- gramie@lemmy.caEnglish6 days
It’s obviously to Lenovo’s benefit to have people believe that RAM prices will not drop, so that they will not wait out the current price surge.
The price will drop if supply exceeds demand, and if competition increases.
- SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.caEnglish6 days
Supply demand economics was a great concept in grade 8, but in the real world, price fixing and monopolies rule unchecked.
6 daysMyth vs reality type thing. A charitable thing to say is that its an incomplete theory. There are political interests to keep it that way.
- cardfire@sh.itjust.worksEnglish5 days
Imagine if all of us cared about the regulatory capture rampant in the baby formula industry they gave us that US baby formula crisis at the start of the decade, as much as we care about our computer memory.
Don’t you worry if it pops they will just slow down the factories, or close them and fire people to get it stay as where they are.
not if companies go broke
That’s what a bubble popping is. NVidia is over-inflated. AI datacenters are over-inflated. The bubble will pop, many will go out of business, and all of their hardware will be liquidated.
- cardfire@sh.itjust.worksEnglish5 days
Realistically, a whole lot of the high bandwidth memory products that they are producing will never find their way into consumer products.
When the dotcom bubble popped there were a lot of Assets in by products which could be adopted by other companies or distributed to a wide array of potential users, but the E-Waste and byproducts of this era are going to be niche and esoteric.
I think a lost decade is much more likely than a Renaissance of repurposing.
I’m just hoping the big three memory manufacturers that have essentially contracted all of their volumes across the next several Cycles will be able to survive whatever collapse hits their account receivable when they’ve done exactly what they said they would but the people with the purchase orders leave them holding the bag.
- Zink@programming.devEnglish6 days
The trump administration has determined that it is critical to national security that americans play all new games at medium graphics settings or lower.
- 6 days
It is critical to national profits. I wonder how trump’s kids are involved in this like every other scheme he rigs.
- cardfire@sh.itjust.worksEnglish5 days
Thinking about that is most of the packagers for RAM are in china. Even if that silicon wasn’t pressed in china, the company that actually buys up the modules slaps them on dims or sodiums, and ships them with custom Packaging are in China.
There is a whole middle step that most of us are completely missing, between the actual memory manufacturers and the distributors.
- pinball_wizard@lemmy.zipEnglish5 days
Expect an import ban on Chinese made ram to be coming soon.
Yes. I do half-way expect that.
Of course, I also look forward to investing in novelty keychains, which just coincidentally come with a free teddy bear, which itself has a couple of RAM sticks sewn inside.
- GoatSynagogue@lemmy.worldEnglish7 days
I have a work issued Lenovo Thinkpad P14S Gen6 AMD with a Ryzen 9 AI, 2TB nvme, and 64GB of GDDR5 RAM. It cost $2600 last October.
Went to buy more of them for other devs last week as their Dells are just hot garbage and are being refunded, who wants to guess what the price of the exact same machine though Lenovo directly again is now?
$6800.
Absolutely insane.
- elucubra@sopuli.xyzEnglish7 days
The article ignores several points.
First, this is one of the conditions where capitalism actually works. Many players in the field dropped out because of the razor thin margins of the past. Fabs take years to ramp up, and are insanely expensive to set up, so getting in to take advantage of a temporary shortage was an unacceptable risk. Now there is a decade(s) long projected shortage, making the investment attractive again. Plenty of players have experience in Fabs, even though they are not up to date.
Also, the market is going to accept that slightly slower ram is quite fine in many applications, and they are easier to make. DDR5/6 is really not that important. I have an AM4 Ryzen 9 with 64Gb DDR4 that flies, I mean the thing cooks! This environment is going to make Chinese Fabs competitive in the mid-term, and give them the opportunity to catch up, especially since the Chinese government subsidizes whole sectors to catch up, and often surpass the west (see EVs, solar, airliners, etc.) maybe they’ll take years to get there, and maybe they won’t match the very top end, but they’ll take over.
We are going to have a shortage and obscene prices, but not as long or hard as doomsayers scream.
Another factor is that the AI bubble is going to pop. LLMs are a dead end, and are already at an extreme diminishing returns point. There is no way the major players are going to recoup investment, and the market will eventually wake up. Open source models are at single digit distance of the most powerful commercial models, so much of the resources are going to shift to in-house.
JEPA is one of the next steps in AI, and is way less hardware intensive. There are several new approaches to AI that are way less hardware intensive. LLMs are plain brute force approaches, and evolution makes efficiency a major goal.
- FukOui@lemmy.zipEnglish6 days
Depends on government policy also I guess. What would most likely happen is for US gov to continue sanction Chinese companies like what they did to cxmt and ymtc to stifle competition and keep prices artificially high
- SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.caEnglish6 days
No one is going to stop you from importing a 32 GB DIMM in your anus.
- cardfire@sh.itjust.worksEnglish5 days
Family trip from Asia? That’s 128gb right there.
I bet I could quadruple it with sodimms. That’s probably why AMD is requiring solder on memory for Strix Halo.
This is your example of capitalism working? Then I don’t want to see it failing.
- cardfire@sh.itjust.worksEnglish5 days
My friend, have you seen the markets? You’re seeing how capitalism works because it fails.
The benefits are privatized. The losses are socialized. Lather, rinse repeat.
- elucubra@sopuli.xyzEnglish6 days
Yes. Capitalism is not bad, it’s actually a sane approach. The problem is when left unchecked, which is the state’s duty, but fucked up by politicians, in the pockets of oligarchs. Have you read Adam Smith? Both Smith’s and Marxs’ thesis fail beacuse they depend and assume inherent good in people, while in reality greed is the driving force in economics, and fuck all else.
Yeah any extra fabs able to produce ‘last gen’ DDR4 would have a big impact.
- eleitl@lemmy.zipEnglish6 days
AI will remain a massively parallel numerics affair with enormous data sets and monstrous memory bandwidth and network crossection. And according energy consumption. Jevon’s paradox will eat any efficiency improvements.
- elucubra@sopuli.xyzEnglish6 days
Only if LLMs are the only option. A paradigm change is coming. It’s like what happened when European and Japanese performance cars started to take on American muscle cars or SpaceX (yeah I hate the Nazitard too) started recovering rockets and reusing them, or PCs started replacing mainframe workstations…
- eleitl@lemmy.zipEnglish6 days
Look at the enormous processing resources of biological brains. Human brain is 2% of body mass but 20% of baseline metabolism – this is very expensive evolutionary. Neural hardware used for LLMs or just any scientific numerics accelerator is just a bad reinvention. Your argument reminds me of Minsky’s “5 MIPS is enough for AI”. Nope. You have to track a lot of state, its relationships and refresh it all very quickly. Computation is expensive.
- SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.caEnglish6 days
There is some question as to whether those rockets are actually being reused.
- elucubra@sopuli.xyzEnglish4 days
Really? Where could I find information about that? If the rockets (first stage) weren’t reused, there is no way that SpaceX could charge the Kg to orbit prices they charge.
- 6 days
I do hope that all the LLM companies have research teams that are investigating alternatives to LLMs as we know it today, rather than just how to make the existing LLMs more efficient/better.
The whole technology of how LLMs work seems flawed to the core, e.g hallucinations.
- chilicheeselies@lemmy.worldEnglish7 days
Quite frankly, we abuse ram anyways. So much software uses way more ram than is actually necessary. I think this may be a catalyst to software fundamentals. Doing far more with far less.
It’s the only thing we are empowered to do, buy less ram and use software that runs smoothly with less ram.
- TheBlackLounge@lemmy.zipEnglish7 days
I was lucky I was forced to upgrade to 32gb right before the bubble, because my new job uses Jira with too many plugins.
- greyscale@lemmy.grey.oooEnglish7 days
That is a hillarious and deeply depressing reason for someone to have 32GB of RAM.
A work planner should work in 32M not 32G…
- moustachio@lemmy.worldEnglish7 days
We should dismantle AI companies and their data center expansion plans and see if RAM still is so expensive.
- zqps@sh.itjust.worksEnglish7 days
At work we were upgraded to 16GB last cycle. 8GB would’ve been plenty if not for all the shit that forcibly runs in the background. Now even the 16GB models are struggling, and I mean struggling sometimes. While my userspace apps use less than 2GB.
I’m going to guess you’re talking about Windows, correct? I work on a laptop (must be about 5 years old already) that I brought up to 64 GB RAM when I bought it (it was way cheaper than ordering with that, so I got it with 8 and then upgraded) only because sometimes I play on it. But when steam is not running and I’m just working, I’ve never seen it use over 2.7GB of RAM. Evidently, it has always run on some Linux distros (PopOS, Fedora, EndeavourOS and now CachyOS). The world is rigged to make all these things artificially expensive. Windows is a resouce-hogging malware that costs money, the computer parts manufacturers inflate prices to see if they can get away with it, the computer manufacturers go with that and then do the same, and we end up paying 10 dollars for what should otherwise be 1 dollar. As another person said, I also believe this will allow China RAM to catch up, which will end up flooding the market with same quality products, if not better, at way better prices. This will probably take a couple of years, but with their government subsidizing technology and most of their international markets the way they are in China, the funds will be readily available. Plus, China companies tend to enter difficult markets at a loss to take a good place if necessary, which is great for consumers. Just look at the blow they put on Mercedes, BMW and Porsche last year in Germany with BYD. Things will get better for us on the RAM front, it will just take a while.
Yeah, most people can probably be totally okay with 16GB (~150€ new, 50€ ddr4 used) too!
We seem to have forgotten that RAM has always been ludicrously expensive, except for a little while a couple of years ago.
- chilicheeselies@lemmy.worldEnglish6 days
16GB feels so low, but if we have to make due then the software we run needs to be crafted better. It’s entirely possible. Also ddr4 is plenty good. I wager no one can tell the difference between ddr5 and 4 or even 3 honestly
- boonhet@sopuli.xyzEnglish7 days
Also true.
But if you choose to run software that uses a lot of RAM, ask yourself why you haven’t created an alternative that doesn’t use a lot of RAM. If the answer is “I don’t have the time to”, then that’s probably also why the developer hasn’t made it use less RAM.
The answer to that question is that they’re either lazy, ignorant or both. :D
In all seriousness. I can imagine that a lot of developers who work on commercial products are given about 20% of the time and resources needed to make a good product. I don’t blame them for doing what it takes to not get fired.
That’s why libre source software is so important!
- boonhet@sopuli.xyzEnglish5 days
Yeah turns out that RAM is cheap and dev time is expensive. Compared to what devs charge their employers in western countries, RAM is STILL cheap.
With libre software, your employer isn’t bleeding money for every day spent on optimization.
- chilicheeselies@lemmy.worldEnglish6 days
It’s more likely they are not incentivized to. When you are writing software for a living, typically there days the companies you work for prioritize delivery speed over everything else. If they prioritized memory constraints, software would use less memory.
When you are rewarded for features and delivery, you end up with shit like electron. Not to even begin talking about how a whole generation of developers learned to code for the web and never touch os level dev…
- boonhet@sopuli.xyzEnglish4 days
Well why would they prioritize memory constraints? It has literally no change to their bottom line.
Say you’re paying an engineer 100k a year. Reasonable cost in a western country, US based would be more like 200k+ when taxes and everything are involved. Tell him to spend 20% of his time optimizing memory usage.
Now how much money are you spending to increase your userbase by maybe 0.01% (there can’t be that many people who’d uninstall software they need just because it uses more RAM than they’d like)? And that’s for every engineer you tell to spend time optimizing.
Memory consumption only becomes important to the authors of the software when it’s on the backend and you’re serving so many users that your annual server costs get into millions, at which point you can save enough money that optimization is starting to be worth it.
It sucks, but it is what it is. For everyone to start building super optimized software again, we’d all first have to move to 512 MB Pentium 4 machines so using more memory would actually mean lost revenue via lost customers.
- ragebutt@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish7 days
Optimization will actually get much worse because software will be designed to run “in the cloud” on servers that have much more resources than the average budget pc or smartphone that 90% of users use for computing. You will own nothing etc etc
- chilicheeselies@lemmy.worldEnglish6 days
Software has been running in the cloud for nearly 2 decades at this point. But yes, I get your point. Their master plan is to get us all on terminals and use their clouds as a giant mainframe more or less.
Doesn’t have to be that way though. Not all tech needs to be the latest and greatest. So long as it’s secure and is feature complete who cares how it looks.
Ironically, with LLMs at our disposal, making new software is easier than ever. In the hands of skilled engineers tasks that took weeks take days. It’s more realistic now for a single dev to sit down with a goal like “let’s remake X software, but a 10mb memory limit”. We can prototype this kind of stuff faster than ever, so we can use the very tools causing this problem to solve this problem.
- 🌸𝓯𝓵𝓸𝔀𝓮𝓻🌸@sh.itjust.worksEnglish7 days
I think this may be a catalyst to software fundamentals.
It’s not that fundamental. It’s just corporations skipping the optimizing step and just shipping because that looks better for their project deadline and budget. As long as complaining is limited and sales don’t drop they don’t care.
- chilicheeselies@lemmy.worldEnglish6 days
Agreed. Only way this happens is either open source, or new companies that recognize it as a competitive advantage. Get new users to favor your software, they grow up to get jobs and advocate for it there. It’s a gamble and a long game though
- Etterra@discuss.onlineEnglish7 days
Oh course not. Why lower them when they can keep the prices high and pocket the profits? When you live in hell you can’t expect the devil to not profit on the vices.
- Fedditor385@lemmy.worldEnglish6 days
Oh, I better then go ahead and buy them at high prices before it turns out in 2-3 years that he was wrong.
- SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.caEnglish6 days
LOL. The biggest area of tech investing right now is alternative video cards and RAM for the home consumer market. The Wang dropped the ball on what made the company chasing a Ponzi scheme. This is so ripe for perturbation.
See Bolt Graphics…dual PCI connect options, upgradable VRAM, non proprietary hardware…
Yeah, I’ll be there waiting for them to rotate their inventory at a loss when it does go down. Meanwhile, fuck Lenovo.
- Captain_Patchy@lemmy.worldEnglish7 days
Lenovo is not a manufacturer of ANYTHING below motherboards (pc or laptop) .
Their opinions need to be looked at through that lens and no other.
- blargh513@sh.itjust.worksEnglish6 days
As an old person, I recall a time period when there were lots of so-called RAM optimization software packages out there. It would be interesting to see if that sort of thing makes a comeback.
Yes, the operating system is far better at managing resources than back then, but I’d bet that lots of fun new malware will sprout up masked as such.
- cardfire@sh.itjust.worksEnglish5 days
I remember diligently installing cash clearing apps and religiously matching that button to make it go back to zero, believing I was speeding up my old Barton core xp-2500+
- MochiGoesMeow@lemmy.zipEnglish6 days
Get the Lenovo worker who said this. We shall dip him slowly into a volcano until he changes his mind.
