alt Hacker News> The speculators are not very smart when it comes to technology, and think RAM is RAM. There is at least three kinds of RAM that are important to this: DDR for system RAM, GDDR for GPUs, and HBM for high density enterprise products, and they are not interchangeable, there is no one-die-fits-all solution.
The commenter is also not very smart and does not realize companies making the RAM can trade capacity of one for another and any re-tooling at current price is still profitable.
The commenter also does not realize that is also true for lines currently making SSDs
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nopurpose • yesterday at 9:59 AM
Reminds me of "false sharing" effect: hidden common dependency and bottleneck for what looks like independent variables on the surface.
They can trade capacity, but they generally aren't. The huge storage-only fabs owned by Samsung and Micron do runs that go for 9 months to 12 months.
Flash chips haven't been speculated on nearly as hard, and are suffering from the same sort of weird lack-of-nuance. Samsung, for example, isn't reassigning capacity to meet some sort of phantom datacenter demand that isn't already there, generically, across all datacenters, AI or not.
A lot of SSD price skyrocketing is largely "SSDs have RAM on them for cache", not "SSDs have flash chips, and they're both made at the same fabs"... which oddly effects low end SSDs that don't have external cache.
To make it worse, for the speculators who do understand this, because it isn't some universal homogeneous group, the flash chips that go into enterprise SSDs aren't the same that go into consumer SSDs.
The Big Three still aren't doing some major re-tasking of capacity, as the actual global demand isn't outstripping supply any more than normal. There is no short term problem to fix, speculators are just gonna have to stop hoarding toilet paper like its the start of Covid.
Edit: Oh, and if you want to ask how AMD/TSMC or Intel solve this? They can't, same reason why making their own in-house HBM isn't happening.