• humanspiral@lemmy.ca
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    2 days ago

    This is extremely serious for economic bubble.

    Orders for datacenter AI chips exceed supply, and more high end/other memory per TSMC wafer is further nightmare. This is likely to mean higher prices per token for datacenter buyers, and higher prices for users/model renters, and much slower demand growth and AI progress. It also means long delays for datacenters, and better black market (China, higher than MSRP diversions from contracted deliveries).

    I’m not sure if affects phone/lpddr soldered memory, but tsmc is going to charge more for phone chips too. This can cause whole consumer/business computing market to collapse. Return of older generation designs on underused process nodes will give little reason to upgrade, and still overcharge. This can be an opening for China exports of competing products that were not possible at low/reasonable ram/tsmc prices/availability, where even if China has difficulty achieving best yields, it’s still profitable to invest/expand aggressively, that discourages US/western colonies from investing.

    This race to give the US Skynet, for stronger political control/social credit/surveillance of Americans, can make a bubble in everything else, and accelerate financial collapse, all the while making the goal impossible to achieve and forcing China to become stronger/more resilient, with greater share of global computing supply.

    • Frezik@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      2 days ago

      It affects all DRAM across the board. The fundamentals of DRAM haven’t changed in decades, and everything comes from three companies.

      Good thing Microsoft forced people to throw away a bunch of perfectly functional PCs. This was the perfect time for everyone to have to buy new ones.

      • muusemuuse@sh.itjust.works
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        1 day ago

        They didn’t force them to throw away PCs. They have alternative options. People chose to be angry instead of doing anything about it.

        It’s the shit people bitch about Apple for doing, but it’s somehow adorable when Microsoft does it.

      • Washedupcynic@lemmy.ca
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        1 day ago

        Linux has entered the chat. I installed linux on my older machine that’s ~ 7 years old. My new machine has windows 11 and I fucking hate it.

    • jaykrown@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      Absolutely. Something you missed though, at the same time AI models are becoming more efficient and cheaper to run, so these data centers are going to be a massive waste of resources in a year.

      • humanspiral@lemmy.ca
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        17 hours ago

        if tsmc only makes datacenter chips from now on, then “we” are shut out from the huge privacy (and fine tuning specialization) gains given by small efficient cheap to run models (or play games on new hardware). US datacenters will serve US empire/political establishment both with government as main LLM customer, but also for data collection/palantir ontology/social credit scores on every American.

        I suspect that better datacenter chips won’t actually reduce their cost due to supply limitations, but even for small efficient models, personal hardware has a long payback period compared to a per token “rental” cloud charge. It is unlikely that all of the datacenter chip buyers will have non-government customers to use them all, and so either bailout or bankruptcy followed by megatech buying the datacenters for cheap followed by a bailout in government revenue for big tech global/citizen control applications.

        Eventually, even the government has too much AI resources, at planned expansion pace, and then consumer/business computing/gpu market comes back. Could be as soon as 2026 that a collective understanding of absurdity occurs.