We’ve been able to hold the same price we had at launch because we had buffered enough component inventory before prices reached their latest highs. We will need to increase pricing to cover supplier cost increases though, as we recently did on DDR5 modules.
Note that the memory is on the board for Ryzen AI Max, not on the package (as it is for Intel’s Lunar Lake and Apple’s M-series processors) or on die (which would be SRAM). As noted in another comment, whether the memory is on the board, on a module, or on the processor package, they are all still coming from the same extremely constrained three memory die suppliers, so costs are going up for all of them.
Longer contracts are riskier. The benefit of having cheaper RAM when prices spike is not strong enough to outweigh the downside of paying too much for RAM when prices drop or stay the same. If you’re paying a perpetual premium on the spot price to hedge, then your competitors will have pricing power over you and will slowly drive you out of the market. The payoff when the market turns in your favor just won’t be big enough and you might not survive as a business long enough to see it. There’s also counterparty risk, if you hit a big enough jackpot your upside is capped by what would make the supplier insolvent.
All your competitors are in the same boat, so consumers won’t have options. It’s much better to minimize the risk of blowing up by sticking as closely to spot at possible. That’s the whole idea of lean. Consumers and governments were mad about supply chains during the pandemic, but companies survived because they were lean.
In a sense this is the opposite risk profile of futures contracts in trading/portfolio management, even though they share some superficial similarities. Manufacturing businesses are fundamentally different from trading.
They certainly have contracts in place that cover goods already sold. They do a ton of preorders which is great since they get paid before they have to pay their suppliers. Just like airlines trade energy futures because they’ve sold the tickets long before they have to buy the jet fuel.
If you’re Apple, maybe that works, in this case we’re seeing 400% increases in price, instead of your RAM you’ll be delivered a note to pay up or you’ll get your money back with interest and termination fees and the supplier is still net positive.
the risk is that such longer contracts would then lock you into a higher cost component for longer, if the price drops. Longer contracts only look good in hindsight if ram prices increased (unexpectedly).
> Question: are SoCs with on die memory be effected by this?
SoCs with on-die memory (which is, these days, exclusively SRAM, since I don't think IBM's eDRAM process for mixing DRAM with logic is still in production) will not be effected. SiPs with on-package DRAM, including Apple's A and M series SiPs and Qualcomm's Snapdragon, will be effected -- they use the same DRAM dice as everyone else.
The aforementioned Ryzen AI chip is exactly what you describe, with 128 GB on-package LPDDR5X. I have two of them.
To answer the original question: the Framework Desktop is indeed still at the (pretty inflated) price, but for example the Bosgame mini PC with the same chip has gone up in price.
Apple secured at least a year-worth supply of memory (not in actual chips but in prices).
The bigger the company = longer the contract.
However it will eventually catch up even to Apple.
It is not prices alone due to demand but the manufacturing redirection from something like lpddr in iphones to hbm and what have you for servers and gpu
To be honest, it starts to look more and more like a single company (we all know which one), is just buying up all DRAM capacities to keep others out of the (AI) game.
I have a feeling every single supplier of DRAM is going to be far more interested in long-term contracts with Apple than with (for example) OpenAI, since there's basically zero possibility Apple goes kaput and reneges on their contracts to buy RAM.
I would think so because fab capacity is constrained, and if you make an on-die SoC with less memory, it uses fewer transistors, so you can fit more on a wafer.
Hey sorry, I didn't knew that. I had watched the short form content (https://www.youtube.com/shorts/eSnlgBlgMp8) [Asus is going to save gaming] and I didn't knew that It was a rumour.
The website isn't the calendar... The print is, so if you Ctrl p, you can see what you'll get, that's not a workaround it's the purpose of the website, I guess I'm confused how you're confused lol
The claim from the post above was "why were there so many FBI agents at the Jan 6 debacle" and the response asked for a source.
If you consider the response to the violence part of "the Jan 6 debacle", then yes, FBI agents were present.
The documents would NOT specify they were in "plainclothes" because the FBI doesn't wear uniforms, therefore everything would be "plainclothes" by definition. This is both common knowledge but I can personally confirm from my time there. You can dislike the characterization but it is correct.
The more interesting questions:
- Since the FBI primarily an investigative body (in the name) and these were NOT tacteams providing armed support, what was their purpose?
- Further, why did it take almost 5 years for the FBI to identify the man placing the pipebombs? According to reports, no new evidence came to light.
The context of this thread is essentially false flags, or at least some kind of entrapment to make the agency look useful by putting a stop to an attack they had instigated. So when someone asks "what were all the FBI agents doing there", it makes a great deal of difference whether agents were embedded in the crowd as the riot got started or if they arrived later to disperse the crowd.
The intial claim/skepticism is that there were agents there at all. Proven.
Moving on to the implication and my question:
> Since the FBI primarily an investigative body (in the name) and these were NOT tacteams providing armed support, what was their purpose?
We DO deserve an explanation to that one and unfortunately, "they showed up to address the violence" doesn't resolve this because - as noted - they are NOT uniformed. Therefore, a Special Agent drawing their weapon looks like a random civilian which would only increase the chaos and danger for everyone.
They're not even particularly useful for crowd control because a) they're not uniformed and b) as an Executive agency, they don't have authority in the Capital unless US Capital Police authorizes it.. though that may take the Sergeant at Arms or the Speaker specifically, I haven't reviewed that in quite a while.
Finally, since the FBI has a multi-decade history of instigating issues to be able to stop them, we SHOULD be skeptical until we get a complete and documented explanation.
the crazy ones might put all their chips in at some point and lose it all but of course you should read perhaps earnings reports (go quarter by quarter 2025 and hit it back to say 5 years which is decent enough timeframe and then perhaps think through whether or not investing is ridiculously profitable companies with insane growth and the same as putting all your chips on black :)
I would love to find a "casino winning streak" spanning 6+ years :) while you and other people talk about bubbles and gambling the rest of us are getting rich and getting ready to retire... it is what it is...
It's an old saying. The ability for submarines to move through water has nothing to do with swimming, and AIs ability to do generate content has nothing to do with thinking.
The quote (from Dijkstra) is that asking whether machines think is as uninteresting as asking whether submarines swim. He's not saying machines don't think, he's saying it's a pointless thing to argue about - an opinion about whether AIs think is an opinion about word usage, not about AIs.
I have fedora xfce running beautifully on a 2011 i5 Mac mini. Replacing the hard disk with modern SSD was all it took to get it running at acceptable speeds where interacting with xfce is roughly instantaneous
What kills me is there seems to be no option for accounting that is acceptable to CPAs besides being held captive paying whatever QuickBooks cloud demands. It's not like dual entry accounting has changed much in 500 years. There are bank integrations and service contracts (notably Apple Card wasn't willing to pay licensing fees for the quickbooks file format, so you simply couldn't syncronize your accounts with your spending, instead falling back to manual import), but they would not make investors happy by merely offering bank connection services
(God forbid banks be required by law to offer a web connector that allows you to request your own data. A workaround I've tried is to have my bank send me an email alert on every transaction over a penny, so at least I have a record, but never got around to setting up an auto import from my inbox)
I've heard that many times, but the 3 accounting firms I've worked with for my business didn't care what accounting software I used. They were all happy to work with Gnucash so long as I could provide the needed reports, all of which were pre-configured in Gnucash. Two were small firms, but one was part of a major national accounting firm/franchise.
There are car lobbyists of course but the streetcars in LA at least were put there by housing developments to sell suburban homes before most people owned cars. Once the homes were sold the corporation that built the rails had no incentive to maintain them, and eventually they were spun off and went bankrupt (of course competing with cars didn't help)
Nor did the fixed price controls they were often saddled with. It seems that politicians are congenitally completely incapable of considering inflation indexing as a concept when they are writing laws.
Street cars are a red herring anyway. Because street cars don't maintain anywhere near the same number of routes as free-form roads. It is a routing problem still, and railed vehicles perform much, much worse at it, which is why they need to be time multiplexed with rail schedules.
Looks like the frame.work desktop with Ryzen 128GB is shipping now at same price it was on release, Apple is offering 512GB Mac studios
Are snapdragon chips the same way?
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