A new report suggests that all three memory manufacturers — Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron — have collectively sold through their 2027 memory manufacturing capacity to AI companies.
HBM and Vera Rubin are not useful for PC Gaming, at least not for current architectures. Main issue is that DDR5 production simply got cut to make more HBM. But there will be a huge amount of LPDDR, NVME / SSD drives and refurbished Hard Drives available, and hardware for running inference at home for pretty powerful models will become cheap as fuck, liberating us all from the hyperscalers; the open weights models from china are available for everyone.
If the memory wafers are largely HBM, so they can’t be used for gaming hardware.
If you’re thinking of HBM gaming GPUs, the chip design pipeline is too long. If Nvidia/AMD/Intel started making one right now, and rushed it, it would still be many years away.
…However, a lot of LPDDR5 is being made too.
Hence the rumors of AMD hedging their bets and using LPDDR for some future GPUs.
My prediction:
Just like how GPUs became cheap and plentiful after mining crypto became passé, right?
…They actually did.
I got an AMD 7950 is a crypto bust. Then a Nvidia 980 TI in the next one, dirt cheap.
Nvidia figured it out in the most recent bust though, and controlled supply fairly well.
After the last crypto bust, prices stayed up though. They’re still way higher than before the last crypto boom.
And nVidia, AMD, Intel all know better now than to overproduce consumer GPUs.
They aren’t PC components. They’re server GPUs.
They don’t even have ROPs anymore. There was a time when the Nvidia P100/A100 could technically game, but that’s generations ago.
FYI, during the crypto busts, Nvidia bought back GPUs and basically incinerated them to keep demand for new stuff up.
…I’m pretty sure that’s what they will do again.
6 will actually be “RAM suppliers buy the stock in bulk and sell as refurbs, keeping prices up”
HBM and Vera Rubin are not useful for PC Gaming, at least not for current architectures. Main issue is that DDR5 production simply got cut to make more HBM. But there will be a huge amount of LPDDR, NVME / SSD drives and refurbished Hard Drives available, and hardware for running inference at home for pretty powerful models will become cheap as fuck, liberating us all from the hyperscalers; the open weights models from china are available for everyone.
At least i pray it will be this way.
But aren’t the wafers uncut? It could be used for anything if they’re just in storage.
If the memory wafers are largely HBM, so they can’t be used for gaming hardware.
If you’re thinking of HBM gaming GPUs, the chip design pipeline is too long. If Nvidia/AMD/Intel started making one right now, and rushed it, it would still be many years away.
…However, a lot of LPDDR5 is being made too.
Hence the rumors of AMD hedging their bets and using LPDDR for some future GPUs.
According to Tom’s Hardware, it includes “DDR5 and LPDDR4/LPDDR5 as well as premium HBM.”