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stuxnet79yesterday at 8:49 PM2 repliesview on HN

While I share your optimism, I still don't fully understand why a crash will necessarily lead to an oversupply and lower prices for regular consumers. The components / RAM you are referencing are for enterprise use / data centers which in my limited understanding is not a 1:1 swap for the kind of components that your smartphone / car / fridge / gaming rig use. I would love for someone more informed than me to spell out the rationale here.

It seems the chokehold started from the very beginning of the supply chain (wafers), so if a crash were to occur I don't see how we wouldn't be doubly screwed. Lots of worthless enterprise gear being shopped on eBay + a scarcity of consumer grade components leading to sustained high prices.


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greggoByesterday at 9:37 PM

My understanding is that it's fundamentally a fab capacity limit. At a given node size/technology (think 7nm, etc) they can only output so many wafers. If AI data centers are generating enormous demand for memory, then that's what those wafers are going to be used to for, unless they can be outcompeted, hence higher prices.

I'm not actually sure if enterprise designated memory is equivalent or not to consumer designated. Could be they are the same just packaged differently and/or with better binning. Either way, it's the same supply/demand dynamic at work.

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matt-pyesterday at 9:43 PM

Datacentre NVMe disk is still usable in a standard desktop. Sever memory less so, but essentially if there were no 'new' server market whatsoever then you could redirect 100% of memory production to consumer chips without enormous upheaval.

By the way I personally think this scenario is very unlikely to happen.

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