Fundamentally because demand and supply curves are lagged. This drives DRAM flood and drought cycles. Right now high DRAM prices are driving fab investment up and demand down. In 3-5 years new fabs will cause DRAM glut that will drive prices down. Lower prices will stimulate demand via things like doubling DRAM size in consumer electronics as companies compete on getting the number bigger. Eventually demand curve will eclipse the supply and we will end up in the DRAM drought again.

This time things are further complicated by the fact that the world is investing a sizable chunk of GDP into building RAM hungry data centers in hopes of building a god which will convert the rest of the world into data centers.

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vablings 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The biggest issue here is that it hurts smaller consumers. Scaling up a fab to produce ram takes 5+ years, people generally buy new hardware ~5 years so this lifecycle of hardware for some people is now locked out. Let's say you was due for an upgrade this year you now might be priced out of the market for the next 5 years and basically due to poor business practices

There is a similar issue happening in the manufacturing space where metal foundries are basically "full" up on allocation for other customers and will refuse to sell to you unless your purchase order is six digits otherwise you pay a hefty premium which once again drives capital towards larger corporations. Compounded by a stagnant jobs market the means that scarcity is just going up and up and nobody is re-investing to meet consumer demands because the market is poisoned by speculation to the absolute extreme

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ffsm8 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Do people really still upgrade so often? I mean it made sense pre 2015 for desktops, and pre 2020 for laptops... But since... Not much has changed from a performance standpoint.

Even gpus hardly advanced since 2022 (4090) and the next generation is at least 1++ years off. Likely 2-3... And it's unclear wherever it will actually be an upgrade or more of the AI shenanigans they released with the 50 generation.

	▲	o11c an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Laptops are pretty fragile, especially with how a lot of people treat them. Replacement is due to breakage, not obsolescence.
	▲	pimeys 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Well, I just updated my 5950x with 128 GB to AMD Strix Halo with the same amount of much faster RAM. It is noticeable faster, but what's better: the whole computer is tiny and sips energy. I'm very happy I ordered this in the summer, framework delivered it to me early this month. I wonder will these machine just be out of stock now or the price goes up a lot...

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ghurtado 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> in hopes of building a god which will convert the rest of the world into data centers

I'm as pro AI as it comes, and I love your way of putting it. Very poignant.

	▲	tonyhart7 39 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		if its what it takes then so be it which company achieve AGI first would be a quadrillion company

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brennanpeterson 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This isn't true. It used to be, as a new fab would appreciably add quantity. At 1M wspm in 2015, a new 100k fab at the most modern node would add effectively 20-30% capacity, and usually multiple.players at once, since all had cash.

Now, the relative shrink is tiny, so capacity adds are just wspm, in effect, and that gives 5%.

Put differently, you cannot invest your way out of the shortage, or into meaningful share....so you take profit.

	▲	gertlex an hour ago \| parent [-]
		apparently wspm is Wafer Starts Per Month guess I'm interpretting "1million wspm; add 10%; was effectively a 20-30% capacity increase" in 2015. Not sure where 5% then comes from. Guessing "relative shrink" is referring to process size (5, 4, 2 nm, whatever) not linearly corresponding to density of transistors, etc.