With imaginary money
Things don’t add up. I see articles about computer parts becoming unavailable along with articles about data center plans being cancelled or not getting built. I assume the data centers ARE getting built and those second articles are lies to calm people down.
OpenAI has a deal with Samsung and SK Hynix to purchase 900,000 DRAM wafers per month, or 40% of global DRAM output. These are just uncut wafers, accumulating in warehouses that serve two purposes:
- Prepares them for the distribution to data centers,
- Manipulates the supply chain to squeeze their competitors, who are left with slim pickings.
You and I are the victims of this until the bubble finally pops and the deal falls through.
Production is usually sold a year in advance. This includes orders from retail outlets.
Oh no, how will I get my flashing lights and data hoarding fix now!!??
Good. Time for software to be optimized again.
how will the vibe coders survive this?
please, will somebody please think about the feelings of the poor vibe coders :(
Vibe coders will ask the AI to write everything in Rust, memory usage will be reasonably low
The people writing everything in Electron are gonna have a fun time with their users though.
nah some dude got recently covered in press b/c he used an LLM to derive Assembly from C.
Chinese to the rescue?
Sold out with pinky promises, not with actual money, no.
its nvidia and AI creating a bubble on the belief they’ll be able to get profit and get out before it pops.
But all it is… is imaginary money going around in circles. nvidia invests a trillion in AI, AI buys a trillion dollars of nvidia videocards from some nebulous point in the future where they arent made yet, nvidia invests that trillion back into AI, AI uses it to buy ridiculous amounts of ram that wont be made for years, RAM invests it back into AI, and on and on they go, generating imaginary money and value, by buying imaginary things.
under a sane government this would be investigated as raw stock manipulation and fraud
I really hope when this bubble pops nvidia is destroyed in the process along with the AI companies.
It’s the same accounting trick as enron, but intercompany instead of internal.
Nvidia already made tons of profit off it. They’re the ones selling shovels.
Then Nvida financed more shovels to the speculators in the hopes that enough of them will strike gold it will get paid back, but also created a shortage in the shovel market so the price of shovels is going through the roof.
nvidia is actually the only one that made profit
My prediction:
- Investors continue to fuel demand, choking supply
- Plans to monetize LLMs don’t pan out
- Eventually, lenders call their margins
- Investors see the called margins and get spooked; demand fizzles
- AI companies desperately try to liquidate their positions. Seeing the price of components, there’s a rush to sell while prices are high.
- PC components flood the market
- Record high supply, record low prices
- PC gaming golden age
Eventually, lenders call their margins
Lending to companies doesn’t work like that.
Softbank’s $40bn loan will be called on March 25, 2027. If they can’t roll this over it’s the banking equivalent of a margin call.
HBM and Vera Rubin are not useful for PC Gaming, at least not for current architectures. Main issue is that DDR5 production simply got cut to make more HBM. But there will be a huge amount of LPDDR, NVME / SSD drives and refurbished Hard Drives available, and hardware for running inference at home for pretty powerful models will become cheap as fuck, liberating us all from the hyperscalers; the open weights models from china are available for everyone.
At least i pray it will be this way.
PC components flood the market
*Server-grade purpose built AI components flood the market
SXM to PCIe adapters already exist hehe
Not to mention my dumbass would chuck money at a whole server just to throw it in my home lab.
Its not trivial.
Check the level1 forums, where some electronics gurus are trying to get a single adapter MI250X to even boot. The problem isn’t the adapters, but firmware that makes it difficult.
I see no problem if I can snag some generic Instinct accelerators, and a server to go. I’ve already got half a rack full.
Just like how GPUs became cheap and plentiful after mining crypto became passé, right?
…They actually did.
I got an AMD 7950 is a crypto bust. Then a Nvidia 980 TI in the next one, dirt cheap.
Nvidia figured it out in the most recent bust though, and controlled supply fairly well.
After the last crypto bust, prices stayed up though. They’re still way higher than before the last crypto boom.
And nVidia, AMD, Intel all know better now than to overproduce consumer GPUs.
They aren’t PC components. They’re server GPUs.
They don’t even have ROPs anymore. There was a time when the Nvidia P100/A100 could technically game, but that’s generations ago.
FYI, during the crypto busts, Nvidia bought back GPUs and basically incinerated them to keep demand for new stuff up.
…I’m pretty sure that’s what they will do again.
It’s frustrating to see the tech industry take this path, because there were alternative paths that didn’t lead us here. We are in a selfish and shortsighted time.
I want to believe
So you’re not 100% incorrect, but does it happen in 2027? 2028?
Logistically it’ll probably happen eventually, but when?
6 will actually be “RAM suppliers buy the stock in bulk and sell as refurbs, keeping prices up”
Didn’t know people liked shitty trucks that much
Mustang marketing department doing overtime
You joke but drunk drivers love those trucks.
*didn’t know there were so many drunk drivers
Looks like I’m gonna keep on rocking my pre-Covid era computer without an upgrade for a few more years.
My steam deck has become my all in one. Sucks memory card prices have leaped the past year. But I got a couple terabytes, so I’ll be alright, just going to have to shuffle them around. But I’m cool with not having 240 hz 4k on Powerthirst settings. I got a back log anyways and a yard to get back into shape.
Keep it as long as possible, the new shit suuuucks, is built to break & riddled with adware.
Back in my day ;) we had to worry about keeping up with the newest tech because you needed it for the best games or whatever.
These days, my desktop from 2014 can run all of the new games that I want to play (yes, even the demanding ones) It has 32 gigs ram and a 1660 Ti. That’s really all I need, especially since most of the games I enjoy AREN’T new.
is built to break
honestly, i kinda agree to this, the current gaafets and mbcfets designs are like fuses on a nano scale if it doesn’t have REALLY good power management. Unlike with finfets where the channels/source are still connected firmly on base to dissipate heat in case of a nasty power draw.
How is adware an issue? I haven’t had any of that with my Mint machine.
It’s baked into a ton of hardware updates these days. Trust me, in 5-10 years it’ll be a big deal if we don’t do something about it…like yesterday.
Also, OS doesn’t matter if it’s a bios update.
That’s…not how device firmware works.
You’re not going to get adware drivers on a Linux system unless you’re using stuff that’s supremely sketchy and also installing things you shouldn’t be. What you’re thinking of is 3rd party windows drivers.
Also, If your motherboard installs something through a bios update, that has nothing to do with your OS. It comes before.
Please point out the bios deployed adware you are talking about, or I’ll have to assume you’re just talking from vibes.
Lenovo had spyware baked into the chips that would reinstall itself if it was removed from the OS. It was a big thing.
Although I believe that was just for Windows. But the functionality exists for them to do it to Linux if they decide to.
Android runs on Linux, wouldn’t you agree that Android is compromised?
It’s actually scary how wrong you are while being so confident. It’s not even just wrong but also so incredibly dumb. Doesn’t matter if you’re drunk or not, you’re clearly an ignorant fucking idiot.
Android depends on who gave it to you. If you install Linux from a parking lot flash drive it doesn’t mean the Linux project is compromised, it means you got pwned.
I’d make the same argument about installing pre-compromised pirated windows but…windows kinda just is malware now.
There is zero adware in Android (AOSP). Unfortunately manufacturers tend to install Gooogle Play Services, which compromises the whole device.
… Not really. And also no.
The Android kernel is a modified version of a Linux kernel, yes.
“Android is compromised” is a very, very silly statement.
Give me startcraft or age of empires ii over most modern fames anyday
Praying it doesn’t malfunction
I got 3 6+ year old thinkpads that are all chugging along just fine. got them all for dirt cheap.
But as another person said keep that shit for as long as possible and learn how to properly maintain it. New stuff is absolutely horrible. I recently had an ASUS laptop that fried itself after 3 years. was getting really wonky 2 years in.
My beloved T440 fears only the oppression of “Zoom for Workplaces”
I have an Asus laptop and the touchpad stopped working tue first week. Piece of garbage.
Why are AI companies buying consumer grade RAM?
They aren’t?
They are buying up capacity from manufacturers who are stopping production of DRAM and pivot to HBM which is more profitable. Abandoning DRAM which affects a lot more than just “consumer grade RAM”
They’re publicly traded companies. Their investor meetings point out that HBM is not more profitable.
It is in theory more guaranteed profit because it’s a smaller number of bigger contracts. But that’s the gamble they’re making.
But isn’t it kind of a game of chicken then for the consumer markets? Whoever gambles the other way, can win in both volume and availability, being able to cut the others off market just by pricing, enabled by the prior two points, get brand points by the ladle while at it, and kind of become a staple of the consumer market. When the bubble pops and others return, the market isn’t the same and everyone else sits at a disadvantage?
Yes.
Which is why it’s bad that the only 3 companies with capacity currently are colluding.
So that you can’t.
You can’t organize against billionaires online if walled garden censored posting to the cloud is the only thing available to anyone. You can’t pirate media if you can’t store media locally. You can’t run a ad blocker if they’re not allowed on their app store. You can’t install linux if your tablet can’t be jailbroken.
You have too much freedom. They must have control back. We allowed them to have enough money to take it, they just had to fool the rubes with the promise of utopian robotic labor via addiction.
This is it. Add in that AI is a 1-way filter of information, substituting web search engines. The AI companies will get all the questions and queries from people instead of search engines, you will not find information unless through the black box service of an AI company. The death of the open web, for the billionaires benefit.
To build chips that are used as collateral for datacentres that have yet to be built, so the chips can’t be used, and they’ll just age out of usefulness.
The prices finna be ka-ching when the bubble finally bursts though
Feels like we’ve been waiting for this bubble to burst for a lifetime.
and they’ll just age out of usefulness.
Nah, we’ll stall on this generation. Even if a new one is released, very few will pay the extra when games would alreadyhave to start becoming RAM optimized again. Even Windows just dropped their 32GB recommendation.
Without the recommendation being met, people weren’t buying windows PCs, so lower the requirement and people will buy more computers and more copies of windows. Which means they always could have just optimized better if they felt pressure.
Games will 100% do the same.
Which could be a huge thing for rational companies right now.
The big hurdle to domestic production is you’ll spend billions and by the time it’s built it’s “last gen”.
Instead of useless data centers, we could be building up domestic chip production, confident it will still produce top of the line chips when it goes live.
A literal golden opportunity, more so if China goes after Taiwan finally, you’d be the only international supplier.
As far as I know, no country is doing it tho.
Even Windows just dropped their 32GB recommendation.
Yes, but they haven’t actually done the memory optimisation work. They just plan to sell underpowered machines.
Odd to think that the Windows Vista days are coming around again.
Wasn’t that one of the reasons that people didn’t like it? A lot of manufacturers basically just crammed it onto XP-spec machines, so it ran horrendously, and was generally awful to use.
You’re right about domestic production but I think the situation is much worse. We’ve tried to make advanced chips domestically and we can’t do it. Taiwan has had decades to perfect the resource allocation, supply chains, knowledge, and work culture to make those damn things.
It should be an executive order to make them domestically, and put up with the years of failure and low output. It’s a matter of national security to be able to create and maintain computers and other advanced tech.
Biden tried to do just that. But our own beloved oompa lumpa axed that first chance it got. Because… I’m not certain it’s “reasoning”
Because it was Biden’s accomplishment. That alone meant it had to go. He’s a vindictive, narcissistic toddler.
Taiwan has had decades to perfect the resource allocation, supply chains, knowledge, and work culture to make those damn things.
…
Uh, Apple taught them from scratch in less than 20 years.
Now they have a proven plan on how to do it, what to look out for.
Like, the on part Apple didn’t understand is that China was ok with Apple employees being treated as disposable, because they’d burn out, quit, (maybe) recover, and by then alreybe replaced.
Now an Apple trained employee needs a job and Apple won’t hire them back. Repeat that tens of thousands of times and before Apple releazied all they were doing was training their competition, it was too late.
It wouldn’t be “years of failure and low output”. It would be years of nothing to build the infrastructure and then flip a switch.
As a bonus this makes chips for weapons in parallel, something we desperately need to do.
This ain’t just a crackpot idea, and it’s not just mine.
It’s just any country that does it, risks kissing off the only manufacturer till up and running. It’s fucking with trillions of dollars. We need an arms race scenario with multiple countries trying to be first.
Source on TSMC hiring ex-Apple employees lol
Apple uses TSMC’s services because there’s a huge difference between what Apple does (chip design) vs what TSMC does (chip manufacturing).
It wouldn’t be “years of failure and low output”. It would be years of nothing to build the infrastructure and then flip a switch.
No, the failure and low output come AFTER the switch is flipped, unless you get a TON of industry know-how from TSMC. First you have nothing, then you have low yields until you figure out the processes.
There’s no problem with ‘last gen’ right now. The “ai” bullshit and global rise of fascism has slowed tech progress to a crawl, and even ten or fifteen year old systems are pretty good right now.
Plus, you’re making this or drafting tables.
I know you know this, but PC RAM is useful for a lot more than games. Workstation PCs are where I find this situation really hurts. I suppose that to an extent, some of what you describe might apply to development and design tools.
Before this shortage took off, I got a rock-5-itx (ARM computer) with a whopping 32GB of RAM which was definitely overkill for the home server I use it as, but now it feels insanely decadent. I’m looking for ways to utilize it, like running Immich with the full AI facial recognition features and whatnot, Nextcloud with the full text search, etc.
This guy actually Making RAM at Home
Really interesting watch actually. But uh, I don’t think we’re gaming on homemade RAM anytime soon lol
My kid wants to build a gaming PC for their birthday.
Am I cooked?
Overcooked at this point
Your bank account certainly will be.
That said, if you buy refurb you can put together a decent rig on a budget.
See if there’s a Microcenter anywhere near you. They fairly regularly have pretty good deals on CPU/MB/RAM bundles.
Microcenter or some similar physical store is probably your own hope. They run pretty decent deals to bring you into the store.
I’d recommend visiting one for Black Friday/cyber Monday. It’s probably your only hope for things not to be ridiculously overpriced. Instead you’ll just pay for very overpriced items.
Recently built a computer for my kiddo. Beg, borrow, and steal. And keep an eye out for motherboard and memory combos from new egg.
SODIMM ram is still cheap. You could build them a ddr4 intel system with integrated graphics (ideally Arc cores or plenty of EUs) that will run some older or simpler games at 40-60fps with a little upscaling, and the whole thing could be done for 500-700 I reckon.
Either that or maybe build an AM4 if you find a used GPU at a good price.
Not necessarily. You could give them a budget and let them pick whatever fits inside that budget.
How long was crypto graphics card demand ? Anyone remember ?
After the last one they never really lowered prices back, we were still buying near crypto era priced GPUs before the AI boom.
My bad, guys. I needed to upgrade my rig. I am planning to play BF7.
