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As AI gobbles up chips, prices for devices may rise
- johnea 10mo ago"May rise"? Prices are already through the roof... https://www.tomsguide.com/news/live/ram-price-crisis-updates https://www.tomsguide.com/news/live/ram-price-crisis-updates
- Imustaskforhelp 10mo agoAsus is ramping up production of ram... So lets see if they might "save us"
- CamperBob2 10mo agoAsus doesn't make RAM. That's the whole problem: there are plenty of RAM retail brands, but they are all just selling products that originate from only a couple of actual fabs.
- nrp 10mo agoThree major ones: Micron, Samsung, SK Hynix And a couple of smaller ones: CXMT (if you’re not afraid of the sanctions), Nanya, and a few others with older technology
- whaleofatw2022 10mo agoIs this glofo's time to shine?
- bee_rider 10mo agoDo they make DRAM? I thought they made compute chips mostly. If I recall correctly, RAM is even more niche and specialized than the (already quite specialized) general chip manufacturing. The structure is super-duper regular, just a big grid of cells, so it is super-duper optimized.
- FastFT 10mo agoThey (GF) do not make DRAM. They might have an eDRAM process inherited from IBM, but it would not be competitive. You’re correct that DRAM is a very specialized process. The bit cell capacitors are a trench type that is uncommon in the general industry, so the major logic fabs would have a fairly uphill battle to become competitive (they also have no desire to enter the DRAM market in general).
- jazzyjackson 10mo agoAsus doesn't operate fabs and has denied the rumor https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/dram/no-asus-isnt-going-into-memory-manufacturing-taiwanese-tech-giant-issues-statement-smashing-rumor https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/dram/no-asus-isnt...
- Imustaskforhelp 10mo agoHey sorry, I didn't knew that. I had watched the short form content (https://www.youtube.com/shorts/eSnlgBlgMp8 https://www.youtube.com/shorts/eSnlgBlgMp8) [Asus is going to save gaming] and I didn't knew that It was a rumour. My bad
- shevy-java 10mo agoSo far all I am seeing is an increase in prices, so any company claiming it will "ramp up production" here is, in my opinion, just lying for tactical reasons. Governments need to intervene here. This is a mafia scheme now. I purchased about three semi-cheap computers in the last ~5 years or so. Looking at the RAM prices, the very same units I bought (!) now cost 2.5x as much as before (here I refer to my latest computer model, from 2 years ago). This is a mafia now. I also think these AI companies should be extra taxed because they cause us economic harm here.
- trinsic2 10mo agoTaxed extra is a good idea. But they bought our current administration so we all know that's not going to happen unless something big happens like Trump gets impeached, and all the criminals in congress go to prison. I'm wondering how likely that will happen. people need to get more directly involved in putting pressure on senators.
- piskov 10mo agoBig companies secure long-term pricing (multi-year), so iPhones probably won’t feel this in 2026 (or even 2027). 2028 is another story depending on whether this frenzy continues / fabs being built (don’t know whether they are as hard as cpu)
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- kankerlijer 10mo agoWell thank th FSM that the article opens right up with buy now! No thanks, I'm kind of burnt out on mindless consumerism, I'll go pot some plants or something.
- johnea 10mo agoI didn't see any of that. I highly recommend disabling javascript in your browser. Yes, it makes many sites "look funny", or maybe you have to scroll past a bunch of screen sized "faceplant" "twitverse" and "instamonetize" icons, but, there are far fewer ads (like none). And of course some sites won't work at all. That's OK too, I just don't read them. If it's a news article, its almost always available on another site that doesn't require javascript.
- metadope 10mo agoI whole-heartedly agree with your recommendation and join in encouraging more adopters of this philosophy and practice. Life online without javascript is just better. I've noticed an increase in sites that are useful (readable) with javascript disabled. Better than 10 years ago, when broken sites were rampant. Though there are still the lazy ones that are just blank pages without their javascript crutch. Maybe the hardware/resource austerity that seems to be upon us now will result in people and projects refactoring, losing some glitter and glam, getting lean. We can resolve to slim down, drop a few megs of bloat, use less ram and bandwidth. It's not a problem; it's an opportunity! In any case, Happy New Year! [alpha preview release]
- piskov 10mo agoProbably using reader mode by default would be less guttural experience (and you’ll have an easy fallback).
- intrasight 10mo agoUsed to work. No longer. What does work is archive.today. But even that is at risk. Some sites now presented encoded text when you view the archive.
- netbioserror 10mo agoPositive downstream effect: The way software is built will need to be rethought and improved to utilize efficiencies for stagnating hardware compute. Think of how staggering the step from the start of a console generation to the end used to be. Native-compiled languages have made bounding leaps that might be worth pursuing again.
- yooogurt 10mo agoAlternatively, we'll see a drop in deployment diversity, with more and more functionality shifted to centralised providers that have economies of scale and the resources to optimise. E.g. IDEs could continue to demand lots of CPU/RAM, and cloud providers are able to deliver that cheaper than a mostly idle desktop. If that happens, more and more of its functionality will come to rely on having low datacenter latencies, making use on desktops less viable. Who will realistically be optimising build times for usecases that don't have sub-ms access to build caches, and when those build caches are available, what will stop the median program from having even larger dependency graphs.
- linguae 10mo agoI’d feel better about the RAM price spikes if they were caused by a natural disaster and not by Sam Altman buying up 40% of the raw wafer supply, other Big Tech companies buying up RAM, and the RAM oligopoly situation restricting supply. This will only serve to increase the power of big players who can afford higher component prices (and who, thanks to their oligopoly status, can effectively set the market price for everyone else), while individuals and smaller institutions are forced to either spend more or work with less computing resources. The optimistic take is that this will force software vendors into shipping more efficient software, but I also agree with this pessimistic take, that companies that can afford inflated prices will take advantage of the situation to pull ahead of competitors who can’t afford tech at inflated prices. I don’t know what we can do as normal people other than making do with the hardware we have and boycotting Big Tech, though I don’t know how effective the latter is.
- yooogurt 10mo ago
- memoriuaysj 10mo agothe first stages of the world being turned into computronium. next stage is paving everything with solar panels.
- kylehotchkiss 10mo agoSolar freaking roadways reborn!
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- vittore 10mo agoI've been ruminating on this past two years, with life before AI most of the compute staying cheap and pretty much 90% idle , we are finally getting to the point of using all of this compute. We probably will find more algorithms to improve efficiency of all the matrix computations, and with AI bubble same thing will happen that happened with telecom bubble and all the fiber optic stuff that turned out to be drastically over provisioned. Fascinating times!
- shevy-java 10mo agoI don't think any of this is "fascinating" - it is more of a racket scheme. They push the prices up. Governments failed the people here.
- yooogurt 10mo agoIsn't this more easily explained by supply-demand? Supply can't quickly scale, and so with increased demand there will be increased prices.
- ozgrakkurt 10mo agoImagine someone goes to the supermarket and buys all the tomatoes. Then supermarket owner says I don’t know, he bought all at once so it is a better sale. And he sells the remaining 10% of tomatoes at a huge markup
- vittore 10mo agoI think it is better compared to Dutch folks buying all the tulip bulbs. And the price skyrocketed.
- Ekaros 10mo agoTulips were by my understanding more so NFTs. Rich people gambling when bored. With promises for tulips in future... Future contracts for tulips. And prices were high because they were insanely rich merchants. The RAM looks like cornering market. Probably something OpenAI should be prosecuted for if they end up profiting from it.
- jazzyjackson 10mo agoQuestion: are SoCs with on die memory be effected by this? Looks like the frame.work desktop with Ryzen 128GB is shipping now at same price it was on release, Apple is offering 512GB Mac studios Are snapdragon chips the same way?
- piskov 10mo agoApple secured at least a year-worth supply of memory (not in actual chips but in prices). The bigger the company = longer the contract. However it will eventually catch up even to Apple. It is not prices alone due to demand but the manufacturing redirection from something like lpddr in iphones to hbm and what have you for servers and gpu
- trollbridge 10mo agoI have a feeling every single supplier of DRAM is going to be far more interested in long-term contracts with Apple than with (for example) OpenAI, since there's basically zero possibility Apple goes kaput and reneges on their contracts to buy RAM.
- greesil 10mo agoApparently Google fucked up https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.indiatoday.in/amp/technology/news/story/ram-shortage-so-bad-google-told-employees-to-secure-supply-in-korea-or-else-they-will-be-fired-2842016-2025-12-26 https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.indiatoday.in/amp/technolog...
- shevy-java 10mo agoI now consider this a mafia that aims to milk us for more money. This includes all AI companies but also manufacturers who happily benefit from this. It is a de-facto monopoly. Governments need to stop allowing this milking scheme to happen.
- throwaway94275 10mo ago"Monopoly" means one seller, so you can't say multiple X makes a monopoly and make sense. You probably mean collusion. If demand exceeds supply, either prices rise or supply falls, causing shortages. Directly controlling sellers (prices) or buyers (rationing) results in black markets unless enforcement has enough strength and integrity. The required strength and integrity seems to scale exponentially with the value of the good, so it's typically effectively impossible to prevent out-of-spec behavior for anything not cheap. If everyone wants chips, semiconductor manufacturing supply should be increased. Governments should subsidize domestic semiconductor industries and the conditions for them to thrive (education, etc.) to meet both goals of domestic and economic security, and do it in a way that works. The alternative is decreasing demand. Governments could hold bounty and incentive programs for building electronics that last a long time or are repairable or recyclable, but it's entirely possible the market will eventually do that.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- rileymat2 10mo ago> If everyone wants chips, semiconductor manufacturing supply should be increased. Governments should subsidize domestic semiconductor industries and the conditions for them to thrive (education, etc.) to meet both goals of domestic and economic security, and do it in a way that works. If there is already demand at this inflated price, shouldn’t we ask why more capacity is not coming online naturally first?
- kaoD 10mo ago> If there is already demand at this inflated price, shouldn’t we ask why more capacity is not coming online naturally first? ...and why it has been consistently the case for a long while.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- shmerl 10mo ago> She said the next new factory expected to come online is being built by Micron in Idaho. The company says it will be operational in 2027 Isn't Micron stopping all consumer RAM production? So their factories won't help anyway.
- terribleperson 10mo agoMicron is exiting direct to consumer sales. That doesn't mean their chips couldn't end up in sticks or devices sold to consumers, just that the no-middleman Crucial brand is dead. Also, even if no Micron RAM ever ended up in consumer hands, it would still reduce prices for consumers by increasing the supply to other segments of the market.
- walterbell 10mo ago> no-middleman Crucial brand is dead It could be restarted in the future by Micron. Crucial SSDs offer good firmware (e.g. nvme sanitize for secure erase) and hardware (e.g. power loss capacitors).
- 29athrowaway 10mo agoAI needs data and data that comes from consumer devices.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- vee-kay 10mo agoFor last 2 years, I've noticed a worrying trend: the typical budget PCs (especially Laptops) are being sold at higher prices with lower RAM (just 8GB) and lower-end CPUs (and no dedicated GPUs). Industry mandate should have become 16GB RAM for PCs and 8GB for mobile, since years ago, but instead it is as if computing/IT industry is regressing. New budget mobiles are being launched with lower-end specs as well (e.g., new phones with Snapdragon Gen 6, UFS2.2). Meanwhile, features that were being offered in budget phones, e.g., wireless charging, NFC, UFS3.1 have silently been moved to the premium mobile segment. Meanwhile the OSes and software are becoming more and more complex, bloated and more unstable (bugs) and insecure (security loopholes ready for exploits). It is as if the industry has decided to focus on AI and nothing else. And this will be a huge setback for humanity, especially the students and scientific communities.
- linguae 10mo agoI wonder what we can do to preserve personal computing, where users, not vendors, control their computers? I’m tired of the control Microsoft, Apple, Google, OpenAI, and some other big players have over the entire industry. The software has increasingly become enshittified, and now we’re about to be priced out of hardware upgrades. The problem is coming up with a viable business model for providing hardware and software that respect users’ ability to shape their environments as they choose. I love free, open-source software, but how do developers make a living, especially if they don’t want to be funded by Big Tech?
- cglan 10mo agoAt this current pace, if "the electorate" doesn't see real benefits to any of this. 2028 is going to be referendum on AI unfortunately. Whether you like it or not, AI right now is mostly - high electricity prices - crazy computer part prices - phasing out of a lot of formerly high paying jobs and the benefits are mostly - slop and chatgpt Unless OpenAI and co produce the machine god, which genuinely is possible. If most people's interactions with AI are the negative externalities they'll quickly be wondering if ChatGPT is worth this cost.
- zaptheimpaler 10mo agoI hope they do. We live in a time of incredibly centralized wealth & power and AI and particularly "the machine god" has the potential to make things 100x worse and return us to a feudal system if the ownership and profits all go to a few capital owners.
- trinsic2 10mo agoIMHO this is exactly what is happening. Everyone should be on the phone with there senators putting pressure to enforce anti-trust and deal with citizens united
- stefan_ 10mo agoFor good measure, a bunch of this is funded through money taken directly from the electorates taxes and given to a few select companies, whose leaders then graciously donate to the latest Ballroom grift. Micron, so greedy they thought nothing of shutting down their consumer brand even when it costs them nothing at all, got $6B in Chips Act money in 2024.
- caconym_ 10mo ago> they'll quickly be wondering if ChatGPT is worth this cost They should be, and the answer is obviously no—at least to them. No political or business leader has outlined a concrete, plausible path to the sort of vague UBI utopia that's been promised for "regular folks" in the bullish scenario (AGI, ASI, etc.), nor have they convincingly argued that this isn't an insane bubble that's going to cripple our economy when AGI doesn't happen—a scenario that's looking more and more likely every day. There is no upside and only downside; whether we're heading for sci-fi apocalypse or economic catastrophe, the malignant lunatics pushing this technology expect to be insulated from consequences whether they end up owning the future light-cone of humanity or simply enjoying the cushion of their vast wealth while the majority suffers the consequences of an economic crash a few rich men caused by betting it all, even what wasn't theirs to bet. Everybody should be fighting this tooth and nail. Even if these technologies are useful (I believe they are), and even if they can be made into profitable products and sustainable businesses, what's happening now isn't related to any of that.
- appreciatorBus 10mo ago[flagged]
- bigbadfeline 10mo ago> has more demand than forecast Nah. The demand is driven by corporations that hoard hardware in datacenters, starving the market and increasing prices in the process - otherwise known as scalping. Then they sell you back that same hardware, in the form of cloud services, for even higher prices. More explanations here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46416934 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46416934
- appreciatorBus 10mo agoIf it’s that easy to make infinite money, maybe the govt should could just do that too so we’d have enough for healthcare and other programs?
- squibonpig 10mo agoWhat? It's just a business you can only execute with lots of resources, and in a space where supply changes slowly.
- bigbadfeline 10mo agoThe government can't, and doesn't, make infinite money. Govt debt can't grow to infinity either, so if revenue is not increased, unpredictable and unpleasant events will follow. However, the taxation issue is so hopelessly misrepresented and misunderstood that I'm not going to discuss it here.
- appreciatorBus 10mo agoThat’s not what I’m saying. If the implication is that hard drives of all things are being manipulated to make unlimited amounts of money, then the government could just do the same thing and earn that money for the public instead.
- deadbabe 10mo agoAre we finally going to be forced to use something like CollapseOS, when the supply chains can no longer deliver chips to the masses?
- bschmidt97979 10mo ago[flagged]
- compounding_it 10mo agoSoftware has gotten bad over the last decade. Electron apps were the start but these days everything seems to be so bloated, right from the operating systems to browsers. There was a time when apple was hesitant to add more ram to its iPhones and app developers would have to work hard to make apps efficient. Last few years have shown Apple going from 6gb to 12gb so easily for their 'AI' while I consistently see the quality of apps deteriorating on the App Store. iOS 26 and macOS 26 are so aggressive towards memory swapping that loading settings can take time on devices with 6gb ram (absurd). I wonder what else they have added that apps need purging so frequently. 6gb iphone and 8gb M1 felt incredibly fast for the couple of years. Now apparently they are slow like they are really old. Windows 11 and Chrome are a completely different story. Windows 10 ran just fine on my 8th gen pc for years. Windows 11 is very slow and chrome is a bad experience. Firefox doesn't make it better. I also find that gnome and cosmic de are not exactly great at memory. A bare minimum desktop still takes up 1.5-1.6gb ram on a 1080p display and with some tabs open, terminal and vscode (again electron) I easily hit 8gb. Sway is better in this regard. I find alacrity sway and Firefox together make it a good experience. I wonder where we are heading on personal computer software. The processors have gotten really fast and storage and memory even more so, but the software still feels slow and glitchy. If this is the industry's idea of justifying new hardware each year we are probably investing in the wrong people.
- heavyset_go 10mo agoFirefox is set to allocate memory until a certain absolute limit or memory pressure is reached. It will eat memory whether you have 4GB of RAM of 40GB. Set this to something you find reasonable: `browser.low_commit_space_threshold_percent` And make sure tab unloading is enabled. Also, you can achieve the same thing with cgroups by giving Firefox a slice of memory it can grow into.
- anigbrowl 10mo agoFair. I installed a MIDI composition app recently that was 1.2 GB! Now, it does have some internal synthesis that like uses samples, but only a limited selection of sounds so I think 95% of the bulk is from Electron.
- bschmidt97979 10mo ago[flagged]
- arjie 10mo agoDRAM spot prices are something like what they were 4 years ago. Having RAM for cheap is nice. But it doesn't cost an extraordinary amount. I recently needed some RAM and was able to pick up 16x32 DDR4 for $1600. That's about twice as expensive as it used to be but $1600 is pretty cheap for 512 GiB of RAM. A 16 GiB M4 Mac Mini is $400 right now. That covers any essential use-case which means this is mostly hitting hobbyists or niche users.
- chzblck 10mo agoyou running a server or local llms with a need for 512?
- arjie 10mo agoServer stuff. Nothing interesting. Supermicro H11 + Epyc 7xxx + RAM. I have a 6x4090 setup for local LLMs and I got myself a 128 GB M4 Max laptop thinking I'd do that, but if I'm being honest I need to get rid of that hardware. It's sitting idle because the SOTA ones are so much better for what I want.
- sgerenser 10mo ago$400 or $499?
- p0w3n3d 10mo ago> A 16 GiB M4 Mac Mini is $400 right now Where do you live? In Poland it's 740usd. However, 16gb is very little for a Mac where the OS itself uses 7GB
- llukas 10mo agoIt is perfectly usable for essential use cases. This thing also has very fast swap and is good at it.
- xbmcuser 10mo agoMight not be the best thing for US but rest of the world needs China to reach parity on node size with TSMC to crash the market.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- czhu12 10mo agoIt seems… fine? Hasn’t DRAM always been a boom and bust industry with no real inflation — in fact massive deflation — over the past 30 years? Presumably the boom times are the main reason why investment goes into it so that years later, consumers can buy for cheap.
- torginus 10mo agoIt's somewhat alarming to see that companies (owned by a very small slice of society) producing these AI thingies (whose current economic is questionable value and actual future potential is up to hot debate), can easily price the rest of humanity out of computing goods.
- palmotea 10mo ago> It's somewhat alarming to see that companies (owned by a very small slice of society) ... can easily price the rest of humanity out of computing goods. If AI lives up to the hype, it's a portent of how things will feel to the common man. Not only will unemployment be a problem, but prices of any resources desired by the AI companies or their founders will rise to unaffordability.
- BoredPositron 10mo agoAI probably will end up living up to the hype. It won't be on the generation of hardware they are now mass deploying. We need another tock before we can even start to talk about AGI.
- walterbell 10mo ago> rise to unaffordability Or require non-price mechanisms of payment and social contract.
- hackable_sand 10mo agoYes. Like theft.
- torginus 10mo agoI think living up to the hype needs to be defined. A lot of AI 'influencers' love wild speculation, but lets ignore the most fantastical claims of techno-singularity, and let's focus on what I would consider a very optimistic scenario for AI companies - that AI capable of replacing knowledge workers can be developed using the current batch of hardware, in the span of a year or two. Even in this scenario, the capital gains on the lump sump invested in AI far outpaces the money that would be spent on the salaries of these workers, and if we look at the scenario with investor goggles, due to the exponential nature of investment gains, the gap will only grow wider. Additionally, AI does not seem to be a monopoly, either wrt companies, or geopolitics, so monopoly logic does not apply.
- Ekaros 10mo agoOutside say video and image editing and maybe lossless audio. Why is this much ram even needed in most use cases? And I mean actually thinking about using it. Computer code unless you are actually doing whole Linux kernel, is just text. So lot of projects probably would fit in cache. Maybe software companies should be billed for user's resources too...
- system2 10mo agoI have multiple apps using 300 GB+ PostgreSQL databases. For some queries, high RAM is required. I enable symmetrical NVMe swaps, too. Average Joe with gaming needs wouldn't need more than 64 GB for a long time. But for the database, as the data grows, RAM requirements also grow. I doubt my situation is relatable to many.
- Ekaros 10mo agoI understand servers. But why do actually average user need more than 2 or 4GB? For what actual data in memory at one time?
- parrellel 10mo agoWhere have you seen 4 GB cut it in the last decade? 2 GB was enough to make Vista chug in 2007? I've got old linux boxes that feel fine with a couple gig of DDR3, but can't think of a place where that would be acceptable outside of that.
- Ekaros 10mo agoMy entire question is why can't whatever users do on computers actually work on 2GB of RAM? Like what is the true reason we are in state that it is for some reason not possible? 2 GB is huge amount information. So surely it should be enough for almost all normal users, but for some reason it is not.
- parrellel 10mo ago
- l9o 10mo agoIt feels like a weird tension: we worry about AI alignment but also want everyone to have unrestricted local AI hardware. Local compute means no guardrails, fine-tune for whatever you want. Maybe the market pricing people out is accidentally doing what regulation couldn't? Concentrating AI where there's at least some oversight and accountability. Not sure if that's good or bad to be honest.
- walterbell 10mo ago> market pricing people out For now. Chinese supply chains include DRAM from CXMT (sanctioned) and NAND from YMTC (not sanctioned, holds patents on 3D stacking that have been licensed by Korean memory manufacturers).
- kasabali 10mo agoThey may not be sanctioned for selling, but they're sanctioned because they can't buy modern fab machinery.
- ls612 10mo agoThe people who worry about “alignment” are very much not the same people who want anyone to have local AI hardware. They are the people who would force every computer legally allowed to be sold to the hoi polloi to be as locked down as an iPhone if they could.
- agilob 10mo agoIt's going to be interesting for Google Chrome team when new laptops will be equipped with 8Gb RAM by default.
- Culonavirus 10mo agoI mean yea, but this is THE wrong site to post stuff like this. Half the people here are the AI cock and the other half is riding it.
- loudandskittish 10mo agoLove all the variations of "8GB of RAM should be enough for anybody" in here.
- walterbell 10mo agoAI PacMan eats memory, then promises to eat/write software so we need less memory.
- elthor89 10mo agoIf all manufacturers jump into serving the ai market segment. Can this not be a opportunity for new entrants to start serving the other market segments? How hard is it to start and manufacture memory for embedded systems in cars, or pc?
- nice_byte 10mo agoNo, because if you have the capacity to make e.g. ram chips it makes more economic sense to sell them for ai bucks. Serving the other market segment is an opportunity cost unless you're selling to them at same prices. In the long run though if enough players emerge the price will eventually come down just due to oversupply.
- SunlitCat 10mo agoNot quite. Making specialized DRAM chips for AI hardware needs, requires high tech components. Making low(er) end DRAM chips for consumer needs might be easier to get started with. I am pretty sure, in the next year we will see a wave of low end ram components coming out of china.
- baobabKoodaa 10mo agoBest of luck with your folksy mom & pop DRAM factory.
- Imustaskforhelp 10mo agoYea I think the same too. China is notorious for price dumping but this might be good for the end consumer.
- lexicality 10mo agoIf it was easy there would be more memory manufacturers, rather than 2-3 wholesalers who sell to the people who put badges & rgb on it
- Imustaskforhelp 10mo agoOne might think so but the AI companies actually lose a lot and I mean a lot of money in these deals. Even if they might sell their inference and everything, they still wouldn't be that much profitable. So like, the key point is that a ram company can supply openAI ram and get some really high quick bucks which would be even more than if they were to create thier own datacenters,run open source models in them, provide inference in say open router. Now you might ask: Is openAI or these AI companies mad for burning so much money? And I think you might know the answer to that.
- zdc1 10mo agoThankfully we're at a stage where a 4 year old second-hand iPhone is perfectly usable, as are any M-series Macs or most Linux laptops. Sucks for anyone needing something particularly beefy for work; but I feel that a lot of purchases can be delayed for at least a year or two while this plays out.
- Imustaskforhelp 10mo ago> Sucks for anyone needing something particularly beefy for work; but I feel that a lot of purchases can be delayed for at least a year or two while this plays out. 100%, there is a lost time factor which sucks though if someone wants beefy, some might be forced to cough up some money but honestly yea although I agree with your statement, the ram increases really impact the self hosting/homelabbing genres and there was a recent post relevant to this discussion on hackernews https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46416618 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46416618: Self hosting is being enshittified.
- goku12 10mo agoI understand the issue with all the devices. But what about the rest of the things that depend on these electronics, especially DRAMs? Automotive, Aircraft, Marine vessels, ATC, Shipping coordination, traffic signalling, rail signalling, industrial control systems, public utility (power, water, sewage, etc) control systems, transmission grid control systems, HVAC and environment control systems, weather monitoring networks, disaster altering and management systems, ticketing systems, e-commerce backbones, scheduling and rostering systems, network backbones, entertainment media distribution systems, defense systems, and I don't know what else. Don't they all require DRAMs? What will happen to all of them?
- lysace 10mo agoA $100k EV has roughly the same amount of DRAM as a $1k phone. The EV is a therefore, on a whole, a lot less sensitive to DRAM price increases.
- goku12 10mo agoOkay, accepted. But are you sure that the supply won't be a problem as well? I mean, even if these products choose a different process nodes compared to the hyperscalers, will the DRAM manufactures even keep those nodes running in favor of these industries?
- Imustaskforhelp 10mo agoWhat will probably happen is that the reselling market/2nd market of these might probably rise > will the DRAM manufactures even keep those nodes running in favor of these industries? Some will, Some might not, In my opinion, the longevity of these brands will only depend if they allow buying ram for the average person/consumer brands so I guess we might see new competition perhaps or give more marketshare to all the other fab companies beyond the main three of these industries. I am sure that some company will 100% align with the consumers but the problem to me feels that they wouldn't be able to supply enough production to consumers in the first place so prices still might rise. And those prices most likely will be paid by you in one form or another but it would be interesting to see how long the companies who buy dram from these providers or build datacenters or anything ram intensive will hold their price up, perhaps they might eat the loss short term similar to what we saw some companies do during trump tarrifs.
- arnaudsm 10mo ago[deleted]
- fartfeatures 10mo agoThis take is pure Luddite nonsense. AI "lowering labor value while boosting capital" ignores centuries of automation: productivity gains cut costs, expand markets, create new jobs, and raise real wages despite short-term disruption. Steam engines, electricity, computers displaced workers but spawned far more opportunities through new industries and cheaper goods. Same pattern now. The "jobless masses stuck with 1GB phones eating slop" fantasy is backwards. Compute keeps getting vastly cheaper and more capable; AI speeds that up. "Terrible for indie creators and startups"? The opposite: AI obliterates barriers to building, shipping, and competing. Solo founders are moving faster than ever. It's the same tired doomer script we get with every tech wave. It ages poorly.
- sidibe 10mo agoNone of the previous tech had the potential to do every economically productive thing we can do. It will spawn more opportunities, but maybe it will also fill those opportunities.
- Inityx 10mo ago> Compute keeps getting vastly cheaper and more capable; AI speeds that up. ???
- fartfeatures 10mo agohttps://deepmind.google/blog/how-alphachip-transformed-computer-chip-design https://deepmind.google/blog/how-alphachip-transformed-compu... Among others.
- SunlitCat 10mo agoI really wonder when the point will be reached at which the South Korean government steps in and starts to take a closer look at the growing long-term supply commitments that companies like OpenAI are indirectly driving with major memory manufacturers such as SK hynix and Samsung Electronics. Allocating a very large share of advanced memory production, especially HBM and high-end DRAM, which are critical for almost all modern technology (and even many non-tech products like household appliances) to a small number of U.S. centric AI players risks distorting the global market and limiting availability for other industries. Even within Samsung itself, the Mobile eXperience (MX) Business (smartphones) is not guaranteed preferential access to memory from Samsung’s Device Solutions (DS) Division, which includes the Memory Business. If internal customers are forced to source DRAM elsewhere due to pricing or capacity constraints, this could eventually become economically problematic for a country that relies very heavily on semiconductor and technology exports.
- HexPhantom 10mo agoIf Samsung's own MX division can't count on predictable access because internal transfer pricing loses to hyperscaler demand, that's a red flag
- nubinetwork 10mo ago> South Korean government It's not like it's their fault that micron pulled out of the market... Edit: maybe someone should consider sweet-talking kioxia into making dram chips?
- Neywiny 10mo agoMicron isn't pulling out of the market. They discounted Crucial. Those are very different things. They pulled out of the direct to consumer market, not DRAM
- motbus3 10mo agoFor me, there is concerning a flag about all of this. I know this is not always true, but on this case, crucial folks say the margins for end user are too low and they have demand for AI. I suppose they do not intend to bring a new AI focused unit because it is not worth it or they believe the hype might be gone before it they are done. But what intrigues me is why they would allow other competitors to step up in a segment they dominate? They could raise the prices for the consumers if they are not worried about competition... There is a whole "not-exactly" ai industry labeled as AI that received a capital t of money. Is that what they are going for?
- HexPhantom 10mo agoBuilding a dedicated AI-focused consumer line is risky: long development cycles, uncertain demand, and the chance that today's hype cools before the product ships
- Imustaskforhelp 10mo agoSo my understanding of the situation is that, Crucial folks had downsized their factory production (see my other comments for reference perhaps) but then AI involvement started demanding chips just at the time their factory production was at their lows. So now for these AI companies, they got tons of money to burn so they are willing to pay a lot more, so now crucial only have a limited supply of ram and the thing is there isn't much difference between AI chip and consumer chip but the margins of AI chip are super higher compared to consumer chip So earlier they would sell consumer chips and AI chips as well but then the AI companies still demanded even more and they would get insane profits selling them so what they did (atleast crucial) is that they stopped selling consumer chips just to sell AI chips for profit. > I suppose they do not intend to bring a new AI focused unit because it is not worth it or they believe the hype might be gone before it they are done. But what intrigues me is why they would allow other competitors to step up in a segment they dominate? They could raise the prices for the consumers if they are not worried about competition... Well as a consumer, I certainly hope so but I think that these companies did this case because their have been times they were -55% in stock prices and its just cash making money device at this point and there is a monopoly of fabs with just three key players. So the answer to your question is "money" and "more money" short term. Their stock prices are already up I think and a company really loves short term rising stock prices > They could raise the prices for the consumers if they are not worried about competition Well, would you increase the prices 3-4x? Because supposedly thats how much the AI chips from what I've heard are... And due to this, the second hand market itself is selling these at a close-enough mark. I don't know but I hope that new players come in the market, I didn't know that this ram industry was such monopolistic with there being only 3 key players and how that became a chokehold for the whole world economy in a way
- CTDOCodebases 10mo ago"May"
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- disqard 10mo agoThe free market will surely fix this, amirite? Maybe this is the free market working as intended -- did you know that RAM is actually a luxury item, like a Rolls Royce, and most plebes should just make do with 4gb machines, because that is the optimum solution!
- bfrog 10mo agoMake all RAM the same density, lease out extra RAM through software. Rent all the things. Blackrock demands it.
- HexPhantom 10mo agoWhat's a bit unsettling is that this isn't a short spike driven by hype; it's a structural shift in demand
- tim333 10mo agoIf it's long term they can build more RAM factories. It may be a bit of a bubble though.
- kotaKat 10mo agoDoes this mean developers will have to make their software work on hardware with 8GB of RAM and stop blindly assuming every person in the world gets a packed developer workstation like they do?
- intrasight 10mo agoIn an idealized market economy that would be the case. But it is far from ideal. Your individual incentive as a SWE is to write more code.
- derelicta 10mo agoI'd like to see a State-owned memory manufacturer
- alecco 10mo agoFor a while CPUs kept getting significantly faster every year. Then ram kept getting bigger. Then NVMe came along and brought 200-1000x IOPS. So writing optimized software was niche and overshadowed by the huge gains of hardware. People and corporations didn't care. They preferred fast feature delivery. Even when optimizing techniques like multi-tenant servers, we ended up having heavy containers wasting RAM and resources. And most apps switched to web frameworks like Electron where each one has its own huge web browser. Most people didn't care. I hope this shortage has a silver lining of untangling the mess and refactoring the sea of bloat. But I know it's more likely some trick will be found to just patch it up a bit and only reduce the pain up to the new equilibrium level. For example something idiotic like Electron sharing resources across multiple apps and taking huge security risks. Corporations love to play false dichotomies to save pennies.
- eb0la 10mo agoIt is true that (most) people don't care, but... ... if you're beign charged by RAM (CPU is essentially free) ... ... AND you develop an application that's also your source of income ... THEN memory usage matters. At least the first years.
- eb0la 10mo agoI believe we're in the middle of a "perfect storm" and AI is not the only one to blame: - Right now A LOT of PCs are getting out of date because Windows 11 wants some new hardware that's missing in older PCs. - At the same time, smartphones were starting to use and need more memory. - Modern cars (mostly electric) have much more electronics inside than older ones... they're now distributed systems with several CPUs working together along a bus. - The cloud needs to upgrade and newer servers have much more memory than older ones with almost the same foorprint (wich means you need to lease less datacenter space). - And GPUs for AI are in demand and need RAM. But only AI is to blame although we're living in a perfect storm for RAM demand.
- liveoneggs 10mo agobloat and crap software coming home to roost
- bilsbie 10mo agoTake this to the limit and humans end up as a primitive, agrarian society and AI does its own thing with industry.
- abhi555shek 10mo agoThis is where government can jump in and take advantage of the less supply by opening large semi conductor factories quickly and helping people in avoiding this bottlneck.
- wmf 10mo agoOpening large semi conductor factories quickly isn't possible. Governments also can't stomach risking ~$20B.
- hansmayer 10mo agoI cannot stop thinking about the LLMs having this Midas touch quality, because everything they touch seems to ruin things or make people want to avoid them, for example: - Ghibli studio style graphics, - the infamous em-dashes and bullet points - customer service (just try to use Klarnas "support" these days...) - Oracle share price ;) - imagine being one of the worlds most solid and unassailable tech companies, losing to your CEOs crazy commitment to the LLMs... - The internet content - We now tripple check every Internet source we dont know to the core ... - And now also the chips ? Where does it stop? When we decide to drop all technology as it is?
- bogzz 10mo agoI am not sure how, or even if, it does stop. I assume once the hot air from LLM company CEOs starts being treated as the flatulence that it is, things will wind down. The sentiment against generated content is not going away.
- cindyllm 10mo ago[dead]
- api 10mo agoIn previous eras there were many purists who considered photography not-art, sequencer and synthesizer made music not-music, other forms of (non-AI) digital art less legitimate than their more manual classical counterparts, etc. This is the same discourse all over again. Is electronic music where the artist composes it on a screen and then hits 'play' music? I think it is, of course, but I have had experiences where I went to see a musician "live" and well... they brought the laptop with them. But I think it still counts. It was still fun. AI slop is to AI art what point and shoot amateur photography is to artistic photography. The difference is how much artistic intent and actual work is present. AI art has yet to get people like Ansel Adams, but it will -- actual artists who use AI as a tool to make novel forms and styles of art. (I used an emdash!) This is an outstanding read: https://medium.com/@aaronhertzmann/how-photography-became-an-art-form-7b74da777c63 https://medium.com/@aaronhertzmann/how-photography-became-an... Anti-photography discourse sounds exactly like anti-AI discourse to the point that you could search and replace terms and have the same rants. Another thing I expect to see is novelists using AI to create at least passable live action versions of their stories. I don't think these will put real actors or actresses out of work for a long time, but I could see them serving as "sizzle reels" to sell a real production. If an author posts their AI-generated film of their novel and it gets popular, I could see a studio picking it up and making a real movie or TV show from it.
- ChoGGi 10mo agoMay rise? RAM has already gone through the roof, why wouldn't everything else?
- bfrog 10mo agoAI has had a net negative on my life and created negative value for me and my family. It's raising my power rate. It's stealing my ideas and creative output. All to enrich a select few assholes who didn't need any more enrichment. AI embodies everything wrong with our modern gilded age era of capitalism.
- dizlexic 10mo agoAlarmist silliness. If it's a bubble prices will drop. If it isn't production will adapt.
- polski-g 10mo agoPeople love to panic for something that will be fixed in 24 months.
- greensh 10mo ago> In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is past the ocean is flat again. J. Keynes He was specifically criticising this "the market will regulate itself after a while" attitude. Nice for you to have a big enough safety net, bot not everybody does.
- throwaway743 10mo agoThis might be a little conspiracy thinking, but I think it's possible that the recent drive from NVIDIA to move toward defense contracting and shift to B2B is part of a larger strategy. When you combine that with the rapid increases in hardware pricing and the push toward renting cloud compute, it looks like a form of collusion between the private sector and the government in the name of "national security". The goal seems to be to squash the proliferation of open source LLMs and prevent individuals from running private, uncensored models at home. It is an effective way to kill any possible underdog or startup competition by making the "barrier to entry" (the compute) a rented privilege rather than a private resource. The partnership with Palantir seems to point directly to this, especially considering the ideologies of Thiel and Karp. They are building a world where intelligence is centralized and monitored, and local sovereignty over AI is treated as a liability to be phased out
- emsign 10mo agoYeah, economic bubbles suck the life out of everything else. Imagine what tech doesn't get funding now because of this bet on LLMs.
- rainsford 10mo agoOne aspect of this I don't see mentioned all that often is that AI is competing for computing resources that are at least somewhat limited in the short to medium term while being pretty inefficient at utilizing those resources compared to alternatives. A medium end gaming PC can display impressively realistic graphics at high resolutions and framerates while also being useful for a variety of other computationally intensive processing tasks like video encoding, compiling large code bases, etc. Or it can be used to host deeply mediocre local LLMs. The actual frontier models from companies like Anthropic or OpenAI require vastly more expensive computing resources, resources that could otherwise be used for potentially more useful computation that isn't so inefficient. Think of all the computing power going into frontier models but applied to weather forecasting or cancer research or whatever. Of course it's not either or, but as this article and similar ones point out, chips and other computing resources aren't infinite and AI for now at least has a seemingly insatiable appetite and enough dollars to starve other uses.
- vee-kay 10mo ago(Sharing a comment I recently posted on a similar thread..) For last 2+ years, I've noticed a worrying trend: the typical budget PCs (especially Laptops) are being sold at higher prices with lower RAM (just 8GB) and lower-end CPUs (and no dedicated GPUs). Industry mandate should have become 16GB RAM for PCs and 8GB for mobile, since years ago, but instead it is as if computing/IT industry is regressing. New budget mobiles are being launched with lower-end specs as well (e.g., new phones with Snapdragon Gen 6, UFS2.2). Meanwhile, features that were being offered in budget phones, e.g., wireless charging, NFC, UFS3.1 have silently been moved to the premium mobile segment. Meanwhile the OSes and software are becoming more and more complex, bloated and more unstable (bugs) and insecure (security loopholes ready for exploits). It is as if the industry has decided to focus on AI and nothing else. And this will be a huge setback for humanity, especially the students and scientific communities.
- pureagave 10mo agoI don't think we need "industry mandate". I suspect the electronics specs are dictated by the very efficient market and the consumer is being squeezed in many ways. So device manufactures are just meeting the pricing needs of the consumer and dropping the expensive things that are less understood like GPUs and extra ram.
- krick 10mo agoReminds me of my comment of 6 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21581390 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21581390
- sega_sai 10mo agoSo that makes it clearer how all these AI data centers will be payed for. They will be payed for by all of us paying more for the PCs, laptops and phones, while all the AI people arrange sweet deals guaranteeing low prices.
- jennyholzer2 10mo ago[dead]
- jennyholzer3 10mo agoThe important question is: Who is planning to buy the datacenters and their hardware when these ludicrously overvalued AI companies are forced to shut doors?
- devhouse 10mo ago[dead]
- racl101 10mo agoI should probably buy a spare Logitech keyboard and mouse pair. Mine current ones are seeing wear and tear.
- nospice 10mo agoFWIW, these markets are largely separate. Keyboards and mice typically use relatively simple microcontrollers made at "yesteryear" node sizes (100 nm+), so they can't start making high-density DRAM or GPUs even if they wanted to.
- ugh123 10mo agoYou either like creating things or you like thinking about things.
- worik 10mo agoAI companies are spending billions of dollars constructing data centers at warp speed around the world. It's the reason why Gogia says the demand for these chips isn't just a cyclical blip. That makes no sense, except in the very short term. The Datacentre building going on is clearly cyclic, the start of a cycle, but still a cycle. There are finite requirements, finite money and finite tolerance for loss. RAM lead in times to ramp up production are long, but also finite. This will correct, again. Hopefully in the meantime we learn to do more with less, always an innovation engine
- corimaith 10mo agoI always feel to place prices in context; Yes it does suck that 32gb DDR5 Ram is 300 dollars now, but comparatively a Magnus Pro XL table is $800 from the beginning. Furniture, Food, Clothes, etc are all at much higher marginal prices, its rather that PC building has been exceptionally cheap here. Are you really going to angrily shake your fist at society for that?
- estimator7292 10mo agoAt work we can't get DRAM chips. Micron stopped talking to us. We're looking to spend millions of dollars and nobody wants it. It's insane.
- cmxch 10mo agoAt what point does antitrust become a thing?