Lenovo saying RAM prices may never go back to how they were | Hacker News Reader

Lenovo saying RAM prices may never go back to how they were

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16 pointsTomte21 comments

Lenovo has an incentive to say prices will never go down. They need to continue selling right now when prices are high, but customers will wait if they have reason to think they'll go lower.

Yes, it's like this in every sectoral boom cycle. Prices are always going to go up until they don't and then prices are always going to go down until they don't

Indeed. And some company saying this is a sign we're at the mid-point of the peak.

I don’t know, even if data centers need more and more ram in the future, there may eventually be enough production that the consumer needs are just a small skim off the top from that.

The current price insanity has got me to reconsider upgrading a few systems. It made me think of what I actually need vs what I want, never a good idea for consumerism.

That's the point of high prices. They solve demand higher than supply by reducing demand, and/or increasing supply. Wait until they're low again, then upgrade.

That's the point of prices in general, they are a measure for how much something is worth, both for the user to have it and for the producer to create it. Neat invention.

It's so easy to weasel out of this statement that it's practically meaningless.

Prices on now obsolete technology never went down either, and what's been obsolete for a long time now is the low-end PC.

If the prices stay the same while the product improves (more per stick and faster), that's what everyone actually wants anyway.

We need like 3x the RAM to get the same value you were before.

Do you mean you need 3x the ram to run your pc than you did at some point in time?

Maybe not, anyway, this graph puts the current memory "crisis" in perspective for me:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/historical-cost-of-comput...

Nope. I currently have 64 GB which is about enough. I'd do 128 or more if it were cheaper. But a decent stick size is about 16 GB. If I could get 48GB for the price of a 16GB stick, that'd be reasonable. Then I could get 2 of those instead of 4 16s and not pay horrendously more.

You need n-times the ram to produce the same work, e.g. produce an office document, sort your mail or filter your files.

I think that's actually an underestimation.

Right, because someone demand-supply is stop gonna be the thing from now on.

Isn't that kinda how market pricing always works?

Memory market has a special problem, it's usually on a boom and bust cycle, and so the actual factories don't want to overbuild capacity to get chips they cannot sell in 2-3 years when the "bust" part of the cycle comes.

Maybe AI is here to have changed that for the better, but we'll see if the hype dies down or we just ride through it and memory really never comes back to regular pricing

If you are Apple, Nvidia, AMD, Intel, Amazon, Microsoft, and there are many other companies out there, but out of the six companies, particularly the first five, you may need to rethink some things.

And one of those things is whether or not you can continue in business being tied to the three headed cabal. You can’t be at the same place two to four years from now. So the key question is what are you going to do put up with it or adapt and I don’t mean just write out a check.

But in the end, with the likelihood of the Chinese getting bigger in the memory market and the three-headed memory cabal, one or two of these companies are gonna have to change the way they do things, and if memory has become so vital, you may no longer be able to sit back and be a spectator on the sidelines and keep memory outside. Not if you want to build what you need to in a timely manner at a reasonable cost…

Market pricing assumes neither participant can control prizes. When a big consumer holds shares of a big producer, or they are just not much of either of them, markets can't work (unregulated).

That's of course bullshit. Technology is going to advance and in 10 years we will have phones with 256gb of memory and of course it will cost less per gigabyte today otherwise it would be unaffordable.

Ram prices will go down if you roll up your sleeves and go in house. If you have the design and engineering department to design/engineer the memory yourself, and if you have enough money to pay for or build the fabs. What are you going to do, going into the future give up and call it a day?

If you want to build new devices or any devices for that matter, are you going sit back and take it, with the Chinese as competitors in this world, what do you think they’re going do? Say we give up?

I am baffled by so many tech people saying you should just, well, take it. With the current situation in the tech world, as they are, this is one of those instances where you have to adapt or die, if you have the design and engineering capabilities in-house, and if you have the money, you have no choice if you want to move forward and build your devices?

Yes, the solutions won’t be instantaneous, the timeline is 2 to 4 years. What would be criminal however is if you do have the resources and the talent in house, would be if you just sit around and do nothing in those 2 to 4 years and you are still be at the same point you are today? At the mercy of the three Headed memory cabal… Now that would be a tragedy.

Why are there only three major memory companies? Because memory is a really hard market for new entrants.

Firstly, IP is heavily patented. CXMT only got around this by using a different manufacturing strategy they bought the patent for from another company.

Secondly, scale and yield is really hard. CXMT’s production costs per unit are higher than the established companies because they’re still struggling with yield. They only made a profit last year because memory is massively overpriced. Most startups do not have the runway to spend a decade improving their yield. CXMT only survived because the Chinese government had an incentive to bankroll them long-term.

Companies like Apple and NVIDIA could get into the memory game for their own needs if they wanted to, but it would take a long time and they’re only incentivized to do so if they think memory will be high forever. If it’s only high for the next 2-3 years it’s not worth it.

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