I saw on Twitter that TSMC has made 1B worth of chips for Apple that they cannot package because of missing memory.<p>(PS: It is time to let ASML sell to CXMT.)
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).
How am I going to buy a computer that connects to AI datacenters now?
Keep an eye on this page → <a href="https://ca.pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/" rel="nofollow">https://ca.pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/</a>
All those devs who were saying "ram is cheap" BTFO.
<a href="https://dam.stanford.edu/memory-prices.html" rel="nofollow">https://dam.stanford.edu/memory-prices.html</a><p>Pretty sure those devs were saying the same thing way before 2017 as well, which seems to be ~ the last time RAM was this expensive.<p>Now RAM in the <i>cloud</i>, now you're really paying the Java premium.
Thanks to AI, we can now one-shot convert electron to native apps ;-)
Bad times for the two-space copying garbage collectors.
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.<p>Also, you have Meta and Google investing in simplified performant versions of their stack for developing countries which is similar.<p>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.
This hopefully helps mitigate the risk of putting more production capacity in place, which the Big 3 were not willing to do so far.
At this size, I think we have to start worrying about a 2008-type default risk. AI companies will have <i>ordered</i> 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.
What kind of default risk?<p>What we got in 2008 was central banks (eg Fed and ECB) willfully collapsing nominal GDP in their economies. Have a look at the dot-com bust or Black Monday for comparison.
That's the reason RAM companies aren't expanding. Worst case, they can sell their normal production to gamers.
Also there is a ton of debt flying around, its not just equities hurting VC funds, real banks are facing risks now.
The fact that consumer-level DDR4 is getting more expensive makes absolutely no market sense to me.
Isn't scalping illegal in some countries?
Buying and selling at market price is rarely illegal. I think in the USSR it might be?
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.<p>It's all fair game IMHO, except the elephant in the room which is that the AI company bubble might pop.
Then we'll have a lot of cheap RAM.
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.
Turns out AI-maxxing implicates citizens-minning.
How to fight the war on general computation:<p>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<p>Method 2: Just buy up all the RAM...