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Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening

(www.buysellram.com)
160 points redohmy | 1 comments | 15 Nov 25 02:45 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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mrsilencedogood ◴[21 Nov 25 21:22 UTC] No.46009135[source]▶
All I can say is,

- the insane frothing hype behind AI is showing me a new kind of market failure - where resources can be massively misallocated just because some small class of individuals THINK or HOPE it will result in massive returns. Even if it squeezes out every single other sector that happens to want to use SDRAM to do things OTHER than buffer memory before it's fed into a PCIE lane for a GPU.

- I'm really REALLY glad i decided to buy brand new gaming laptops for my wife and I just a couple months ago, after not having upgraded our gaming laptops for 7 and 9 years respectively. It seems like gamers are going to have this the worst - GPUs have been f'd for a long time due to crypto and AI, and now even DRAM isn't safe. Plus SSD prices are going up too. And unlike many other DRAM users where it's a business thing and they can to some degree just hike prices to cover - gamers are obviously not running businesses. It's just making the hobby more expensive.

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epistasis ◴[21 Nov 25 21:43 UTC] No.46009325[source]▶
It is a weird form of centralized planning. Except there's no election to get on to the central committee, it's like in the Soviet era where you had to run in the right circles and have sway in them.

There's too much group-think in the executive class. Too much forced adoption of AI, too much bandwagon hopping.

The return-to-office fad is similar, a bunch of executives following the mandates of their board, all because there's a few CEOs who were REALLY worked up about it and there was a decision that workers had it too easy. Watching the executive class sacrifice profits for power is pretty fascinating.

Edit: A good way to decentralize the power and have better decision making would be to have less centralized rewards in the capital markets. Right now are living through a new gilded age with a few barons running things, because we have made the rewards too extreme and too narrowly distributed. Most market economics assumes that there's somewhat equal decision making power amongst the econs. We are quickly trending away from that.

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automatic6131 ◴[21 Nov 25 22:14 UTC] No.46009619[source]▶
We need better antitrust and anti-monopoly enforcement. Break up the biggest companies, and then they'll have to actually participate in markets.
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fpoling ◴[21 Nov 25 22:31 UTC] No.46009804[source]▶
I think a better solution is exponential tax on a company size. I.e. once a company starts to earn above, say, 1 billion, it will be taxed by income by ever increasing amount. Or put it another way, use taxes to break the power law and winner takes effect all into a Gaussian distribution of company sizes.
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philipkglass ◴[21 Nov 25 23:47 UTC] No.46010492[source]▶
This would permanently increase DRAM prices. Memory fabricators either earn billions of dollars in income each year or they can't keep going. There are no little Mom and Pop businesses that can do photolithography on leading process nodes.
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octoberfranklin ◴[22 Nov 25 00:10 UTC] No.46010660[source]▶
Nonsense, it would force vertical de-integration.

Chip fabs used to be like book publishers; you don't have to own a printing press to be an author. Carver Mead even described his vision of the industry that way.

Nowadays you have to get your cell libraries and a large chunk of your toolchain from the fab. Of course it's laundered through cadence+synopsys, but it's still coming from the fab. You have to buy your masks from the fab (heck they aren't even allowed to leave the fab so do you really own them?). And on and on.

For the record I don't agree with the "exponential" part, but otherwise this is an underappreciated and powerful technique.

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1. philipkglass ◴[22 Nov 25 00:19 UTC] No.46010727{3}[source]▶
In another comment you proposed a sane version of the parent proposal. I wouldn't have commented if fpoling had originally floated that scheme. I was mainly objecting to drastically increasing taxes "once a company starts to earn above, say, 1 billion" without regard for the minimum viable scale of different businesses.