2027 memory capacity is reportedly sold out

(ign.com)

54 points | by inigyou 1 hour ago

12 comments

  • xg15 2 minutes ago
    How to fight the war on general computation:

    Method 1: Spend decades pushing elaborate technical standards for locking down bootloaders, try to convince society why we need device attestation and hardware-bound keys, gradually establish devices without root access as the norm, get into constant skirmishes with free software and privacy advocates, get drawn into unpleasant political quagmires, etc etc

    Method 2: Just buy up all the RAM...

  • Schlagbohrer 2 minutes ago
    Amazon has implemented a password system for RAM delivery. You're supposed to give a password to the deliverer before taking delivery of the RAM, and you're not supposed to send the password over the phone at all (although the Amazon delivery guy still called me and asked for it over the phone).
  • chvid 13 minutes ago
    I saw on Twitter that TSMC has made 1B worth of chips for Apple that they cannot package because of missing memory.

    (PS: It is time to let ASML sell to CXMT.)

  • amelius 20 minutes ago
    How am I going to buy a computer that connects to AI datacenters now?
  • guessmyname 1 hour ago
    • zarzavat 15 minutes ago
      Note to the momentarily shocked: this is in Canadian dollars.
  • gaigalas 1 minute ago
    The fact that consumer-level DDR4 is getting more expensive makes absolutely no market sense to me.
  • tosti 57 minutes ago
    All those devs who were saying "ram is cheap" BTFO.
    • jbverschoor 17 minutes ago
      Thanks to AI, we can now one-shot convert electron to native apps ;-)
    • amelius 43 minutes ago
      Bad times for the two-space copying garbage collectors.
      • pjc50 32 minutes ago
        Are there any of those left? The popular VMs for Java, Javascript and dotnet are all very mature heavily tuned designs.
    • rock_artist 49 minutes ago
      That's tech... Moore Law was steadily going until raw CPU got stuck for a few years, switching from single core to multicore then heterogeneous cpus, all those requiring to rewrite software in a scalable manner and then consider newer schedulers switching between performance/efficiency cores and changing CPU freqs.

      Also, you have Meta and Google investing in simplified performant versions of their stack for developing countries which is similar.

      What's funny though, I see people that sometimes says it's cheaper to build the app they need in a single prompt than to search for it.

      • eru 2 minutes ago
        You know that Moore's law is about transistor count? What worked really well for CPU in eg the 1990s was Dennard scaling. That drove the Hz higher. And Dennard scaling is what stopped working.

        Moore's law is alive and well.

  • PeterStuer 1 hour ago
    Isn't scalping illegal in some countries?
    • inigyou 56 minutes ago
      Buying and selling at market price is rarely illegal. I think in the USSR it might be?
      • chupasaurus 21 minutes ago
        It was legal in USSR for USSR to scalp though, depends on point of view.
    • actionfromafar 1 hour ago
      Isn't scalping a term used for tickets? Also, these companies supposedly intend to actually use the RAM they ordered, not reselling at some inflated price.

      It's all fair game IMHO, except the elephant in the room which is that the AI company bubble might pop.

      • GoblinSlayer 15 minutes ago
        Then we'll have a lot of cheap RAM.
      • AussieWog93 47 minutes ago
        I don't see the AI bubble popping any time soon (as in, not in terms of physical datacenter buildout - stock prices could fall). Even if progress hits a brick wall, we still have multiple years of just expanding out the models we have to more people in more industries.
  • WithinReason 51 minutes ago
    This hopefully helps mitigate the risk of putting more production capacity in place, which the Big 3 were not willing to do so far.
    • pjc50 29 minutes ago
      At this size, I think we have to start worrying about a 2008-type default risk. AI companies will have ordered all the RAM and paid some kind of deposit for that, but actually taking delivery and paying for it is still in the future and the sums of capital involved are extremely large.
      • inigyou 15 minutes ago
        That's the reason RAM companies aren't expanding. Worst case, they can sell their normal production to gamers.
      • nixon_why69 27 minutes ago
        Also there is a ton of debt flying around, its not just equities hurting VC funds, real banks are facing risks now.
  • AmbroseBierce 6 minutes ago
    Turns out AI-maxxing implicates citizens-minning.