Comment by simonw
20 hours ago
The headline here under-serves the article in my opinion: this is a fascinating, deep explanation of how the memory market works and why increased demand for HBM (used by big GPU racks) hurts the availability of wafers for DDR and LPDDR (used by laptops and phones).
This also put a lot into perspective:
> these memory makers have learned a very particular lesson from the unforgiving history [deep drops in demand] of their industry: always leave demand unmet
I can't blame them for keeping some reserve demand ready so they keep having customers over the years.
I wonder if this is actually true in the long-term though. If they were to flood the market with lots of high capacity memory, then I think our programs would start using more memory too. As a result we might end up needing more memory faster compared to if they keep demand unmet.
Just consider that a chat application today takes more memory than a full 3D game with thousands of users (including chat) + the operating system used to ~20 years ago. If 128 GB of RAM were the norm then there's a chance we might expect to buy 128 GB of RAM too.
But I suppose it's really a question of how many dollars we expect to spend on memory rather than the specific amounts of memory.
They are running fabs at 100% capacity. New fabs take many years to build, cost billions, and are out of date within a few process moves.
One cannot simply "flood the market" or the Chinese would have done it ages ago.
1 reply →
For older hacker news readers who have lived through multiple RAM price spikes - it has held true for decades so far. Making memory is one of the most vicious tech markets to compete in.
1 reply →
"I wonder if this is actually true in the long-term though. If they were to flood the market with lots of high capacity memory, then I think our programs would start using more memory too. As a result we might end up needing more memory faster compared to if they keep demand unmet."
It's a gambler's ruin problem. Future profits are worth zero if you go out of business first.
I think that Slack's memory usage is "not bad" at ~300MB just because Discord exists, and somehow that seems to get into the gigabytes before even looking at a message.
3 replies →
Lots of people have bought baseline 32/64 GB ram in their laptops for a long time (the last few laptops).
Applications can be lazy and grow to the amount of resources using, but the real need for maximum ram is using it for these new purposes.
[dead]
I'm no expert analyst on this topic, but I'm worried this time might be different for them. China finally has the technological capability to challenge this time around and they will gobble up the unmet demand, allowing them to get more experience and more money to catch up.
> always leave demand unmet
And then allow small low cost manufacturers to get the rest of the market... like China has been doing this whole time.
Agentic workflows and computer use. You still need regular servers for the agents to use.
This author has outstanding articles regularly