This is awesome! Having had to deal with ancient file formats knowing that there are renewed tooling that's not binding to legacy OSes that you can't no longer find viably is great.
Now, who's open sourcing and reviving FileMaker that Apple killed?
The irony here is, thats hobby hardware. You spend 20k and can run slow hobby models that are barely capable of anything unsupervised.
Entry level serious hardware starts at 100k, and a bit better but still almost-useful grade is 200k (8x rtx pro, plus a nice epyc pairing). Thats the sort of thing a salaried expert lets their employer buy them for sort of serious work.
Anything really serious is well north of 1M - not including the housing and commercial grade mains connection. And at best that buys fast Kimi K3 or GLM.
I do have a 128gb mac, and the experience is, for my use cases, hobby grade. I use models on a daily basis for design work (chiefly), and sometimes implementation work. I can't justify a drop in output quality and significantly increased waiting time. Sure, if frontier did not exist, I'd use them, but way differently than fable or astra.
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.
No, completely wrong. Supply and demand will definitely fix this.
More HBM4 will drive the price of it down. That will make it less profitable to produce. That will mean firms shift some production back to more profitable "consumer" RAM. Increased supply will lead to lower prices.
What specifically did that say that you think is wrong?
Supply is currently moving the wrong way. Supply and demand for consumer DRAM will get even worse, even if it will "definitely fix this" in the long run.
And the fact that production is moving the wrong way suggests that in the short term supply and demand is actually doing more harm than good. HBM is so profitable it's radioactive.
I don't know where you got the idea in another comment that all memory will get "very cheap quite soon". They're not increasing total memory production. (much/yet)
China is about to massively compete. And doesn't Micron and someone else have new fabs in NY coming online ? I can't imagine they're going to exclusively make HBM.
Ram always goes through these boom and bust cycles. They're going to increase supply but not so much that they're eventually left with huge overproduction as usual.
Of course if Google researchers come up with more ram reduction tricks for newer AI architectures that could make a huge difference as well
I don't expect China to be a particularly large competitor in the next year or two affected by the decision in the article, but they'll help a lot in the long run.
Micron's NY fab had a press release two months ago that they started pouring the first concrete, so that's far from coming online.
If AI demand sticks around and buildouts stay cautious it could take much much longer than usual to build up enough capacity to push prices back down below $3/GB.
More efficient AI memory use risks even more demand for memory because you're now able to get even more performance per dollar; the benefit of extra memory has to be sufficiently far into diminishing returns for demand to drop overall.
> What specifically did that say that you think is wrong?
You said:
> the market doesn't fit the issue.
I presume you meant "fix" not "fit". You are wrong that the market will not fix the issue. There are literally millions of observed cases across many markets of increased demand (or decreased supply) leading to higher prices leading to increased supply leading to lower prices, which is why it's a fundamental law of economics.
I feel like everyone here forgets that the DRAM industry is operated by one big cartel. The rules of supply and demand don't apply here. Now that prices are up, they will keep it up, cutting supply as needed in order to do so. Every big DRAM manufacturer in the industry has been charged with price fixing, among other things: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_industry_price_fixing
There are so few players in this space they can coordinate and collude pretty easily.
DRAM isn't nearly as hard to get into as compute. The price fixing stuff is going to bite them in the ass someday soon by massively increasing the incentives for new players to enter the market and compete.
Also they're talking about the short to medium term. On that time scale they're not wrong. The market is so far from fixing it right now, it's going in the opposite direction. The market is chasing HBM money which is outbidding everything else.
> The price of RAM will fall.
And if that might take 5+ years, that's not much comfort.
> higher prices leading to increased supply leading to lower prices
So far higher prices are causing barely any supply increases. (Note that the article we're commenting on is about a supply decrease.) Companies are barely trying to expand, and even if they do start trying hard it'll take a very long time.
Yes. Non-HBM Samsung supply going from 60% to 20% will cause prices to increase, which will cause increased production of non-HBM, and then prices will fall (below where they currently are).
This is probably still considered standard response timeline, not a rapid one.
The time window allowing for CVEs + Vulnerabilities remediation has been collapsing to days and hours perhaps even minutes[1]. Anyone who has an OpenRouter account can start using Strix + GLM 5.3 Flash to do damages at frontier Mytho 5 level cyber capabilities. [2]
This cyber patching race is on, won't stop until all the software created for the past 70 years still in active use needs to be patched up. This is happening at EVERY SINGLE software company.
Meanwhile I have customers running legacy web apps last compiled over five years ago on end-of-life operating systems… and it’s crickets chirping. Dead quiet, not even a hint of an attack, let alone a breach.
I expected them to have been hacked to pieces by now, but even “maximally vulnerable” internet-facing apps seem to be relatively unmolested so far.
Maybe it’s still too expensive to go after “boring” enterprise targets? Maybe the bad actors targeted crypto systems first for the immense payoffs, if successful?
It's a risk-reward ratio, same as anything else, whether legal or illegal.
You wouldn't organise the equivalent of an elaborate bank heist to break into a child's piggy bank, it's just not worth it.
I have heard of a few high profile crypto heists that appear to be AI-assisted, some as far back as the GPT 3.5 era. There was an article I can't find any more about someone accidentally pushing a security fix to a public repo and getting their wallets drained via that specific mechanism within something like an hour.
Malicious actors are watching crypto like a cat in front of a mouse hole, because a "success" can net them the equivalent of hundreds of millions of USD that they can instantly transfer, launder, and spend.
For comparison, what would they achieve by hacking the web site of a local council or public library? Cause some embarrassment? Attempt to crypto-locker them? What are the chances of a payout? Certainly not a 100%, and you're also certain to get the attention of the local equivalent of the FBI or Homeland Security.
Two chilling effects Mr. Rietta brought up that are legit and happening right now:
1. "When a critical CVE is published impacting a publicly accessible system, think again. You have hours at most. All organizations have to process changes to match this reality on the ground."
2. “AIs are also good at reverse-engineering exploits from patches, which means that these vulnerabilities will be weaponized as soon as the update is published.” Yes, it helps defenders long term but in the short term it is a weapon most are not ready for.
1. Rust's memory safety design will help Microsoft improve a gigantic portfolios of products that have been known to have lots of CVEs and 70% of them are memory safety issues, according to Azure CTO Mark Russinovich's talk at RustCon last year.[1]
2. Windows 11's forceful push to retire millions of legacy PC hardware by putting Windows 10 EOL last October was absurd for millions of consumers and businesses. I was literrally helping a S&B having to replace the entire fleet of working PCs simply because Windows 10 of EOL and Windows 11 refused to run on those legacy hardware. Quite honestly those PCs ran just fine! That's why some has been migrated to Linux, in particular to Google's ChromeOS Flex.[2]
3. RAM shortage due to AI boom exhausted the memory chip manufacturers' production pipepline for at least the next 5 years. This means the mainstream PCs sold today will actually have a diminishing RAM size configurations than last year's in order for the PC manufacturers to not drastically raise the product price (or raise prices drastically for high RAM configurations like Apple does). This requires the Windows 11 operating system to be more conservative about RAM usage, Rust can be a part of that.
I'm quite skeptical of rust usage leading to anything that helps consumers. Microsoft managed to add arbitrary code execution to Notepad. And it all points to a total disregard of the end-user, not lack of talent or capacity.
> Microsoft managed to add arbitrary code execution to Notepad.
You write as though this was an intentional feature. Not, it was a CVE. I had to Google about it. For anyone else who didn't know about this CVE: "Microsoft added Markdown (.md) support and interactive hyperlink parsing to the modern Windows 11 version of Notepad. Improper validation of links meant that clicking a crafted hyperlink inside a Markdown file could cause Notepad to launch unverified protocol handlers without proper warnings." This CVE has already been patched.
> And it all points to a total disregard of the end-user
I don't understand this part. Are you trying to say that because they had a security flaw in a new feature that this demonstrates "total disregard of the end-user"? It seems like quite a reach.
Aight! Fable 5.1 summary says this is about Microsoft built, self-hosts, and runs in production a proprietary-backend codegen for rustc that bypasses LLVM on Windows. The vehicle is rustc_codegen_utc, an alternative rustc backend in the same family as the LLVM, GCC, and Cranelift backends, wired to the MSVC backend ("UTC").
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