LOL. The biggest area of tech investing right now is alternative video cards and RAM for the home consumer market. The Wang dropped the ball on what made the company chasing a Ponzi scheme. This is so ripe for perturbation.
See Bolt Graphics…dual PCI connect options, upgradable VRAM, non proprietary hardware…
Oh when the bubble pops ram is gonna be insanely cheap
not if companies go broke
It’s obviously to Lenovo’s benefit to have people believe that RAM prices will not drop, so that they will not wait out the current price surge.
The price will drop if supply exceeds demand, and if competition increases.
Supply demand economics was a great concept in grade 8, but in the real world, price fixing and monopolies rule unchecked.
Myth vs reality type thing. A charitable thing to say is that its an incomplete theory. There are political interests to keep it that way.
Ah yes, history has shown that prices never fluctuate.
Expect an import ban on Chinese made ram to be coming soon.
It is critical to national profits. I wonder how trump’s kids are involved in this like every other scheme he rigs.
The trump administration has determined that it is critical to national security that americans play all new games at medium graphics settings or lower.
Trump was told the enemy could see him across the map.
Oh, I better then go ahead and buy them at high prices before it turns out in 2-3 years that he was wrong.
As an old person, I recall a time period when there were lots of so-called RAM optimization software packages out there. It would be interesting to see if that sort of thing makes a comeback.
Yes, the operating system is far better at managing resources than back then, but I’d bet that lots of fun new malware will sprout up masked as such.
You mean RAMdoubler? That was a scam.
Oh course not. Why lower them when they can keep the prices high and pocket the profits? When you live in hell you can’t expect the devil to not profit on the vices.
The article ignores several points.
First, this is one of the conditions where capitalism actually works. Many players in the field dropped out because of the razor thin margins of the past. Fabs take years to ramp up, and are insanely expensive to set up, so getting in to take advantage of a temporary shortage was an unacceptable risk. Now there is a decade(s) long projected shortage, making the investment attractive again. Plenty of players have experience in Fabs, even though they are not up to date.
Also, the market is going to accept that slightly slower ram is quite fine in many applications, and they are easier to make. DDR5/6 is really not that important. I have an AM4 Ryzen 9 with 64Gb DDR4 that flies, I mean the thing cooks! This environment is going to make Chinese Fabs competitive in the mid-term, and give them the opportunity to catch up, especially since the Chinese government subsidizes whole sectors to catch up, and often surpass the west (see EVs, solar, airliners, etc.) maybe they’ll take years to get there, and maybe they won’t match the very top end, but they’ll take over.
We are going to have a shortage and obscene prices, but not as long or hard as doomsayers scream.
Another factor is that the AI bubble is going to pop. LLMs are a dead end, and are already at an extreme diminishing returns point. There is no way the major players are going to recoup investment, and the market will eventually wake up. Open source models are at single digit distance of the most powerful commercial models, so much of the resources are going to shift to in-house.
JEPA is one of the next steps in AI, and is way less hardware intensive. There are several new approaches to AI that are way less hardware intensive. LLMs are plain brute force approaches, and evolution makes efficiency a major goal.
Depends on government policy also I guess. What would most likely happen is for US gov to continue sanction Chinese companies like what they did to cxmt and ymtc to stifle competition and keep prices artificially high
No one is going to stop you from importing a 32 GB DIMM in your anus.
This is your example of capitalism working? Then I don’t want to see it failing.
Yes. Capitalism is not bad, it’s actually a sane approach. The problem is when left unchecked, which is the state’s duty, but fucked up by politicians, in the pockets of oligarchs. Have you read Adam Smith? Both Smith’s and Marxs’ thesis fail beacuse they depend and assume inherent good in people, while in reality greed is the driving force in economics, and fuck all else.
Yeah any extra fabs able to produce ‘last gen’ DDR4 would have a big impact.
AI will remain a massively parallel numerics affair with enormous data sets and monstrous memory bandwidth and network crossection. And according energy consumption. Jevon’s paradox will eat any efficiency improvements.
Only if LLMs are the only option. A paradigm change is coming. It’s like what happened when European and Japanese performance cars started to take on American muscle cars or SpaceX (yeah I hate the Nazitard too) started recovering rockets and reusing them, or PCs started replacing mainframe workstations…
There is some question as to whether those rockets are actually being reused.
Look at the enormous processing resources of biological brains. Human brain is 2% of body mass but 20% of baseline metabolism – this is very expensive evolutionary. Neural hardware used for LLMs or just any scientific numerics accelerator is just a bad reinvention. Your argument reminds me of Minsky’s “5 MIPS is enough for AI”. Nope. You have to track a lot of state, its relationships and refresh it all very quickly. Computation is expensive.
I do hope that all the LLM companies have research teams that are investigating alternatives to LLMs as we know it today, rather than just how to make the existing LLMs more efficient/better.
The whole technology of how LLMs work seems flawed to the core, e.g hallucinations.
I have a work issued Lenovo Thinkpad P14S Gen6 AMD with a Ryzen 9 AI, 2TB nvme, and 64GB of GDDR5 RAM. It cost $2600 last October.
Went to buy more of them for other devs last week as their Dells are just hot garbage and are being refunded, who wants to guess what the price of the exact same machine though Lenovo directly again is now?
$6800.
Absolutely insane.
It’s just crazy.
Yeah, I’ll be there waiting for them to rotate their inventory at a loss when it does go down. Meanwhile, fuck Lenovo.
Get the Lenovo worker who said this. We shall dip him slowly into a volcano until he changes his mind.
They’re basically saying the AI companies are going to keep demand elevated to the point that supply will never catch up. It’s possible but with variables like public backlash, unrealistic power requirements, eventual financial and AI regulation, I would bet on a painful collapse.
There’s always a collapse on the horizon, I believe many of these stories are worst-case scenarios or a way to help billionaires believe their own hype and swallow the turds to keep capitalism on life support.
I would bet on painful collapse, because the whole model is “winner takes all”, which means there is an awful lot of duplication. Even if it ends up more like a commodity with multiple players (because why pay for super powered AI for a task if there is a cheaper low powered alternatives?), the constant scale up makes no sense at all economically. We’re already well into diminishing returns with each scale up, and the models continue to be fundamentally flawed.
Lenovo are right that prices won’t go back to “normal” - I think there will be a huge crash in prices due to oversupply when the AI boom ends, and some of the big AI companies collapse.
We don’t even know if it’s currently being produced at greater numbers (as far as I’m aware). The only public info I’ve seen is that the data centers that haven’t been built will need all of the produced RAM based on handshake deals (not contracts). The RAM makers themselves are doubling down on the bubble by investing into the AI generators as well as increasing costs to insane levels in the process which surely reduces the amount of items sold.
no they are not. the article was clear. after the ai boom, the memory companies wont drop proces because you dont have a choice.
my new soap box - the government should regulate this industry because its very important to society and there should be prive caps.
Wrong line of thinking.
They want you to stop holding out and just buy their crazy high (along with everyone else) priced stuff so they move inventory and make some capital.
If their ram claim ends up true (I call bullshit) they make some sales and they go happily along.
If their claim ends up being false, they still made those sales and no one remembers or cares how “wrong” they were about it.
Saying this is basically a no lose guess for them.
Sounds like Lenovo is one of many companies pumping stocks.
Quite frankly, we abuse ram anyways. So much software uses way more ram than is actually necessary. I think this may be a catalyst to software fundamentals. Doing far more with far less.
It’s the only thing we are empowered to do, buy less ram and use software that runs smoothly with less ram.
Agreed, but still fuck data centers
I was lucky I was forced to upgrade to 32gb right before the bubble, because my new job uses Jira with too many plugins.
That is a hillarious and deeply depressing reason for someone to have 32GB of RAM.
A work planner should work in 32M not 32G…
We should dismantle AI companies and their data center expansion plans and see if RAM still is so expensive.
Yeah, most people can probably be totally okay with 16GB (~150€ new, 50€ ddr4 used) too!
We seem to have forgotten that RAM has always been ludicrously expensive, except for a little while a couple of years ago.
16GB feels so low, but if we have to make due then the software we run needs to be crafted better. It’s entirely possible. Also ddr4 is plenty good. I wager no one can tell the difference between ddr5 and 4 or even 3 honestly
At work we were upgraded to 16GB last cycle. 8GB would’ve been plenty if not for all the shit that forcibly runs in the background. Now even the 16GB models are struggling, and I mean struggling sometimes. While my userspace apps use less than 2GB.
I’m going to guess you’re talking about Windows, correct? I work on a laptop (must be about 5 years old already) that I brought up to 64 GB RAM when I bought it (it was way cheaper than ordering with that, so I got it with 8 and then upgraded) only because sometimes I play on it. But when steam is not running and I’m just working, I’ve never seen it use over 2.7GB of RAM. Evidently, it has always run on some Linux distros (PopOS, Fedora, EndeavourOS and now CachyOS). The world is rigged to make all these things artificially expensive. Windows is a resouce-hogging malware that costs money, the computer parts manufacturers inflate prices to see if they can get away with it, the computer manufacturers go with that and then do the same, and we end up paying 10 dollars for what should otherwise be 1 dollar. As another person said, I also believe this will allow China RAM to catch up, which will end up flooding the market with same quality products, if not better, at way better prices. This will probably take a couple of years, but with their government subsidizing technology and most of their international markets the way they are in China, the funds will be readily available. Plus, China companies tend to enter difficult markets at a loss to take a good place if necessary, which is great for consumers. Just look at the blow they put on Mercedes, BMW and Porsche last year in Germany with BYD. Things will get better for us on the RAM front, it will just take a while.
Run less software then. You can do that today.
You don’t have to run less as long as you choose good software.
Also true.
But if you choose to run software that uses a lot of RAM, ask yourself why you haven’t created an alternative that doesn’t use a lot of RAM. If the answer is “I don’t have the time to”, then that’s probably also why the developer hasn’t made it use less RAM.
The answer to that question is that they’re either lazy, ignorant or both. :D
In all seriousness. I can imagine that a lot of developers who work on commercial products are given about 20% of the time and resources needed to make a good product. I don’t blame them for doing what it takes to not get fired.
That’s why libre source software is so important!
It’s more likely they are not incentivized to. When you are writing software for a living, typically there days the companies you work for prioritize delivery speed over everything else. If they prioritized memory constraints, software would use less memory.
When you are rewarded for features and delivery, you end up with shit like electron. Not to even begin talking about how a whole generation of developers learned to code for the web and never touch os level dev…
Optimization will actually get much worse because software will be designed to run “in the cloud” on servers that have much more resources than the average budget pc or smartphone that 90% of users use for computing. You will own nothing etc etc
Software has been running in the cloud for nearly 2 decades at this point. But yes, I get your point. Their master plan is to get us all on terminals and use their clouds as a giant mainframe more or less.
Doesn’t have to be that way though. Not all tech needs to be the latest and greatest. So long as it’s secure and is feature complete who cares how it looks.
Ironically, with LLMs at our disposal, making new software is easier than ever. In the hands of skilled engineers tasks that took weeks take days. It’s more realistic now for a single dev to sit down with a goal like “let’s remake X software, but a 10mb memory limit”. We can prototype this kind of stuff faster than ever, so we can use the very tools causing this problem to solve this problem.
I think this may be a catalyst to software fundamentals.
It’s not that fundamental. It’s just corporations skipping the optimizing step and just shipping because that looks better for their project deadline and budget. As long as complaining is limited and sales don’t drop they don’t care.
Agreed. Only way this happens is either open source, or new companies that recognize it as a competitive advantage. Get new users to favor your software, they grow up to get jobs and advocate for it there. It’s a gamble and a long game though
This must be the wisest thing I’ve read in a long time.
Lenovo is not a manufacturer of ANYTHING below motherboards (pc or laptop) .
Their opinions need to be looked at through that lens and no other.
