Fuck Microsoft with an umbrella, but in this case it’s not just only Microsoft, there are a lot more and bigger players on this shit dish
I wonder if we’re going to see a console generation with expandable memory for the first time since the N64.
Would make some sense if the current climate persists for a few more years. Sell variants with multiple ram configs at different price points, and when ram prices come down you can wack a ram stick/module in there.
Obvious problems: consoles usually use unified memory, which probably won’t really work with expandable storage, so would need a different architecture. Also, if they use non-standard dimms, it’s unlikely the manufacturers would drop prices of those modules anywhere close to the actual amount of theoretical ram price drops. And this would require cooperation with game developers to make games that work with different ram configs, and give a tangible benefit for having more ram, without breaking compatibility for the base model units.
You think RAM prices are ever going to drop?
Sweet, summer child…
Yeah, I do. For two reasons.
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Buildout will start to slow down when the speculative investment slows down. Which is going to happen. None of the big ai companies are actually making money yet, and even if they were, eventually growth will start to level off. Investors are always looking for the next big thing, so once AI isn’t the shiny new thing, the magic investor money will start to dry up.
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Even if demand continues as it is, more memory will be manufactured. China is already producing memory, and I’m expecting them to scale fast. Also other countries and regions are realizing how important tech independence is, so I expect we’ll see more fabs pop up at least in the EU and US. One of the big reasons we’re in this mess is that the Korean fabs have been hesitant to expand production because even they don’t expect this to last.
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Poor Microslop
I went to my thoughts store and they were all out of thoughts. The prayer store? Out of business.
My fucks to give? Gave the fuck up and left.
My local prayer store burned down. The thots store is still in business tho thank God.
If there was a decent governement behind they would have never left this reaching the point where the consumer market is left with nothing
They’re still planning on making a new Xbox? Sometimes I forget there’s an Xbox console anymore.
They could just cancel all yet to be manufactured orders for starters…
…640k ought to be enough for anybody…
Episode 7893 of corporations artificially creating problems to make profit by selling the solution. Just to then fail at solving the problem of their own creation.
Brilliant economic system. You can marvel at its ingenuity and just get lost in it.
They aren’t artificially creating this problem, they are inadvertently creating this problem.
AI companies need RAM and other compute components to feed the AI beast which drives up demand, and cost but reduces supply for everyone, including their Xbox and Surface divisions.
Given their enterprise divisions make vastly more money than their consumer divisions, nothing will change.
The problem is artificial, because 95% of all this ‘AI’ is useless, pointless, and a massive waste of resources. Nobody asked for it, and practically nobody is using it.
Even in cases where a chatbot is helpful, a small, local model is more than enough. Not a single soul needs a 50T parameter model for anything. Nobody on the planet uses AI image enhancement or item removal.
Almost all of this shit is purely made to inflate the bubble, and serves no other purpose. All the while ruining many other industries, people’s hobbies, ease of finding factual information online, etc.
The problem is artificial, because it was created pretty much deliberately, for no particular reason other than profit.
It’s a solution in search of a problem.
And it’s a bunch of misanthropic sociopaths with main character syndrome who read scifi novels and saw the warnings as a guideline because “I’m the super smartest, I can implement it correctly, and I have to be first, because those other guys won’t do it correctly”
But does anyone need ai companies?
The fact that the major players are still in business means someone thinks so.
Are they still ‘in business’ though? They’re burning through money they don’t even have at a never before seen rate. Just to make barely useful software that works 20% of the time at best.
I feel like it’s the same as saying the banks and real estate companies were ‘still in business’ in 2008. Naturally, time will tell if it’s the same cycle repeating. So far everything seems to be pointing in that direction.
Good, then they can finally be the kings of the shithole they’re digging.
sits on his sbc pcs, sticks of ddr4 and stack of old hard drives like a dragon
Idk, maybe stop??
“We’re going to crash in to that orphanage! AHHH!”
“Then brake…”
“OH THE HUMANITY!?!”
You can stop pulling the lever at any time. All that happens is modern society unravels as we enter the financial equivalent of a thermonuclear bomb going off. The same will happen but slightly worse if you keep holding the lever.
Better Nate than lever.
But how else should they waste billions of dollars to avoid paying any taxes?
Reminds me of that time Samsung wouldn’t sell ram to Samsung because they needed to compete with the demand from Samsung.
Wait, what?
#OutOfTheLoopSamsung is a Korean jaebeol. It’s a massive conglomerate all owned by the one family, but each department operates very independently and is incentivised largely to maximise its own profit independent of the rest of the conglomerate.
The semiconductor/memory chip production side wouldn’t sell the chips to the consumer electronics side, because it’s more profitable to sell and feed to the genAI side of the business.
hehehe
They could start manufacturing ram? Or fund startups trying to make ram?
Seriously is there no way to get out of having only 2-3 chip and memory makers?
The lead time on new fabs is massive like truely massive. We would have to assume this bubble won’t burst for the next decade to justify it.
On the flip side ramping up production is what actually caused the current problem to a degree. The last time there was a massive bubble that caused a huge demand surge for memory. The various companies producing it all ramped up production. Then the bubble popped and 70% of the companies went bankrupt.
Its why the current companies are refusing to ramp production. They refuse to be fucked over by the bubble. And frankly I don’t blame them.
As stupid as it is it’s ALSO good for the consumer. Cause if the bubble goes pop and the few remaining big guys all go belly up. Then we are all collectively fucked.
If you think now is bad the fuck do you think would happen if one one few remaining fabs goes bankrupt and is sold off and split up.
Best case scenario is long term we have a larger number of more flexible smaller fabs. Realistically it just means we have even fewer companies making ram at all in the short term and prices go even higher for possibly years longer then they otherwise would.
So while yeah the ram companies are making money hand over fucking fist. They are also doing what is best for themselves and the customer. Shit just fucking sucks cause reality disagrees with the delusion that’s being imposed on it.
The big three producers refusal to expand will hurt them a lot, chinese producers like cxmt got a great way in and have already started producing dram that works for ddr5 6000mhz.
Honestly, we should probably just have a state owned and ran chip fab company. If the US is serious about security and/or innovation, that’s what needs to happen. There’s no way it’s going to happen though sadly, but that’s what should be done. >
Why state owned, when they can have privately owned and just funnel your tax money right into it, then retire to take up cushy “consultancy” positions on the board?
You cant just “fund a startup trying to make ram”. Chip fabrication is probably the most difficult and capital intensive production process there is. What manufacturing more ram looks like is investing tens of billions of real money (not the you give us stock we let you use our GPU deals the AI companies have been doing) and then waiting 5-10 years before the fab you funded starts to make chips, and hope prices are still high by then.
That’s why the existing manufactures are slow to scale up, they arent sure that the current spike in demand will still be there by the time their scaling up increases production.
Yes, but also cartel behavior. Those same 3 manufacturers have been found guilty of it in the past, and it wouldn’t surprise me one bit if they were fixing prices again now. See this video by Gamers Nexus.
Its both things to be perfectly honest. Last Time there was a ram bubble. A bunch of companies all went belly up because they ramped up production too high to meet demand. Got caught left hold in the bag. It’s why this so few companies now and why they can do the cartel nonsense.
And well, yes, they’re very clearly doing cartel nonsense yet again. They also aren’t entirely wrong in their reasoning. They’re just going about it in a really s***** manner.
Cuz if they did ramp up production and then the bubble pops and the left holding the bag and one of them goes belly up then we’re all f***** even more. Prices will then actually legitimately just go up even more. Which would just f*** everyone even more.
History has proven that ramping up production to meet a bubble is a stupid business decision. It also hurts your customer and hurts your profits in the short to medium term.
So you have a logical historical reason. A logical current business reason and illegal cartel nonsense.
There’s just no reason to ramp up production. It just doesn’t make sense on any front. It’s basically purely knee-jerk reaction.
If only there was something like a chip act that the government could have provided that capital….
Of all companies, though, Microsoft is one of the few who could easily afford to sink a few billion into starting in-house chip production.
And even if they only ever produce chips for their own products, they’ll still probably come out ahead in the long run, because of all the money they’ll save on not paying inflated prices for others’ chips to use in Microsoft hardware.
That ‘in the long run’ part is the problem, though. Corps can never see beyond the next quarterly earnings report. An investment that will take years to pay off … that’s just out of the question.
Try decades… Chip fabs take like 5-7 years just to get running and then double that to recoup. No company is going to gamble on a possibility 15 year investment for a very obvious bubble.
They’re going to start up an entire RAM company to fill a temporary shortage?
Yes, then they’ll be shortage resistant
It can’t really work the way to want it to.
You have let’s say Samsung who can make money selling a chip as long as the price > $50. And historically the price of the chip has averaged $100.
But the demand is crazy and they can’t keep up and the price of the chip is $500. They are making money hand over fist but let’s say they feel a moral obligation (hahahahaha) to lower the price by increasing capacity.
So they invest a billion dollars to increase capacity. Now that’s a huge cost that reduces their margin on all chips. Between loans and maintenance, now they have to sell a chip for $90 to break even. But that’s fine because they are making $410 per chip instead of $50!
Except now you fix the supply issue and demand falls to normal. You’ve just cut your profit from $50 to $10. You have to sell 5x the volume to make the money you were making!
Except it’s even worse, because now you have all these extra chips you’re building and nowhere to put them. Supply exceeds demand, pushing prices lower so instead of $100, they are selling for $80. Now Samsung loses $10 on every chip and they go bankrupt trying to pay back a billion in loans.
So it’s not really in their interest to build capacity to meet a temporary demand. Unfortunately.
That is not how it works at all. RAM is a necessary part for every compute device, and there is no way to recover any part of selling at a loss once it’s acquired by the final owner. Thus, they will never be sold without a profit margin. This is very different from, for example, the video game consoles market. Once you have the console, you still need games, so, whatever loss the manufacturer is assuming has a chance of being filled by the customer “buying” (renting) games.
Having said that, the rest of your logic is sound. However, I don’t see prices dropping back to what they were before this AI bullshit even if the market is suddenly flooded by triple the offer vs demand. These corporations would certainly manufacture a fictional shortage somehow, makeing people rush-purchase ram for fear of the prices going too high again, and release all the production into the market to maintain the illusion of low offer.
There were loads of ram companies in the eighties, so many that when meager times came, half went bankrupt.
RAM making is a brutal market. It’s very different to chip making, it’s “just” billions of capacitors.
You don’t need to be “shortage resistant” when there’s no shortage.
It is an extremely long and complicated process to do so. China has been trying to enter chips manufacturing for decades and are now almost there (they don’t have the capacity to produce the most advanced chips yet, but are still working on it).
However the moment they got a decent DDR4 production going they announced they are going to “phase them out” in favour of DDR5 chips (of which they have not really perfected the process yet) so they can be used for Chinese AI-datacenters.
That still might take 10y because lithography printers aren’t cheap, their location isn’t cheap, and so much more. Once you watch an Intel, TSMC, or Texas Instru… chip factory tour.
Wait, why doesn’t Texas Instrument cash in or did they offshore their production too?
Fun fact…the chip maker and the calculator company are completely seperate. Don’t really know why it’s fun but well it is a fact.
They’re already selling silicone designed twenty years ago at absurd markup, so Texas Instruments has no need to jeopardize that with the AI fad.
Honestly, no. There is no fast way to spin up fabs for this stuff. A lot of lithography equipment for the top tier stuff is made by 1 supplier, stocking a shitload of fabs with the right gear just isn’t something they can do.
IMHO, the fastest way out of this mess would be for governments to regulate how supply is spilt between consumer and enterprise products.
A lot of lithography equipment for the top tier stuff is made by 1 supplier
So maybe invest in that and become another top-tier supplier of lithography equipment?
That’s about as hard to do as making the chips in the first place… So that also would take 10+ years of r&d and build up.
There’s a reason it’s taken China literally decades to catch up with home grown alteratives and they still aren’t entirely there.
Or just build hardware that’s easier to make
I would gladly go back to 2012-era hardware if it meant I could afford it and people maintained software for it
But you can!
Just buy up used stuff, computers nowadays are very resilient.
I have a 6 gen intel Linux, works like a charm., and a 8 gen for “gaming n stuff” (windoze), I even got my hands on a recent laptop for 100€…
No need to buy that latest stuff, IMO.
The “demand” is in the future. It may never be realized. There’s no money in starting a chip fab when there’s only a manufactured shortage. The chip companies aren’t adding capacity because they don’t need it.
Eh … even with the popping of the AI bubble, the long-term future is bright for any new chip manufacturer. The world is only becoming more and more electronic, with more and more gadgets needing advanced chips. When the AI bubble goes boom, demand may temporarily drop, but in the long term demand will rise overall.
Plus it’s not like any of the major companies have been earning consumer appreciation. If a new company started today and offered similar price fora buck less than everyone else I’d buy just for the pleasure of saying I didn’t buy Nvidia
The startup cost for a chip fab is MONSTROUS. Add the fact that the incumbents have already been convicted of being a cartel once (or more?), and it’s going to be a heck of an industry to break into. The incumbents just will drop price
The problem is it doesn’t solve the core issue. What’s to stop an AI data center buying up all the startup’s stock and future stock also.
If you’re the one funding the startup you can just reject that
Asha Sharma standing on the glass cliff.
She and Xbox will be gone inside of two years.
Asha was absolutely put in place to be glass cliffed.
Not sure Xbox will be gone any time soon, but once Asha has taken all the blame they’ll get back to the same old BS.
Oh I hope not. The one part of Microsoft I actually like is World’s Edge, and that sits under Xbox.
I haven’t bought an XBox since the 360 because it was such a vapid upgrade path.
It’s worth noting that the Xbox brand these days represents so much more than the console. It’s a game studio, a storefront, a subscription service, a software application, and more.
The Xbox Series X is a really nice deisgned Console tho. I actually think its the best console hardware to date. But software and games are the problem
There’s no software or games problem on Xbox. It gets 99% of all the games the PlayStation 5 does, and most of them play and look better unless you’ve got a PS5 pro.
