Comment by gblargg
13 hours ago
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 New fabs take many years to build, cost billions, and are out of date within a few process moves.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.
> and are out of date within a few process moves.
The fabs themselves (especially for memory) are being retooled for process moves. At least that's what micron has been doing.
But otherwise I agree. Micron has a new fab being built that was started around 2020. It's nowhere near finished.
The Chinese memory makers have been sabotaged by USA, otherwise they would have already "flooded the market" and reduced the prices.
Even so, the production of cheaper Chinese DDR5 memory is increasing despite not being able to import all the tools and materials that are needed, so eventually they will benefit from this memory shortage that allows them to gain market share that they would not have gained otherwise.
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.
The last one I remember was after the 2011 tsunami. I think things are worse these days because memory isn’t just a chip that you toss on a board anymore, it’s now frequently delivered in the same package as the CPU.
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.
Too much of IRC has been lost to Discord :(
1 reply →
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.