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The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

• emmanuelsemugga 5mo ago
  [flagged]
• simonw 5mo ago
  The headline here under-serves the article in my opinion: this is a fascinating, deep explanation of how the memory market works and why increased demand for HBM (used by big GPU racks) hurts the availability of wafers for DDR and LPDDR (used by laptops and phones).
  • cm2012 5mo ago
    This author has outstanding articles regularly
  • gblargg 5mo ago
    This also put a lot into perspective: > 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.
    • Ilaurens 5mo ago
      I'm no expert analyst on this topic, but I'm worried this time might be different for them. China finally has the technological capability to challenge this time around and they will gobble up the unmet demand, allowing them to get more experience and more money to catch up.
    • Aerroon 5mo ago
      I wonder if this is actually true in the long-term though. If they were to flood the market with lots of high capacity memory, then I think our programs would start using more memory too. As a result we might end up needing more memory faster compared to if they keep demand unmet. 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.
      • xnorswap 5mo ago
        I think that Slack's memory usage is "not bad" at ~300MB just because Discord exists, and somehow that seems to get into the gigabytes before even looking at a message.
        • deleted 5mo ago
          [deleted]
        • Scoundreller 5mo ago
          Too much of IRC has been lost to Discord :(
          • tracker1 5mo ago
            LiberaChat FTW!
        • daymanstep 5mo ago
          Yeah everything is a browser app now gotta ship a whole browser engine even for a simple messaging app.
      • picsao 5mo ago
        [dead]
      • j45 5mo ago
        Lots of people have bought baseline 32/64 GB ram in their laptops for a long time (the last few laptops). 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.
      • pjdesno 5mo ago
        "I wonder if this is actually true in the long-term though. If they were to flood the market with lots of high capacity memory, then I think our programs would start using more memory too. As a result we might end up needing more memory faster compared to if they keep demand unmet." It's a gambler's ruin problem. Future profits are worth zero if you go out of business first.
    • nashashmi 5mo ago
      > always leave demand unmet And then allow small low cost manufacturers to get the rest of the market... like China has been doing this whole time.
    • pseudohadamard 5mo ago
      It's more than that though. Memory is a series of boom-and-bust cycles. Also, it costs around $15 billion and takes 2-3 years to build a fab. So if you were to start now, you'd have a pretty good chance of hitting the next bust right after spending $15 billion. It's not necessarily some sinister conspiracy, it's because execs are reluctant to be the ones to take the blame for setting fire to $15 billion. Looks kinda bad on your CV.
    • illiac786 5mo ago
      How does that work in practice though? There’s a central “RAM Oversight Council” that checks that no one sells too much?
      • zargon 5mo ago
        There are only 3 memory manufacturers. They just quietly follow the same strategy. They learned not to talk about it from the last time they were fined for antitrust price fixing in the 2000s.
        • illiac786 5mo ago
          ouch. That’s indeed a problem.
  • nullpoint420 5mo ago
    Agentic workflows and computer use. You still need regular servers for the agents to use.
• sys_64738 5mo ago
  I can't say I've noticed specifically. I have two tracfone accounts and a Cricket account so used to use the Android phone with Cricket after two months - a free phone. But tracfone was bought by Verizon and they being them immediately changed the unlock period from two months to a year. So that to me kills my use case of free smartphones as I don't want to spend any money on phones.
• mrandish 5mo ago
  The deep dive on memory market dynamics and the LLM bubble distortion is great. But another cause of declining smart phone sales is simply that the devices have matured and aren't improving at nearly the same rate. 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.
  • trvz 5mo ago
    First, the iPhone 17 Pro is a huge improvement. Second, the article doesn’t focus on phones we buy. There won’t be a shortage of those.
    • georgebcrawford 5mo ago
      Improvement in what way and over what previous phone? The parent mentioned a number of metrics.
    • taneq 5mo ago
      What does it improve, in practice? For myself, I need my phone to make phone calls, take photos/videos, occasionally run apps, and to be a wifi hotspot. My iPhone 6S did all of these well enough that I only upgraded it recently because I dropped it and bent the power button. My new phone has a slightly nicer camera and better battery life, that’s about it.
      • 5mo ago
• aurareturn 5mo ago
  The MacBook Pro on which I’m writing this piece needs memory that can keep up with a powerful processor running many programs at once: so it uses a standard called DDR, “double data rate,” which runs at a reasonably high voltage and offers high bandwidth. The processor on my iPhone is less powerful, so it needs less data at any given moment; but voltage matters enormously, since every milliwatt allocated to memory is drained from the battery. So smartphones use LPDDR, “low-power double data rate,” a variant of DDR engineered to operate at lower voltages. The last MacBook Pro to use DDR was in 2019. All Apple Silicon Macs use LPDDR.
  • deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
  • cherioo 5mo ago
    Maybe author is writing this from an Intel Mac!
    • aurareturn 5mo ago
      Quite possible. He did say his “powerful” MacBook Pro CPU is faster than his iPhone. 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.
      • NathanielK 5mo ago
        Powerfulness is measured in watts, it's why I keep my almost 400W 980ti around. :)
  • windowsrookie 5mo ago
    Apple has been using LPDDR in the MacBooks since at least 2015. I remember it was one of the complaint of the 2016-2017 MacBook Pros. They were still using LPDDR3 because LPDDR4 wasn't ready for production yet (despite regular DDR4 being available). The 2018 MacBook Pro's finally switched to LPDDR4.
• jimbokun 5mo ago
  This article expanded my understanding of the memory industry dramatically. For anyone who doesn’t follow the market closely, this is about a good a primer as you could hope for.
• blehn 5mo ago
  But aren't there plenty of used expensive phones from the last 5-7 years that are more or less equivalent replacements for new cheap phones? Apple alone sells 250 million phones a year.
  • _--__--__ 5mo ago
    The article takes a while to get there, but it is focusing on a set of companies I hadn't heard of ("Transsion, Oppo, Vivo, and Lava") that buy components from last gen smartphones to make cheap devices to sell in the African and South(/east) Asian markets. 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.
    • frm88 5mo ago
      You are underestimating these phones. Transsion is in the top 5 smartphone shippers worldwide together with Samsung, Apple, Oppo and Xiaomi. There is nothing Frankenstein about them: https://techeconomy.ng/transsion-ranks-in-top-5-worldwide-smartphone-shipments-for-the-first-time/ https://techeconomy.ng/transsion-ranks-in-top-5-worldwide-sm...
• LeifCarrotson 5mo ago
  What was most surprising about all this to me was this line: > So modern DRAM manufacturing is an extraordinarily complex and expensive process. Building a single state-of-the-art DRAM fabrication facility, a “fab,” will cost you about $15 to $20 billion; acquiring all the necessary equipment, like lithography tools and etching machines, will cost you another few billion; and then it’ll take you a few years of 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.
  • swatcoder 5mo ago
    And what happens if the market settles back down or the leading memory tech pivots away from what you invested all this capital and time chasing? 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.
    • shimman 5mo ago
      Why should society care about people making profits? Society would greatly benefit from cheap abundant ram than FAANG shares going up. I'm kinda sick about only caring that some billionaire makes more money and would rather you know... actually improve conditions to better society. This is why China is eating the West. Quite easy to start an electronics company when you have such an abundance of suppliers, compare 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.
• WarOnPrivacy 5mo ago
  I'm a newborn shill for Ulefone. They come unlocked and the manufacturer supports rooting. The devices are rugged, heavy on features and are (still) reasonably priced. Pics:https://duckduckgo.com/?ia=images&origin=funnel_home_website&t=h_&q=ulefone&chip-select=search&iax=images 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.
• Ayushkumar1808 5mo ago
  [flagged]
• ls612 5mo ago
  I’m really wishing I had overbuilt my NAS last year. As it stands I feel lucky to have even built it at all given I bought all the parts in the last week of September. My 4090 and 12900k are gonna have to last till 2029 at this rate won’t they…
  • rationalist 5mo ago
    Won't processors come down in price because people are buying less of them because people are buying less computers because of higher RAM prices? I've heard that is happening for motherboards.
    • ls612 5mo ago
      I’m not gonna build new until I can get a GPU and RAM as well lol. That’s gonna be a few years for sure.
    • phil21 5mo ago
      Processors are currently becoming the next bottleneck on the server component side of things. If consumer SKUs start seeing even less volume than they are today, manufacturers will simply produce more for the datacenter. Certain popular AMD SKUS are already 120 days lead time and growing. If a vendor will talk to you at all. I expect motherboards to get cheap until they get to be really expensive niche products should the current situation last a few more years. At least as we know them today as PC enthusiasts and/or prosumers. I could very much see that market evaporating entirely and moving towards large integrators instead. Gamers and such were already a rather small niche to begin with. Right now the saving grace is a server board doesn’t look a whole lot different than a consumer board. But that may change significantly faster than anyone predicts should current trends with SoCs and the like continue. You may be in a place soon where you get to choose your CPU/RAM/storage at purchase time like you do with a MacBook today.
• Viacol 5mo ago
  At Xiaomi's latest smartphone launch event, Xiaomi founder Lei Jun said that memory prices are likely to keep rising over the next two years, which could drive smartphone prices up as well. His conclusion was pretty direct: everyone should just replace their phones now. Kind of a depressing story.
  • cryptoegorophy 5mo ago
    Wanted to get Steam Frame VR headset and probably it will be delayed due to this. Sad
  • nyc_data_geek1 5mo ago
    He could be right, or he could just be a phone company CEO trying to get you to buy a new phone, or he could be both.
• amazingamazing 5mo ago
  Maybe if we're lucky we get more memory efficient software. ehh who am I kidding.
  • hnthrowaway6323 5mo ago
    Might get some ingenious creations from poorer countries, like how in China they mod RTX GPUs to have more RAM because of export controls. Maybe some souped up Xiaomi devices with insane amounts of memory from old donor parts? Custom ROMs/postmarketOS for ultra low end devices that wouldn't normally get them but needed because they're going to need to last a few more years?
  • RachelF 5mo ago
    Yeah, modern software towers of libraries literally eat memory. MS Teams uses around 1000MB of RAM to do exactly the same things that Microsoft Messenger could do in 8MB.
    • nottorp 5mo ago
      Also 12 processes right now on my mac for some reason. It's haaard to do state machines.
      • CrimsonCape 5mo ago
        Can you shed more light on this? You are saying that more processes help avoid figuring out correct state logic? Howso?
        • nottorp 5mo ago
          This is not HPC, they don't need to 100% use all cores. If they knew how to do a state machine, a glorified chat app needs how many threads? Maybe 4: UI, network, audio, video. And the last 2 are only needed during calls. They have 12 just because they don't know to do better. Btw with teams (the application) off there's a com.microsoft.teams2.agent there anyway. What's it for, spyware?
• stego-tech 5mo ago
  This is the biggest memory repricing cycle I've ever seen in my life; some degree of high price/limited availability and "free RAM with purchase of Doritos" cycle is always expected, but this has been the worst one yet. 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.
  • aurareturn 5mo ago
    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. My bet is that vendors will simply discontinue their low margin phones, which are usually the budget phones. 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.
• TheOtherHobbes 5mo ago
  It's impressive that somehow, as if by coincidence, we're seeing the biggest inflationary drivers for decades, perhaps for centuries, all happening simultaneously. The Iran war is spiking the price of oil and will likely cause shortages of pretty much everything if it isn't ended. The Ukraine war is helping with that by destroying Russian refining capacity. The memory shortage is set to do the same to consumer 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.
  • 7thpower 5mo ago
    Farms are failing where? More than usual?
    • bdangubic 5mo ago
      they are not failing, our Socialist President provides billions in handouts for Farmers so they gonna be just fine
      • xbmcuser 5mo ago
        if they are large corporation owned farms as many small family owned farms are going to go bankrupt in the next 2 years because of the price of fertilizer and diesel and higher interest rate.
      • Gigachad 5mo ago
        He destroys trade relations so the farmers can’t sell their produce, then bails them out by taking on more government debt so farmers can dump soybeans in a ditch. It’s all such a clown show.
      • 5mo ago
• xinayder 5mo ago
  Maybe it's time to go back to the time where computers and entertainment were niche and develop efficient resource-constrained devices.... 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.
• DaveZale 5mo ago
  I've been buying a "new" used iphone for $100-150 now, every few years, for over a decade. My "new" used Dell laptop I bought a few months ago for $40 which became a linux system in just an hour. All good here.
• doodlebugging 5mo ago
  I appreciated the detailed breakdown of the memory crunch and how it will affect parts of the industry and consumers. Very good article. I'm not one of those people who chases all the new great things. I wait until things wear out or become completely obsolete before upgrading. I just get comfortable doing things the same way every day and see no reason to waste money on SaaS shit or anything else wastes my time or money. I think the memory shortage will present opportunities for those willing to take advantage of the situation. A lot of DRAM is going into GPUs for data centers in AI work. Those units have a limited lifetime online and they will be rotated out and replaced with new units as performance degrades. I think this will be a lot like Li-ion batteries in that many of these GPUs will be perfectly fine for home pcs or small business workstations or for other less intensive use cases and the RAM will be performant enough that a viable recycling industry should arise from this AI buildout. Funny enough, one day the local AI noise-making, power-wasting, water-wasting data centers will be the best places to score high-tech components and many of us will have one right down the road. That should set a lot of people up as recyclers redistributing reconditioned components to those who build their own systems.
• p0w3n3d 5mo ago
  I heard that one company buying all the product or a majority of the product is called a monopoly practice. If a dominant buyer locks up most of the supply chain through exclusive contracts, it prevents rival companies from getting the materials they need to survive, which violates laws like Section 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act.
  • supriyo-biswas 5mo ago
    It's called a monopsony[1], regardless, antitrust regulation is famously dead under the current US administration. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopsony https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopsony
    • gbriel 5mo ago
      Regulation is dead under this current US administration (unless you pay a bribe). It's so weird this is where we are right now and most of the tech leadership has to play along even though it's technically illegal?
      • wmeredith 5mo ago
        > most of the tech leadership has to play along Many of them orchestrated the situation.
    • nathanaldensr 5mo ago
      Antitrust has been dead for decades. It spans administrations and parties.
      • fireflash38 5mo ago
        Under Biden they at least tried
        • andrekandre 5mo ago
          sometimes i wonder if thats big tech pivoted to team red...
• Animats 5mo ago
  This is another place where modern capitalism struggles in an area that requires large capital investment producing payoff after years of startup costs, and the buy side is volatile. We've seen this recently with rare earths, copper, and some other minerals. DRAM is almost in the same category. 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.
  • ahepp 5mo ago
    what share of the DRAM market does China control today?
    • Animats 5mo ago
      About 7.6%.[1] That's Changxin Memory Technologies. That makes them #4 in DRAM, after Samsung, Hynix, and Micron. They're still only a third the size of Micron, the last US manufacturer. They have a lot of scaling up to do, but they can make current-generation DRAM. Changxin just became very profitable, due to high DRAM prices. They're planning an IPO. And, of course, building more fabs. Yangtze Memory Technologies isn't as far along, but they're building a new fab and planning an IPO. Both of these companies were created in 2016 as part of a national effort to become a force in the DRAM industry. It took a while to get the technology working. Now it works, and they can scale up. [1] https://chinabizinsider.com/how-the-economics-of-the-global-dram-market-are-shifting/ https://chinabizinsider.com/how-the-economics-of-the-global-...
• agumonkey 5mo ago
  Who else thinks that this constraint will force new creative solutions. We got compression algorithms due to limitations. my 2 cents
• bit1993 5mo ago
  If electronics become too expensive for consumers, wouldn't the demand for AI also go down because consumers cant access it?
  • larsnystrom 5mo ago
    I don’t think AI demand is driven by consumers.
    • deleted 5mo ago
      [deleted]
  • s17tnet 5mo ago
    Users will have even have more dump devices and will be forced to use remote and cloud services.
    • deleted 5mo ago
      [deleted]
• einpoklum 5mo ago
  I work in healthcare imaging. The DRAM crunch is translating into significant increases in costs - because reconstructing images from raw scans is a compute-itensive process; and that gradually translates into product price increases. And then, healthcare providers may well opt for cheaper, lower-tier medical scanners, since they can't afford the better ones; and then finally you get less accurate scans if you're suspected to have cancer or whatever. So, that's another way we are financing the LLM machine and the trillion-dollar valuations of those corporate behemoths.
• einpoklum 5mo ago
  So, if you were wondering how come LLM services are cheap or gratis - now you know another group of people bearing the costs: The poorer half of humanity, who will now not be able to afford a smartphone, i.e. not having access to a computer. Sure, that doesn't kill you, but it is quite significant personally and socially.
  • azan_ 5mo ago
    That's the worst critique of AI I've ever heard, and I've heard a lot of it.
    • Hackbraten 5mo ago
      Care to share your constructive rebuttal with us?
      • azan_ 5mo ago
        Increased demand will result in more money for new hardware investments and will in the end decrease prices and provide better technology for everyone. Like it always has.
        • einpoklum 5mo ago
          I'm sure you tell homeless people on the street that their demand for housing will in the end increase availability for everyone, like it always does, so everything is fine.
          • azan_ 5mo ago
            > I'm sure you tell homeless people on the street that their demand for housing will in the end increase availability for everyone Whatever you say mate.
• nuancebydefault 5mo ago
  So the availability of cheap phones is going down because of the cost of RAM. 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.
  • account42 5mo ago
    RAM usage doesn't just depend on the software that comes with the phone but also (or even more so) on the apps the user installs and on the content - so this is something that would need an ecosystem-wide adaption not just a single vendor.
  • ponector 5mo ago
    Unless you can use apps created 10 years ago the is no sense to produce phones with old specs. Think of desktop, browser and electron applications. No way one can comfortable run modern software on 2015 machine. Maybe Linux could help, but anyway
    • dijit 5mo ago
      I think the reasoning is incomplete. 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.
    • bitmasher9 5mo ago
      My initial reaction was that old compute levels are probably good enough for modern applications, but after thinking through all of the common use cases you’re probably right. 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.
• mstralman 5mo ago
  [flagged]
• anthk 5mo ago
  Use ZRAM, seriously.
• kopirgan 5mo ago
  Very well written sub. Any prediction on when it'll end? Can Chinese companies scale up to scare the big 3 into increasing capacity or lose price control?
  • automatic6131 5mo ago
    It will end slowly, and then very suddenly. 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.
    • realusername 5mo ago
      I have the same opinion, these AI companies can't even work financially with the cheap ram prices, they certainly won't with high prices. And ram producers are betting on it, they will just milk the AI companies until they collapse.
    • andybak 5mo ago
      I'm yet to see any convincing argument that inference is subsidised in any substantial way. Training and speculative expansion are where the spend is from what I can see.
      • automatic6131 5mo ago
        If inference was profitable - they'd tell us. Msft, goog, public companies. They'd break out the numbers and show us, if they were good. 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.
      • rjh29 5mo ago
• cbdevidal 5mo ago
  The optimist in me hopes this means developers will pay more attention to memory usage in their apps.
  • Zopieux 5mo ago
    Well, not if you believe that all future software will be slop.
    • deleted 5mo ago
      [deleted]
    • cbdevidal 5mo ago
      I don’t. Also from my optimist side :-)
• Havoc 5mo ago
  Amused by all the comments about optimisation. If anything the vibe coding era will lead to the opposite
  • LatencyKills 5mo ago
    I have a friend who is VP at a major telecom company. He has no technical experience but has been using Claude to create data analysis apps. He was complaining that it took three hours to process certain datasets, so I took a look. 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.
    • sokoloff 5mo ago
      What would have happened five years ago? I suspect this VP would have gone entirely without analysis tools for these datasets or would have a department of people slowly grinding away at his long list of tickets, tickets that were poorly specified and hard to get clarity on because by the time they were worked on, he’d lost some of the context of his original request. 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.
      • LatencyKills 5mo ago
        He didn't even know that there was a solution to the performance issues. He simply assumed that processing data took that long. 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.
• 21asdffdsa12 5mo ago
  I find this deeply ironic, the revolutionary product is eating the devices the consumer who where supposed to use it on. Saturn is hungry!
  • ngcazz 5mo ago
    I feel like this has just accelerated what was the ideal scenario all along: high hardware prices push more people to rent
    • Schlagbohrer 5mo ago
      It will result in more people having to "rent" their computer from a corporate cloud. An extension of what already exists for poor gamers who stream their own games from a cloud renderer.
    • deltoidmaximus 5mo ago
      From an outside view OpenAI buying all that raw RAM certainly looked like they were buying it mostly to prevent anyone else from using it more than that they had an immediate need. I recall a Microsoft exec complaining that many of the GPUs they purchased were just sitting in a warehouse as they didn't have the power supply to actually do anything with them.
• HPsquared 5mo ago
  I wonder if aggressive swapping could help a bit. Higher performing SSDs with endurance. Unless flash memory is also being squeezed...
  • zozbot234 5mo ago
    Yes, it would be viable. Intel Optane/XPoint is wearout-resistant and has DDR3-like performance for 10% of current DRAM prices (and that's on the secondary market, since it's not being manufactured new). But it's far more power-intensive per bit read/write than even SSDs, let alone DRAM.
• wartywhoa23 5mo ago
  TIL: price rise (eng.) = repricing (newspeak).
• softwaredoug 5mo ago
  Add to this if China keeps adding pressure to Taiwan, escalating in a soft blockade, we might see something worse than what’s happening in Hormuz.
• emsign 5mo ago
  AI is choking the tech industry and the economy at large. This already has negative effects on the supply chain and profits.
• heisenbit 5mo ago
  We always knew the limits to Moore‘s Law are first and foremost economic. Given an industry used over decades to predictable lowering of price per compute function and thus swallowed any advance for new user functions and overhead when the limits are reached there is going to be a squeeze. AI scaled up at the time the production capacity became more inelastic. 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.
  • onlyrealcuzzo 5mo ago
    AI data centers are eating like 80% of memory. 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.
    • H8crilA 5mo ago
      It would make memory-poor phones more viable. Like why can't we have a 512MB, or even 256MB RAM phone. Although I doubt that the software effort would be cheaper than just buying the extra RAM. It's definitely much more uncertain.
      • zozbot234 5mo ago
        Those exist, they're just feature phones. Smartphones have to run general purpose apps and that takes RAM.
        • H8crilA 5mo ago
          That was my point, make it so that apps can run on that RAM budget. At least some apps.
          • pabs3 5mo ago
            The OpenMoko Freerunner only had 128MB RAM, it was able to run a Linux desktop of the time, Englightenment/E16. There were lots of apps for it too. IIRC the cut down QtMoko distro ran best though. https://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Neo_Freerunner https://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Neo_Freerunner https://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Applications https://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Applications https://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/QtMoko https://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/QtMoko Before that Linux ran on the Zaurus too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharp_Zaurus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharp_Zaurus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenZaurus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenZaurus
• ReptileMan 5mo ago
  God of war 2 ran on 32MB of ram. There is enough ram in the devices for any reasonable workload. Just the developers on all levels of the stack weren't bothered to give rat's ass for optimization. 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.
• fguerraz 5mo ago
  This is great news, maybe people are going to start caring about their electronic gadgets more and not treat them as disposable? Maybe longevity is going to become a criteria again?
  • Schlagbohrer 5mo ago
    The blokes in Agbogbloshie will hopefully make more money from recycled e-waste. 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.
• clearstack 5mo ago
  HBM is what makes this bifurcated. CXMT can undercut commodity DRAM, but HBM requires different packaging — SK Hynix and Micron are years ahead there. ASP gap is roughly 5x
• stasomatic 5mo ago
  "and then it’ll take you a few years of producing substandard and defective memory chips before your yields start to look competitive." 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?
  • JrProgrammer 5mo ago
    I can imagine that the process of fabrication relies on tweaking a tremendous amount of parameters. In a sense seasoning a skillet and perfecting it to the max
  • ACCount37 5mo ago
    Kind of. 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.
    • stasomatic 5mo ago
      Can a recipe be acquired and reproduced to perform correctly from the start? Say one line is performing well, can its parameters be copied over to a new one and start producing? 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.
      • ACCount37 5mo ago
• fittingopposite 5mo ago
  Like Taleb says: "I've never seen a shortage not followed by a glut." Just wondering when this time is and got how long end consumers should wait for prices to fall again strongly.
  • Ylpertnodi 5mo ago
    I'll wait forever, if necessary.
  • andriy_koval 5mo ago
    Did he ever check housing market in certain developed areas?
  • shdh 5mo ago
    Then China needs to ramp up DRAM production, because the big three won't in a significant enough fashion to bring the glut
    • fittingopposite 5mo ago
      No it's not about interesting supply. The logic is that the demand will just plummet when the general economic situation turns because we have over provisioned the datacenters
• DeathArrow 5mo ago
  >One of the most remarkable things about the last few decades is how cheap computers have gotten. >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.
• DeathArrow 5mo ago
  >All of which is to say: things are going to get a lot worse before they get better. 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.
  • shdh 5mo ago
    Same, I have 128GB of DDR, a 3090, and 5950x I was about to upgrade earlier 2025 but then held off, guess I shoulda just pulled the trigger
• pjdesno 5mo ago
  Jatin Malek on Twitter had perhaps the best explanation of the DRAM crunch: "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."
  • crazygringo 5mo ago
    That's just a snarky way to describe all business investment that requires purchasing things made in the future. It's entirely normal. 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.
    • d3rockk 5mo ago
      >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. 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.
      • anthonypasq 5mo ago
        [dead]
      • strangegecko 5mo ago
        Did they consider that profits on the build out won't be uniform, i. e. there will be some companies that go under but the rest of them will capture the profit?
• ilaksh 5mo ago
  Surely some significant fraction of the billions and billions are being spent on intensive R&D to for example increase scale of MRAM modules or radical new paradigms like nitrides-based ferroelectric compute-in-memory? 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.
• Levitating 5mo ago
  Luckily innovation in smartphones has also stagnated. I just bought a 6 year old phone (Poco X3 NFC) secondhand for 60 euro. That's barely a downgrade from my Poco X7 from last year. Poco X3 has excellent support for Ubuntu Touch, PostmarmetOS and LineageOS etc.
• nashsimulator 5mo ago
  This is such a detailed article and lesson in manufacturing complex parts and their fixed costs vs variable costs accounting lesson, and a lesson in how a product we use daily goes through the manufacturing chain and its' price, availability etc.. is influenced by a complex chain of factors.. I agree with the top poster, the title is an undersell of the full article..
• wg0 5mo ago
  That's why it is very important for these AI companies to go bust for the collective good.
  • gbgarbeb 5mo ago
    It'll definitely happen. After all, the collective hate for the oil barons 100 years ago put them out of business in a jiffy. /s
    • wg0 5mo ago
      Oil companies were profitable. Oil always burned provided there's oxygen. Price of oil was crystal clear how much you'll get for what you're paying. And nothing else was affected with supply of oil. No harm in keeping comparisons inline with the subject matter at hand.
• tim333 5mo ago
  >So it will be hard to avoid a great repricing of consumer electronics in the coming years I would have thought in the coming years they'll build more chip plants or the AI bubble will crash or some such. If there's an effect it should be greatest now.
• fsckboy 5mo ago
  since any given day here there will be a majority unconcerned or actually defending code bloat, well now, this uniinteresting topic is just chickens-coming-home-to-roost. All the benefits of Moore's law are not gone, today's prices reflect a very large N of an exponential decline of cost per bit; these price increases are linear, not even a 2nd order polynomial, so why all the angst? go to your room and clean up your code.
• ecommerceguy 5mo ago
  So does this mean all of the ram I've got piled up in a box is not worthless anymore?
• arikrahman 5mo ago
  It's bad when even Samsung is not even able to negotiate an agreement with Samsung.
• try-working 5mo ago
  The Big 3 memory producers are really super charging their Chinese competitors CXMT and YMTC. They will IPO this year and they will be able to get massive funding for their build outs. If the Big 3 had been more prudent, they could have kept profits lower and avoided this, but now they've probably dug their own grave and will see massive decline in profits starting from 2027/2028 when Chinese capacity really comes online.
  • lmz 5mo ago
    The article has examples from history of overexpansion and crashes. Would rapidly expanding (or keeping profits lower(??)) be beneficial long term for the Big 3? I bet they think it's better to bank the surplus now. The Chinese will have to get their investment back somehow too after the expansion spend.
    • try-working 5mo ago
      Well, they're about to lose massive market share to CXMT and YMTC.
      • lmz 5mo ago
        If they're screwed either way then the rational solution is to bank the extra cash. Then at least they would have cash at the end of it. If they are production constrained how would reducing profits help in any way?
        • zargon 5mo ago
          We wouldn't be switching to Chinese manufactured memory if Korean & US memory wasn't exorbitantly priced. They're forcing the switch.
          • lmz 5mo ago
            It's a capacity constraint. It's either consumers switch or the HBM buyers switch and I know which one I'd prioritize.
• anigbrowl 5mo ago
  I feel confident in predicting there will be a glut in 5 years.
• norikaoda 5mo ago
  [flagged]
• KronisLV 5mo ago
  Two predictions. The people responsible for throwing the consumer segment under the bus will see no repercussions for this - nobody is going to jail, consumers get screwed. The memory prices will never return to the pre-shortage prices. They’ll use this as an excuse to subtly increase the base prices and the orgs that sell the devices will also do a similar increase, also past what the BOM changed by.
• noborutakahashi 5mo ago
  [flagged]
• DoctorOetker 5mo ago
  did I understand the article correctly? "Because of all the peripheral circuits and all the vertical channels, a single gigabyte of HBM consumes more than three times the wafer capacity that a gigabyte of DDR or LPDDR does. Every gigabyte of HBM produced is, in effect, three gigabytes of commodity memory not produced." Is this true or conflating wafer area with process steps? If the bottleneck isn't process steps but wafer area, you'd expect the semiconductor boule growers to rake in all the profit, not the memory makers themselves (although they would see more revenue). I'm not hearing about Umicore or other semiconductor corps raking in big under a wafer shortage. Thats why I ask the question if this is actually correct. If correct, it really makes one wonder what would be more productive for machine learning community X PB of HBM vs 3X PB of conventional (LP)DDR RAM, or somewhere in between. By giving a couple of big players carte blanche financially, has allowed the decision to divide in 3 global memory capacity (in units of terrabytes manufactured per day say)? The singularity that slows itself down?