alt Hacker NewsI wonder if this is actually true in the long-term though. If they were to flood the market with lots of high capacity memory, then I think our programs would start using more memory too. As a result we might end up needing more memory faster compared to if they keep demand unmet.
Just consider that a chat application today takes more memory than a full 3D game with thousands of users (including chat) + the operating system used to ~20 years ago. If 128 GB of RAM were the norm then there's a chance we might expect to buy 128 GB of RAM too.
But I suppose it's really a question of how many dollars we expect to spend on memory rather than the specific amounts of memory.
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For older hacker news readers who have lived through multiple RAM price spikes - it has held true for decades so far. Making memory is one of the most vicious tech markets to compete in.
I think that Slack's memory usage is "not bad" at ~300MB just because Discord exists, and somehow that seems to get into the gigabytes before even looking at a message.
We already had that. Memory prices got really low for a while. If there are too many companies with too much capacity they’re forced to race to the bottom until one of them collapses and reduces supply.
"I wonder if this is actually true in the long-term though. If they were to flood the market with lots of high capacity memory, then I think our programs would start using more memory too. As a result we might end up needing more memory faster compared to if they keep demand unmet."
It's a gambler's ruin problem. Future profits are worth zero if you go out of business first.
Lots of people have bought baseline 32/64 GB ram in their laptops for a long time (the last few laptops).
Applications can be lazy and grow to the amount of resources using, but the real need for maximum ram is using it for these new purposes.
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They are running fabs at 100% capacity. New fabs take many years to build, cost billions, and are out of date within a few process moves.
One cannot simply "flood the market" or the Chinese would have done it ages ago.