Comment by bayindirh
9 days ago
> By the time you can have a slow death of personal computing, capacity will improve and prices will improve.
I love this baseless optimism. Reminds me of the economic theory (forgot who put it forward): Everything will be fine in the long run.
...and it's rebuked by Maynard Keynes: "We're all dead in the long run".
Yes, by the time capacity & prices will improve, we'll be all dead.
> I don't see why hyperscalers would be so much better at handling price increases.
I'm pretty sure that you don't know how much discount they can get when they order "I'll buy the whole production in Y2027". When first generation EPYC was launched, it didn't reach academic or local datacenters, because AMD sold all production to Hyperscalers and Dropbox back in the day.
Money is always more valuable today than tomorrow, so if you can pay today, you'll get massive discounts.
> I love this baseless optimism. Reminds me of the economic theory (forgot who put it forward): Everything will be fine in the long run.
Seems accurate though, I've already noticed no-name Chinese manufacturers stepping it up, throwing caution and capital to the wind and leaning in as hard they can. Following the typical Chinese model of how they get involved in markets, we're just a couple years away from memory being a market with skyrocketing prices and limited availability to a market where various nations are considering bailouts and tariffs to protect their local manufacturers from dirt-cheap Chinese exports to keep their memory producers from going through what domestic solar panel producers went through (a near extinction level event).
I specifically didn't say disk mfg as well only because I haven't yet noticed a new big spinning HDD Chinese brand. But they're definitely active in the lower end of the DDR5 market.
In that scenario, maybe SSD prices drop enough that spinning disk loses relevance.
I don't see that possibility from a data retention duration perspective. SSDs are glorified and addressable capacitors at the end of the day, and they leak.
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> ...and it's rebuked by Maynard Keynes: "We're all dead in the long run".
Keynes said that when somebody complained that his theories didn't work in the long run. And the true rebuke is, we're now in the long run and Keynes is dead
> ...and it's rebuked by Maynard Keynes: "We're all dead in the long run".
The trouble with Keynes is that it's only fully true on the time scale of the heat death of the universe, and in that context it's fully nihilistic. Whereas most economic theories do operate on timescales where the finding out comes within the lifetime of the people fucking around. And to the extent that it doesn't, it generally comes within the lifetime of their kids. Meanwhile that quote is used to justify every piece of short-term thinking that screws the next generation to juice this year's numbers.
> When first generation EPYC was launched, it didn't reach academic or local datacenters, because AMD sold all production to Hyperscalers and Dropbox back in the day.
When first generation EPYC was launched, it broke Intel's effective monopoly on performant servers that everyone was eager to get out from under, but the first generation was being fabbed by Global Foundries using the decaying infrastructure being sustained only by the few uncompetitive Opterons nobody had really wanted in years.
It's the example of the thing you're saying doesn't happen. The following generations were fabbed by TSMC who has dramatically more capacity than GF and expanded it even more since EPYC launched, to the point that AMD's share in servers this year is almost 50%, up from ~0% the year before EPYC launched.
> Money is always more valuable today than tomorrow, so if you can pay today, you'll get massive discounts.
The real issue here is capacity planning. It costs billions of dollars to build more fabs so they only do it if they're confident the demand isn't going to crash. But cash-rich customers willing to pay in advance are a good way to do that. You give them a contract that says they pay you now and agree not to dump the hardware into the market if the bubble pops (e.g. customer agrees to maintain possession of the hardware for 3 years after delivery and use only for AI) and then the AI companies are the ones taking the risk instead of the hardware companies, which makes the hardware companies willing to build more fabs. Which in turn is what gets the price back to something ordinary people can afford.
> The trouble with Keynes is that it's only fully true on the time scale of the heat death of the universe, and in that context it's fully nihilistic. Whereas most economic theories do operate on timescales where the finding out comes within the lifetime of the people fucking around
You got this completely backwards: Keynes argument is that economic policies cannot just rely on the fact that things are going to be fine “in the long run”, because the “long run” may be something we never see. He was in fact arguing against economic theories that are “only fully true on the time scale of the heat death of the universe”, not the other way around.
No, the quote is regularly brought out as a justification to ignore long-term and even medium-term effects whenever the result is anything less than instantaneous. Even right now we're in a discussion about manufacturing where the lead time is a low single digit number of years. The expectation that we'll all be dead before it shakes out is rather implausible but there is the quote.
And there are no valid theories that are only true if you wait until the heat death of the universe, because by then everyone is dead and there is no one to constitute an economy. There are, however, many theories that could be valid even though they take decades or more to shake out, and that quote is used especially against those to rationalize exactly the short-term thinking that lets people ignore that even when they are dead, we, i.e. humanity and its future generations, will be holding the long-term consequences of whatever we choose to do right now.
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