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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 HB
by simonw 6mo 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 6mo agoThis author has outstanding articles regularly
- gblargg 6mo agoThis 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 6mo agoI'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 6mo agoI 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 6mo agoI 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 6mo ago[deleted]
- Scoundreller 6mo agoToo much of IRC has been lost to Discord :(
- tracker1 6mo agoLiberaChat FTW!
- daymanstep 6mo agoYeah everything is a browser app now gotta ship a whole browser engine even for a simple messaging app.
- picsao 6mo ago[dead]
- j45 6mo agoLots 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 6mo 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 6mo 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 agoIt'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 agoHow does that work in practice though? There’s a central “RAM Oversight Council” that checks that no one sells too much?
- nullpoint420 6mo agoAgentic workflows and computer use. You still need regular servers for the agents to use.