alt Hacker NewsRAM now represents 35 percent of bill of materials for HP PCs
Comments
If you are on Linux you can 'download' some RAM. Enable zram, configure sysctl variables to make good use of it.
Note that it won't help you if your workload makes use of all your RAM at once.
If you have a bunch of stuff running in the background it will help a lot.
I get 2 to 3 compression factor at all times with zstd. I calculated the utility to be as if I had 20GB extra RAM for what I do.
I think Europe should invest into manufacturing RAM. RAM isn't going anywhere, all of modern compute uses it. This would be an opportunity to create domestic supply of it.
i am working on my side-product [1] where i was exploring a Rockchip which required external memory (just 1G) which went from $3 to $32 and completely destroyed economics for me. I settled with one with embedded memory and optimizing my code instead :)
Maybe this RAMmageddon will trigger a wave of optimized softwares that don't need GBs of memory for anything and everything.
Only a matter of time before you hear about missing shipping trucks being stolen. China is opening up more production, but I don’t see any relief coming soon.
I might not have bought NVDA or timed BTC correctly, but at least I have 512 GB of DDR5 in my server and 128 GB in my Macbook Pro haha. The reality is that these are insanely huge amounts of RAM. I'm glad to have them because I don't need these tab suspender extensions a bunch of my friends use, but really I'd prefer if GPUs were a bit cheaper, and server hardware was generally easier to get. An SXM5 based motherboard is really hard to get these days despite the fact that you can get super powered Epyc 9755s for comparatively nothing.
It reminds me of the heady days of Thai floods when hard drives were inaccessible.
"Bill of materials" (BOM) is not a monetary invoice, only an itemization of constituent parts. :)
Jeez. I'm glad I "splurged" for the 24gb RAM in my macbook air. Should last me a few more years..
Isn't there a full wafer ai chip mainframe for data centers now that blows anything needing ram out of the water? I don't understand the ram shortage exists companies have surpassed nvidia.
I think China is about to step in and take every last bit of non-ai market share, and then when the bubble bursts companies like micron and samsung are going to be begging governments for a bail out.
90s: so little memory, programmers have to optimize their code to run properly.
2010s: so much memory, programmers used electron and chrome wrapping everything in js.
2026: so little memory, programmers have to optimize AI code to run properly.
Is there any hope for RAM to stabilize in prices again?
Will this RAM shortage also affect the price of mobile phones?
Recently order a number of machines with 32Gb of RAM. Wanted 64, was told prices couldn't be guaranteed nor could delivery dates. Under the pressure of urgency settled for whatever was available that day.
Expensive PCs/homeservers means more people on mobile crap + someone cloud, means students who do not learn PCs FLOSS when they have time and so on. That's the real point.
>AI-driven “end-to-end planning processes"
Behold, the RAM cost is being optimized with AI.
A conspiracy theory I’m entertaining right now is that hogging RAM manufacturing by AI companies is not so much because they _need_ the RAM, but because they want to cripple existing and potential competitors, and that includes on-device models.
One thing that might support this is the fact AI companies are purchasing uncut wafers of DRAM. One use might be to hoard and stockpile them somewhere in a cave, so that no one else gets to them.
Another thing that might support this is that precisely the same strategy had been in use by software companies during the COVID hiring fever. Companies used to hire people for ridiculous pay with little actual work to perform so that among other things, competitors wouldn’t whisk those people away and be at an advantage.
This, of course, ended with massive layoffs once the reckoning came about, and I’m wondering about what is going to happen when (there’s no “if”) the reckoning comes for big AI, too.
I think we’re at the peak, or close to it for these memory shenanigans. OpenAI who is largely responsible for the shortage, just doesn’t have the capital to pay for it. It’s only a matter of time before chickens come home to roost and the bill is due. OpenAI is promising hundreds of billions in capex but has no where near that cash on hand, and its cash flow is abysmal considering the spend.
Unless there is a true breakthrough, beyond AGI into super intelligence on existing, or near term, hardware— I just don’t see how “trust me bro,” can keep its spending party going. Competition is incredibly stiff, and it’s pretty likely we’re at the point of diminishing returns without an absolute breakthrough.
The end result is going to be RAM prices tanking in 18-24 months. The only upside will be for consumers who will likely gain the ability to run much larger open source models locally.
Big tech wants all the chips and they get them. That is Stalinist level of absurd planning.
People is missing the point. Mega-corporations distort the market. This is not capitalism this is old aristocratic ruling by power. If all these monopolies were divided in smaller chunks and regulated to not allow them to abuse that power we will not be here.
This situation is not normal, big tech is currently above the law and above the market economy and if they fail their plan is to make us pay *AGAIN* for their bad decisions. All businesses and individuals are already paying higher prices for big tech folly, we will be left with the bill when the AI boom fails, too.
[dead]
This is a fairly odd statement given that BOMs are managed in manufacturing systems and for accounting and engineering purposes in multiple different ways. This can be for anything to do with sales data for a client or for guys on the factory floor or for the accountants. There are sales BOMs, manufacturing BOMs procurement BOMs and nested BOMs etc all for different parts of the business process...you would have BOMs within the organisation that were probably nearly 70% etc or those that were 0%!
I asked ChatGPT directly how it was fair that OpenAI bought 40% of the world’s RAM supply.
It denied this saying that the figures quoted were estimates only, that such massive RAM contracts would be easily obtainable public knowledge and that primarily the recent price increases were mostly cyclical in nature.
Any truth to this?
Edit to add: I am actually curious; I was under the impression that this 40% story going around was true and confirmed, rather than just hyperbole or speculation.
I had my formative years in programming when memory usage was something you still worried about as a programmer. And then memory expanded so much that all kinds of “optimal” patterns for programming just become nearly irrelevant. Will we start to actually consider this in software solutions again as a result?