A shame that this should if anything, lead to consumer DRAM prices getting even worse.

Why would more RAM supply lead to higher consumer prices?

Depends on what proportion of Samsung's output is current HBM4 and HBM4E DRAM.

Everything in their statement can be true and it be a bad thing for consumers of non-HBM RAM.

"HBM capacity to expand to 250,000 wafers a month"

So let's say their current HBM capacity is 100k wafers/month (pure speculation/random number for illustration), and their total RAM capacity (including HBM( is 300k wafers/month, then non-HBM capacity reduces from 200k to 50k.

Keep in mind that total manufacturing capacity is increasing as well. Perhaps not enough to fully offset, but it's incorrect to assume that supply capacity is flat.

HBM4 and HBM4E DRAM are NOT the DDR4/5 that consumer markets need. Capacity allocation is leaning more to data center grade HBMs so less to produce dedicated DDR4/5 DRAMs. Supply demand will further drive up the consumer DRAM price! Note, the article mentions NO of new fabs is being constructed (all semiconductor manufacturers know that constructing more fabs means the boom/burst cycle will eventually kill them, so no one create more fabs) Perhaps the federal government need to step in here - the market doesn't fit the issue.

Might lower the prices of Mac Minis, Studios etc though

Will that be enough for AI's hunger?

It will be just in time for when AI will run very well on consumer hardware and the need for data centers will collapse.

Or even more amusing in time for the bubble to burst, I hope the big RAM makers end up holding the whole bag for that. Greedy bastards.

Since you’re not greedy when there is a memory glut I’m sure you’ll be willing to pay extra to make it fair.

Not at all, I’m going to relax with a cooling drink and watch the consequences of this unbelievably destructive and wasteful venture implode. I also adore the idea that it's on the customer to be "fair" to a company that dumped us a group in favor of chasing B2B money.

Their choice, their consequences.

Internet is a fad, it will implode at any moment.

In fact as a business opportunity it did just that because the massive investment in the mid-late 1990's was without anything like a connection to profitability or sustainable demand. It took years after that crash for the concept of e-commerce to begin both a recovery and evolution into what we see today.

I expect something similar for AI. It's useful tech... just not very profitable tech, and certainly not to the tune of trillions of dollars worth of public demand. The promises of superintelligence, replacing everyone, and the rest of the hype will die with the companies who made the promises, but the tech will survive and thrive.

The promises of superintelligence, replacing everyone, and the rest of the hype will die with the companies who made the promises

The hype will die but there are many reasons why super intelligence and robots are a separate entity from said hype.

Look, back a few decades and tell someone our gdp would be in the trillions and it's likely they'd have a hard time believing you. A huge portion of our products that we use day to day would be complete science fiction to them.

All we're negotiating at this point is the timescale it will take.

That's never going to happen. By the time you can run current frontier models on your $10k desktop the frontier will have massively advanced and people will want those models instead.

I'm not sure if this prediction will hold true.

We're not seeing the progress in those "frontier models" that we have previously seen. There's certainly still gas left in tank tank, but we're way into the diminishing returns by now.

Cloud inference still beats hardware investments by orders of magnitude of course, but that's only if your data doesn't really matter to you.

We are certainly not in the diminishing returns phase for LLM progress. No sign of that yet.

I’ll grant that for specialized applications like coding agents and mathematics, but even there I suspect that most the real gains are actually taking place in the harness.

But I suspect returns may have already diminished into negative territory for at least some other use cases. One of my least favorite job responsibilities in this brave new era is figuring out how to avoid performance and behavior regressions when an older model were using for some application reaches end of life. It’s getting uncommon for me to look at our benchmark results and say, “Oh, good, it does better on one of the newer models!”

suspect that most the real gains are actually taking place in the harness.

Part of the reason harnesses work well is you can run a lot of agents in parallel. That doesn't slow down demand.

That is true, but the eventual realization that more machines doing more coin flips in parallel does not mean "more work gets done" might.

LLMs are amazing tech, but they're terrible without oversight. More agents faster just makes reality collapse on them quicker.

But yeah, you're right, temporarily, this will still push demand. But the topic was about "diminishing returns" as in "tech getting better". Not as in "customer spending".

I had actually been thinking more about all the non-LLM functionality that go into the harnesses. I'm not going to name names and I haven't done any rigorous testing, but my general impression is that choice of harness matters more than choice of model. In terms of basic task completion success specifically, not code aesthetics.

they really dont want to hear this bro lol

It’s a constant tension in computing that has been around since mainframes and clients… Neither is going to disappear. My general feeling is normal people care more about how thin and light something is than their privacy, so if data center powered LLMs will have a strong future.

I’m not so sure about that. Already AI vendors are back to cutting prices to try and keep customers from cutting back on their usage. My own employer is working hard at pivoting to much smaller fine-tuned models for established use cases, and seeing model performance improvement in addition to large inference cost reductions. Being able to run them locally hasn’t exactly been a disaster for devex, either.

It may turn out that demand for SOTA frontier models isn’t so limitless after all.

Every product follows demand curves. At a price of 0 you could find infinite usage. This has nearly zero relation to how much it costs to provide the product.

Except of course it relates. All else being equal, we will prefer $X COGS over $2X COGS because that helps us with both profit margins and price competition.

It relates in the sense there's a minimum cost of production without losses, not the actual price people are willing to pay.

It's going to happen very soon, which is why these frontier labs are scrambling to shut down open source language models. There's an existential risk threatening their obscene returns.

It's going to happen very soon

Why? You can't just assert it. There are very good reasons to think it won't happen soon, and you've given no reasons to think it will happen soon.

You asserted that it was never going to happen first

What if the AI companies start selling the hardware with their models?

I.e., you get a locked down device with access to their AI and maybe a way to run third party apps. Of course the developers of those apps will have to pay a percentage of their revenue.

Sound familiar?

More likely they would sell a chip with the model etched in silicon for the dramatically higher token/s.

Most likely those models would be extracted from the hardware in no time.

About 2 years ago I bought some SDRAM or something like that, DDR4 or DDR5, don't recall offhand. A few months ago I looked at the price today, and it was over 3x as high. That's just insane. Governments need to do something against this abuse system that AI amplified here.

What abuse? Responding to supply and demand fluctuations isn't abuse, it's the proper operation of the market.

Would if one industry gobbles up an important resource to the point that other consumers lose practical access to it, shouldn't there be limits?

If others are willing to pay more, that a signal that more value is created if the resource goes to them rather than to the more price sensitive customers.

This logic falls apart completely when gamblers allocate one trillion to bidding up the price, denying access to the resource to people who are responsibly spending their own money. The ideal world of the imaginary perfect free market never takes into consideration the messiness of the real world, like the fact that people will spend extreme sums of money irrationally. It can take years for this effect to correct, damaging the market severely in the meantime.

Alternatively, the money invested can be rational because it prices out competitors and establishes a monopoly, after which point the monopolist earns their absurd investment back with complete control of the market. This is also bad.

This has zero to do with the company that is making the product and all to do with the company buying them.

The problem you have here is hundreds of different companies are doing the "gambling" in a non collusionary manner so it's going to take decades in court to prove it. Are you saying governments should do an authoritarian take over of RAM allotment?

Where is the additional supply resulting from the sustained increase in demand?

Governments need to do something against this abuse system that AI amplified here.

Which governments, and what exactly would you want these governments to do? The demand is global. There are no levers a single government can pull to meaningfully influence the global demand without fully committing to an protectionist economic policy, in which case the U.S. doesn't have the facilities to magically pop up world class fabs overnight, and South Korea and Taiwan don't have the market demand that the U.S. generates to justify their investments in making these chips and China lacks the IP to be able to build anything comparable to Nvidia's silicon at the moment.

No one has all the cards and no one controls all the levers.

Governments have sued DRAM companies for price fixing and forming cartels before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_industry_price_fixing. They can absolutely step in and if there are evidence of price fixing or anti-competitive behaviours, can impose fines. The choice of whether to do that though is political.

Is there any allegations of price fixing in this case? The demand just skyrocketed. Other than legislation like the defense act in the US I don’t know of any governments that have jurisdiction over these ram makers that mandate companies produce more of a product.

Especially not for consumer goods.

If they're charging one customer $X and another customer $5X for the same chips... there's got to be some law about this.

I missed that this is happening, is it really? I thought it's 5X for everyone

No one has all the cards and no one controls all the levers.

I'm as fanatical a free-market fundamentalist as you'll ever meet, but if someone were to argue that government has a role in preventing bullshit like OpenAI's unilateral 40% attack on the entire DRAM market, backed by nothing but funny money, I would have a hard time coming up with defensible counterarguments.

Your attempts to insult what they are doing doesn't show they did anything wrong, but it does impeach the validity of your own argument.

Hit dog hollers, sounds like.

That's abuser logic.

3x? I bought 128GB DDR5 SODIMMs for 300 eur. Now it's 4000 eur.

What's the main blocker (other than the current inflated cost) for using HBM instead of DRAM as the primary memory for consumer electronics?

Nothing except CPU manufacturer choices. Mac laptops use it and they're consumer products.

People will have to get used to buying a fixed amount of RAM with their CPU but thats unlikely to be a problem.

The normal non-tech-savvy person already does this. They simply don't know that their ram is upgradeable or something else breaks first, before having to touch ram.

MacBooks use regular soldered lpddr5(x) RAM. Same RAM as every other laptop manufacturer, they just use more lanes to achieve a higher bandwidth.

Perhaps more noteworthy for general home and business computing, doesn’t it also allow for lower latency?

More channels or soldered memory? Channels are basically RAID 0 so it depends what you're measuring. Soldering memory down was the only way to use LPDDR5X so if you wanted the best memory you had to solder it down. LPCAMM2 exists though so newer devices can use that instead of soldering them down, but not all devices would be able to fit the required LPCAMM2 slots.

Apple's "unified memory" marketing is so strong that even tech literate people seem to have this misconception!

They have managed to pull this sort of thing off many many times. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_distortion_field

Yup, the only reason Macs have higher memory bandwidth is because they use more memory channels, which gives them a wider bus. Both Intel and AMD only allow more than dual channel memory on server class processors these days.

The “Apple only does X better because they do Y” thing has been a meme for ages. I remember dismissals like “PowerPC is only faster at math because it has more integer units” or something along those lines, and thinking, uh, isn’t that a good thing?

I am just saying it's not magic and x86 is capable of doing the same. Quad channel memory used to be more common in consumer hardware but now it looks like you don't even have the option anymore for desktops. AMD's Strix Halo was the first sign to reversing that (it has quad channel memory!) and hopefully we see more of that in the future.

AMD does market segmentation and limits consumer chips to dual-channel. You need to cough up the dough and get Threadripper for quad-channel. Or even more for Threadripper Pro to get octa-channel.

There's a qualitative difference between "they're doing a different thing" and "they're doing the same thing, tuned differently". GP is saying that this is a case of "they just tuned it differently".

This distinction doesn't change what the performance numbers look like today, but it does inform what changes would be necessary for those numbers to look different tomorrow. E.g. Apple Silicon isn't fundamentally orders of magnitude more efficient than x86, they just used smaller features. Newer Intel and AMD chips made on equivalent processes _also_ get similar efficiency gains.

The memory bandwidth is a small thing compared to the massive win you get by not having to move data between two memory pools at all.

Having unified memory is a real advantage though, it's not a reality distortion.

Agreed. That's why it's a good thing all computers made in the past 15 years have unified memory, not just macs.

https://x.com/Lina_Hoshino/status/1820947147312820497

It's not that there's a blocker. It's that it takes roughly 3x the manufacturing capacity to produce an HBM package at the same storage capacity as DRAM. We are sacrificing total bytes for bandwidth.

How so? FEOL is pretty much the same, BEOL is almost the same save TSVs, the packaging tech is different and more advanced, but not exactly 1:1 comparable. Do TSVs really occupy 3x the area of DDR IO's?

See remark on the slide 11: https://www.servethehome.com/micron-evolving-memory-architec... That presentation is by Micron.

direct link: https://www.servethehome.com/micron-evolving-memory-architec...

Yuck. Time to build an xSPI/HyperRAM workstation (if only these had multi-bank chips).

Sadly the $ per byte of xSPI and HyperRAM quite high

It doesn't really say that it needs to use 3x more area, but that 3x more gets consumed due to "advanced packaging and manfuacturing complexity". Which doesn't properly explain why it consumes 3x more and could simply mean they have a bad yield and 2/3 produced is garbage.

I don't fully understand the source of the "total bytes" constraint, but a major factor may be because HBM4 / HBM4E can only make use of the footprint directly above the processor/logic die (or in direct vicinity of its interconnect), while traditional DRAM can be placed further away where there's lots of real estate on the motherboard.

I gather a practical max ceiling today is a stack of 16 chips in height yielding 64GB?

These chips have a massive bus size of 2048 bits, instead of the 64 or 128 bits (dual channel) used by DDR5. That's what gives them their order-of-magnitude bandwidth speedup. But even though they technically pack in more capacity per square millimeter of motherboard, I gather they take up more space than older technologies once you account for the vias and interconnects to route all those signals.

Thanks for that, just went down an interesting rabbit hole. Many of us were hoping this re-tooling would eventually trickle some fast RAM down to DRAM-exhausted PCs, but given it would require a rearchitecture of the motherboard it's unlikely.

I think people might prefer the lower idle power consumption from lpddr over the better bandwidth in hbm in battery powered stuff. That said right now the price is definitely preventing us from finding out.

Idle yes, but HBM energy consumption / memory operations seems to be a bit better than DRAM.

Only if you’re running at 100%. Consumers generally do not.

That hasn't been true since early HBM2 days, before the controllers standardized on power/voltage management and did things like leave them in P0 to ship on time

LPDDR/DDR/GDDR generally still win over HBM when there’s no data being transferred. HBM is primarily better in watts/byte transferred. Consumer electronics spend most of their time idle.

Racing to idle is a very common power optimization technique

HBM is a stack of DRAMs, so there is no “instead”.

The vias to enable stacking is a significant amount of the die area.

Why would you want/need to?

The advantage of HBM over regular non-stacked DRAM is memory bandwidth, which also requires a super-wide memory bus - 2048 bits wide for HBM4. Compare that to the 128 bit wide bus of a modern CPU.

So to take advantage of it on the desktop, or anywhere else, you need that 2048 bit wide bus, and a processor capable of consuming 2-3 TB of data per second!

These are not normal requirements, other than for a GPU.

SIMD (and especially the modern matrix extensions) can use as much bandwidth you can throw at it.

Without further clarification, that statement seems impossible. "As much" being unbounded and all. You should expand what you mean.

Right but if HBM memory is all that people want to produce, then building a CPU which can use it use it would be useful on it's own merits.

But in reality we also already have unified memory architecture systems, integrated graphics etc.

People want to produce hbm because it’s more expensive and more profitable than regular memory.

Now make some DDR5.

HBM is DDR5 in a different package.

The beginning of the bubble pop?

On a related note, I was reading yesterday that apparently the real bottleneck for Chinese production of AI accelerators is HBM production, not processors or ASML equipment.

The lack of ASML EUV machines certainly hurts, and pushing DUV so hard results in abysmal yields of good chips, but you can compensate by running more wafers or making smaller chips, and the net result is that Huawei's Ascend production volume is limited by CXMT's HBM capacity not processor dies.

The problem is that HBM manufacture requires many steps (die thinning, via drilling, plating, alignment) where the equipment used by everyone else (Samsung, SK Hynix, Micron) is also blocked by sanctions, so the Chinese are having to develop all of this themselves too, which they have, but yields are currently low, even when using shorter HBM stacks.

Tokens per second is almost entirely memory bandwidth at inference time, training obviously needs more compute but you can add more chips for that.

I read HBM yields are 25-30% (vs 80-90%) making them 3 to 5 times as expensive. They are 4-5 years behind, that probably means 1-2 in Chinese time.

China should invest in an analog inference chip. It's a hail mary but why not.

tl;dr; This is existing production being redirected to HBM. Which means consumer market is going to get a lot worse.

And the worst thing is that is the best possible strategy for them. It's essentially win-win for everyone but consumers.

- Buyer (AI) has crazy money, so will pay whatever

- Seller doesn't have to build anything new, as the buyer is willing to pay whatever

- Generate ridiculous profits from crazy money

- No oversupply risk in case of reversal

- Return from producing HBM to DDR5 in a single quarter if reversal does happen.

Hold on to your existing hardware, people, and be on lookout for your local deals.