wouldn't that mean the shortage should be localized to RDIMM rather than the much more common UDIMM that most gaming PCs use? But it seems to me like the pricing is going up more for UDIMM than RDIMM.
- bradfa 11mo agoBecause manufacturers transitioned fab and assembly lines from low margin dram to higher margin products like hbm, hence reducing dram supply. But the demand for consumer grade dram hasn’t changed much so prices for it go up.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- dboreham 11mo agoSame chips in both, made in the same fabs. Any relative price difference is like the difference between regular and premium gas/petrol.
- dylan604 11mo agowait, are you saying that there's no difference between regular and premium gas?
- timschmidt 11mo agoThis may surprise you, but gas stations typically only have two grades of fuel stored in tanks. Mid-grade gas is mixed at the pump from the other two.
- PunchyHamster 11mo agono, but made in same place with mostly same ingredients, just different ratio to hit higher octane (and in some cases some extra additives). Also vary a bit between winter a summer, basically in winter they can get away with putting a bit more volatile compounds coz it's colder
- MichaelNolan 11mo agoThe “regular” and “premium” label at the pump is misleading. The premium gas isn’t better. It’s just different. Unless your car specifically requires higher octane fuel, there is no benefit to paying for it. https://www.kbb.com/car-advice/gasoline-guide/ https://www.kbb.com/car-advice/gasoline-guide/
- throwaway48476 11mo agoYou get slightly better mpg on premium, just not enough to justify the cost.
- addaon 11mo agoNot unless you’re adjusting timing. Premium gas has lower energy per unit mass and per unit volume than standard gas.
- wmf 11mo agoUDIMM and RDIMM use the same DRAM chips. And my understanding is that the fabs can switch between DDR5, LPDDR5, and maybe HBM as needed. This means high demand for one type can create a shortage of the others.
- embedding-shape 11mo ago> This means high demand for one type can create a shortage of the others. Wouldn't that mean that a shortage of DRAM chips should cause price difference in all of them? Not sure that'd explain why RDIMM prices aren't raising as sharply as UDIMM. That the fab and assembly lines have transitioned into making other stuff makes sense why'd there be a difference though, as bradfa mentioned in their reply.
- Aurornis 11mo agoIt's a valid question if you're not familiar with the RAM market. Sorry you're getting downvoted for it. The manufacturers make the individual chips, not the modules (DIMMs). (EDIT: Some companies that make chips may also have business units that sell DIMMS, to be pedantic.) The R in RDIMM means register, aka buffer. It's a separate chip that buffers the signals between the memory chips and the controller. Even ECC modules use regular memory chips, but with extra chips added for the ECC capacity. It can be confusing. The key thing to remember is that the price is driven by the price of the chips. The companies that make DIMMs are buying chips in bulk and integrating them on to PCBs.
- consp 11mo ago> Even ECC modules use regular memory chips, but with extra chips added for the ECC capacity. Quite a few unbuffered designs in the past had a "missing chip". If you ever wondered why a chip was missing on your stick, it's missing ECC. Don't know if it's still the case with DDR5 though.
- buildbot 11mo agoI have not seen that yet DDR5, I think the signal integrity requirements are too high now to even have unused pads open. Most sticks don’t appear to have many traces at all on the top/bottom sides, just big power/ground planes. Also with DDR5 each stick is actually 2 channels so you get 2 extra dies.
- PunchyHamster 11mo agoThe chips come from same factory. And difference betweeen those two is... a buffer chip. And extra ram die for ECC
- SirFatty 11mo ago"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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing_scandal
- timschmidt 11mo agoI 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.
- HPsquared 11mo agoLooking forward to the "Organization of Processor-Etching Corporations".
- venturecruelty 11mo agoIt's not just predictable, it's illegal. Of course, if you have an executive that actually cares about enforcing the law.
- marcosdumay 11mo agoIt's usually not only illegal, but also a crime. Anyway, that's the kind of market that governments always need to act upon and either supply directly or regulate intensively.
- testing22321 11mo agoYou mean “capitalists”. Maximizing profit is the only sane way to play a rigged game
- golem14 11mo agoI wonder how long it will take for China to flood the market with state-of-the-art modules. It's a pretty decent opportunity for them. They probably can hasten the build of new fabs more than many other nations. But my guess is that this shortage is short-lived (mostly because of the threat above). There's no OPEC for tech.
- caycep 11mo agoIt'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 less access to RAM, computing power and food and...uh...GPUs to play Cyberpunk; and are dependent on Altermanic aristocracy to dribble compute onto us at their leisure and for a hefty tithe. I am hoping some of that Clayton Christensen disruption the tech theocracy keep preaching about comes along with some O(N) decrease in transformer/cDNN complexity that disrupts the massive server farms required for this AI boom/bubble thing.
- timschmidt 11mo agoOne 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 purchasers signing large checks and entering predictable contracts. Individual consumers are very price sensitive and fickle by comparison. From that perspective, anything that increases overall capacity should also increase the supply of binned parts and overflow. Which will eventually benefit consumers. Though the intervening market adjustment period may be painful (as we are seeing). Consumers have also benefited greatly from the shrinking of component sizes, as this has had the effect of increasing production capacity with fixed wafer volume.
- HPsquared 11mo agoGaming drove the development of GPUs which led to the current AI boom. Smartphones drove small process nodes for power efficiency.
- timschmidt 11mo agoSGI 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.
- j45 11mo agoManufacturing 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.
- Aurornis 11mo ago> 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.
- timschmidt 11mo ago> Are you referring to complete home-grown DRAM designs? That, too, was already in the works. Yes, via cxmt as discussed by Asianometry here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mt-eDtFqKvk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mt-eDtFqKvk As I mentioned, various groups within China have been working on China-native DRAM since the '70s. What's new are the margins and market demand to allow them to be profitable with DRAM which is still several years behind the competition.
- throwaway48476 11mo agoLots of low end android boxes use cxmt ddr4.
- throwaway2037 11mo ago> Manufacturers don't actually want too many extremely long term contracts because it would limit their ability to respond to market price changes. I don't agree with this sentence. Why would not the same apply advice to oil and gas contracts? If you look at the size and duration of oil and gas contracts for major energy importers, they often run 10 years or more. Some of the contracts in Japan and Korea are so large, that a heavy industrial / chemical customers will take an equity stake in the extraction site. Except silicon, power, and water (and a tiny amount of plastic/paper for packaging), what else does a fab need that only produces DRAM? If true, then power is far and away the most variable input cost.
- somernd5678 11mo ago[dead]
- venturecruelty 11mo agoI guess we'll just have to stop making computer memory if it ceases to be profitable. The market is so efficient.
- az226 11mo agohttps://videocardz.com/newz/chinese-cxmt-to-produce-ddr5-8000-and-lpddr5x-10667-memory https://videocardz.com/newz/chinese-cxmt-to-produce-ddr5-800...
- blindriver 11mo agoDRAM already has a spot price, because it is a commodity. https://www.trendforce.com/price/dram/dram_spot https://www.trendforce.com/price/dram/dram_spot
- darig 11mo ago[dead]
- lwhi 11mo agoI've just remembered a similar situation in 1993! A Japanese factory that made epoxy resin for chips was destroyed and the price of SIMM chips skyrocketed (due to lack of availability). I remember being very upset that I wasn't going to be able to upgrade to 4MB.
- hmng 11mo agoThere should be a t-shirt for that ;-) I remember paying insane prices that year.
- noobermin 11mo agoSo this would have been great may be 15 years ago, or am I mistaken? New fabs for DRAM would take a while, no?
- RobotToaster 11mo agoFor some reason it never crossed my mind that there would be futures for DRAM the same way there is for gold and silver.